Welcome to the July/August 2012 issue of artscope magazine!
It’s been a busy two months since we last visited with you, with artscope staff putting in lots of mileage toward bringing you the stories featured inside these pages, and conducting endless hours of conversation with and about artists and topics that will result in the coverage you see in the issues that follow.
Artscope publisher Kaveh Mojtabai and writer Elizabeth Michelman attended the Montserrat College of Art’s ARTrageous!26 art auction, of which we were a corporate sponsor. Mojtabai also attended a breakfast gathering to announce plans for the Danforth Museum of Framingham, Mass. to move to a new location in the MetroWest city. Following was a discussion on ways that museums might partner with area educational institutions and introduce themselves to wider audiences by making themselves more accessible.
I traveled with Mojtabai and Barbara Bausch, who is working in the artscope office this summer, to southern Connecticut, where Margaret Bodell and Heather McDonald welcomed us on behalf of the city of New Haven by hosting a party celebrating the publication of our May/June issue at Project Storefronts. After they gave us a whirlwind tour of the galleries, restaurants and jazz clubs that have transformed the once-depressed area into a lively, vibrant neighborhood, we had an extended talk with fiber artist Ruben Marroquin; his work is profiled in this issue by Clara Rose Thornton, who had covered the Southern and Central Vermont and New Hampshire regions for us for a number of years before recently relocating to Brooklyn – where Marroquin works during the week.
Sculptor and artscope writer Elizabeth Michelman participated in “Sculpture Now,” a panel discussion among curators and writers held on Thursday, May 24 at the State Transportation Building in Boston. The occasion was the reception for the Spring 2012 exhibition of the New England Sculptors Association. Michelman presented a video mimicking the states of mind of Marcel Duchamp at the time he assembled his Bicycle Wheel in 1913 and Robert Morris pulling down his Column in a New York theater in 1962, leading to a discussion of the artist’s need to tolerate absurdity without knowing in advance whether or not a work will be assimilated to the canon of sculpture.
In this issue, Michelman reviews the “Living Treasures of North Carolina Craft” exhibition at the Fuller Craft Museum; she wrote the piece around overseeing her own installations on display at Dartmouth College and the Soho20 Chelsea Gallery in New York City.
In early June, Mojtabai attended the Sixth International Encaustic Conference, based at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, with related exhibitions throughout Provincetown, where he spent the entire weekend talking with artists and gallery owners.
This issue has a Cape Cod theme, ranging from the “200 Years of Cape Cod Art” exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, which is reviewed by James Foritano, who also visited with Bao LeDe at the Tao Water Gallery in West Barnstable. André van der Wende takes in the mesmerizing Selina Trieff, Brenda Horowitz and Michelle Mailer shows at Provincetown’s Berta Walker Gallery and introduces us to Susie Nielsen, owner of The Farm Project Space and Gallery in Wellfleet – which contributed “Pink Hum,” the enticing work you see on this issue’s cover, by Jill Vasileff. Ami Bennitt profiles painter Sean Thomas, whose work is on view at the Rice/Polak Gallery in August.
Of course, it’s hard for most New Englanders to get to the Cape without going through or near New Bedford, which was recently named one of “The Most Artistic Cities in America” by The Atlantic magazine. Don Wilkinson brings you on a wanderlust tour of the seaside city’s galleries, museums and eateries.
As we were putting the finishing touches on this issue, artscope’s J. Fatima Martins was participating in a guided tour of Annie Leibovitz’s “Pilgrimage” at the Concord Museum, a fitting reward for a whirlwind two weeks in which she visited the Concord Art Association to review its “Present/Future: A Showcase of Emerging Artists,” featuring students from the Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design graduate programs, and made multiple visits to Providence’s Chabot Fine Art to fully grasp its Made in America exhibition.
Thanks to Suzanne Volmer, you can get a taste of sculptor Rodrigo Nava’s work, which will be on view at Providence’s Yellow Peril Gallery, and get an extended insight into what goes into displaying Doris Duke’s enormous collection at the Newport Preservation Trust’s Rough Point grounds through her interview with director of collections Bruce MacLeish in this issue’s “Cornered” feature.
New England is loved for holding fast to its traditions, and a number of “old school” shows celebrate the tried and true. Alexandra Tursi reviews the Shelburne Museum’s “Man-Made Quilts: Civil War to Present” exhibition; Marguerite Serkin introduces us to Vermont oil painter Janis Sanders, whose landscapes are on display in Brattleboro, Maine and Provincetown this summer; and Taryn Plumb checks in with the artists working on the Harlow Gallery/Kennebec Valley Art Association Community Supporting Artists artist/farmer partnership project in Maine.
The winner of this issue’s centerfold contest is Ginny Zanger, whose entry was selected by jurors Natacha Villamia Sochat, co-owner of NK Gallery; Christy J. King, of the Cape Cod Museum of Art’s media communications/graphic design group; and artscope’s Barbara Bausch.
For our next centerfold contest, we’re looking for submissions of your fiber art. For full details, see our classified section.
To expand our Cape Cod coverage, we reduced the size of our Capsule Previews section for this issue. Fear not, you can read more exhibition previews on the artscope blog at artscopemagazine.com. And we’re nearing the 1,000-fan mark for the artscope magazine page on facebook, where we mix announcements of the current week’s gallery and museum exhibition openings, opportunities to submit work for upcoming shows and pictures from recent openings.
So grab your favorite summer drink, dig in, enjoy, and hit the road to take in as many of the shows featured in the pages ahead as you’re able.
Brian Goslow
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