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Arts

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ART REVIEW

Music, memory, mystery on view

By Sebastian Smee

 |  Globe Staff  

  March 18, 2012

In recent weeks, Massachusetts has witnessed an outbreak of vandalism against musical instruments on a scale not seen since the early days of punk rock. The perpetrators? Artists. First we had Radcliffe Bailey, whose powerful installation evoking the slave trade, titled “Windward Coast,’’ at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College (through May 6) is made up of 35,000 piano keys extracted from no less than 400 pianos. And now we have Sanford Biggers - like Bailey, an African American artist of thrilling flair and conviction - who seems to love smashed up instruments.

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