Welcome to our May/June issue, our kick-off to the summer season with a series of exhibitions we hope you’ll find road-trip worthy. This time around, we’re featuring an expanded number of wanderlusts, taking advantage of the knowledge and enthusiasm of our writers throughout New England to introduce you to parts of the region you may be unfamiliar with. Not only did I ask them to suggest art venues, but also to share their favorite coffee shops and restaurants to add to your experience.

 

Marcia Santore takes you on a trip up New Hampshire’s Interstate 93, from Manchester to Littleton, exploring such diverse venues as the Currier Museum of Art, a knitting store that doubles as a gallery, an outdoor sculpture garden and an eatery billed as “one of the 10 best neighborhood restaurants in America.”

 

Alexandra Tursi brings us to Johnson, Vermont, home of the Vermont Studio Center, lovely cafes, bakeries and sandwich shops. In nearby Waterbury, she explores a wine bar, European food and a budding gallery scene.

 

Kristin Nord runs down her favorite Connecticut museum exhibitions — who knew typewriters would become artistic artifacts (at the New Britain Museum of American Art) — and previews the Fujiko Nakaya: Veil installation now on view at the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan.

 

Eric J. Taubert, owner of Barometer Media, publisher of the Ogunquit Barometer, and innkeeper of Ogunquit’s Hartwell House Inn, shares his favorite places on Maine’s South Coast, a welcoming mix of galleries, museums and eating establishments that’ll have you itching to plan a trip to Kennebunkport and surrounds.

 

The Natick and Framingham, Mass. art communities have been expanding in recent years; Meredith Cutler meshed longtime mainstays Danforth Art and the Center for the Arts in Natick (and its impressive small venue concert series) with family-run galleries, galleries that offer ongoing hands-on experiences and a craft lager brewery — for starters.

 

Artscope is happy to be a sponsor of this year’s Newburyport ArtWalk, taking place in June, August and October. Local resident Jamie Wallace visited two of the participating galleries to give you a feel for the event — and lets you know where to get the best ice cream and gelato.

 

We’re thrilled to welcome professional blogger/self-publishing pioneer Laura Shabott to the artscope family; a 1992 graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she lives in Provincetown and contributes a preview of “Going Fishing: A Tribute to Our Industry,” the first show of the Berta Walker Gallery’s 25th anniversary season.

 

Thanks to everyone — all 500-plus of you — who turned out for our eighth anniversary “Light Up the Arts” celebration on April 4 at Adelson Galleries Boston. A personal thank you to artscope’s Kimberlee Meserve for managing the project; Christina Huang for contacting all of the participating artists, area businesses, food and beverage sponsors (whose support we appreciate enormously); Matthew Mullin for designing the event’s promotional material; and Vanessa Boucher for implementing the entertainment, event design, promotional material and website management.

 

The aforementioned people ensure we’re a young, vibrant magazine constantly in search of new ideas in covering the New England arts and cultural community; social media was barely a blip on the radar when we published our first issue and they ensure we don’t get too set in our ways. Many of our online offerings are the result of suggestions of an artscope intern; by the way, if you’re a college student looking for experience in the field, we’d love to have you join us for a semester.

 

“Light Up the Arts” — along with the recent Montserrat College of Art, Mass College of Art and Design and Artists For Humanities fundraising auctions — was a chance for us to do what we enjoy best — listen and work with artists, find how we can better give them a voice and help them expand their opportunities to show and sell their work (we love doing that with galleries, museums and theater production companies, too).

 

We hope our pages encourage you to break out of your normal gallery and museum visiting patterns, whether it be to see a neighbor or internationally-known artist working in their studio or giving a gallery talk, simply supporting a local artist who might still be rough around the edges when they have that small opening at your local coffee shop, or getting out to venues and parts of New England you don’t regularly spend time in.

 

If you visit any of the art venues and eating establishments mentioned in this issue, please tell them you learned about them through artscope magazine. We work extremely hard to build worthwhile partner- ships with all of the places and artists we cover to ensure that we both grow.

 

This issue’s centerfold contest winner, with a summer theme, is Cara Gonier’s acrylic-on-canvas painting, “Always.” Thanks to our judges: Jill Deupi, director and chief curator of university museums at Fairfield University; Anita Trezvant, artist and director of Hope Gallery; and Clare Marron, director, curator and owner of Monkitree. For our next contest, we’re looking for your original surrealism work; for full details, see our Classifieds section.

 

Amazingly, this is our 50th issue — anyone who’s ever tried to put together a magazine or book knows what an accomplishment it is to finish a single project, and we wouldn’t be here without your continued support, encouragement, suggestions, feedback and friendship — it’s all greatly appreciated.

 

Another milestone is the upcoming one-year anniversary of the artscope tablet edition being available digitally on iPads and tablets around the world through Apple Newsstand — download it in your App Store and please continue to share the word with your friends outside the region so they can keep in touch with (and hopefully consider buying) the great work being created here in New England.

 

And yes, we are indeed already head- first into planning our July/August issue, which will include more wanderlust ideas. But first, please get out and enjoy all the exhibitions, artists and adventures awaiting you in this issue’s pages.

 

Brian Goslow, managing editor (bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com)