Covering art in Boston: a personal post By Lindsey Davis

I can’t believe April is already here, especially since that means my time interning for Artscope Magazine has ended. Each week I’ve covered two events or galleries for the Zine online, condensing a performance or an exhibition down to 500 words. I’ve learned there isn’t really a formula for this kind of writing, but a list of aspects to cover, and each story has its own hierarchy of which parts are most important.

Boston, MA- Since I came to Boston after three and a half years spent in the middle of Manhattan, it took a while to shake off the incredibly high expectations that New York tends to give you about the amount of money in the arts. Compared to New York, the artwork I found in Boston was more traditional; technical perfection seemed the most important aspect, so most works were representational paintings and a lot were landscapes, each more serene and beautiful than the last.

First I visited Newbury Street and later I went to the South End, never forgetting the galleries sprinkled outside the city. I found the most contemporary works in the South End and on Newbury Street — exhibitions filled with innovative, abstract works with each gallery establishing an individual flavor among the ones that surrounded it.

Covering performances gave me some diversity of subject, and I practiced shifting gears between describing things that moved and things that stand still in a gallery or hang on its wall. I saw the Boston Ballet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which were both phenomenal, but my favorite assignment was interviewing the Boston Cello Quartet — four talented musicians with an incredible passion for their instruments. It felt like an impossible task, trying to put that kind of dedication into words, so I opted for a Q&A-style post so the musicians could speak for themselves.

More than anything though, writing for artscope gave me the opportunity to explore another city’s art world, one that’s proud of its New England landscape and formal training. I was able to see my words in print for the first time in last month’s Seventh Anniversary Issue — especially exciting after journalism school had prepped me for the death of print media. Come summertime I’ll be moving to California for a writing position at Huffington Post’s Social Impact section, where I’m hoping to write about all the wonderful things people do as if they were works of art.

(Artscope greatly appreciates Lindsey’s contributions to our zine blog and magazine over the past three months; if you or anyone you know would like to intern at artscope magazine, please contact us at info@artscopemagazine.com. You can continue to follow Lindsey writing at http://www.thingsworthdescribing.com)