Welcome

ON THE ROAD WITH ARTSCOPE MAGAZINE Over the past two months, the artscope staff has been busy traveling throughout New England putting together our expanded 96-page November/December 2015 issue. Here are some of the places we’ve been: Clockwise (starting with the top left box): Publisher Kaveh Mojtabai (l) with Maine, New Hampshire & Western Mass. correspondent Greg Morell at Portland Museum of Art after the 2015 Biennial curator talk sponsored by artscope. Cape Cod correspondent Laura Shabott with Berta Walker, owner of the Berta Walker Gallery of Provincetown & Wellfleet. J. Fatima Martins at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston. Artscope Oct. 3 staff dinner at King & I, Boston: (from lower left): Donna Dodson, Brian Goslow, Franklin W. Liu, Marguerite Serkin, James Foritano, Kaveh Mojtabai, Elizabeth Michelman, Suzanne Volmer and Andy Moerlein. (From left to right) Historian, author & art critic Alicia Faxon, artscope staff writer Suzanne Volmer, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston director Matthew Teitlebaum, artscope staff writer Elizabeth Michelman, “Airlifting” chief curator Stephanie Wright and Craig Bloodgood, contemporary curator at The Art Complex Museum (photograph courtesy of Mei Hung of the Chinese Culture Connection ). Vermont and Western Mass. correspondent Marguerite Serkin with Strandbeests curator Theo Jansen at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Artscope interns Emily Pysczynski (l) and Shem Tane (r) with artist Stan Leiberman at the Congress Square Gallery in Portland, Maine during its October 15 Third Thursday festivities. Managing editor Brian Goslow at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Welcome to artscope magazine’s final issue of 2015, an issue we’re proud to be sending to Art Basel Miami Beach, where it will be exhibited and available in the Collective Booth. Any expanded issue is a challenging enterprise for our editorial staff, even more so with the responsibility of putting New England’s visual arts community in front of a national and inter- national art audience and collector base.

As was the case this past June at Art Basel Switzerland, artscope will be in attendance at Miami Beach. I encourage you to download our “artscope Universe” mobile app that surveys all of our social media offerings in one place on your smartphone, iPad or reading tablet so that you don’t miss a post. You can get it in your App Store or on Google Play.

With our attention firmly on Miami Beach, Suzanne Volmer talked to a cross- section of regional galleries, artists and collectors to find out how they prepare and what they look for in attending and presenting their work at Art Basel; her preview opens this issue.

When we started planning this issue, we set out to find artists and work we felt would bring a WOW factor, a New England equivalent of Julius von Bismarck’s “Egocentric System” — the rotating dish-like work with adjoining desk and chair its creator “rode” at Art Basel in Switzerland; you could easily have imagined Lady Gaga purchasing and using it as a concert prop.

While this issue doesn’t include anything with that level of sensory overload attached, we are featuring a great collection of exhibitions, artists and newly renovated and reinvigorated museums for you to visit and explore in the coming months. While many galleries traditionally put aside their solo schedules in November and December to formulate group exhibitions to take advantage of the holiday season, thanks to the hard work of our devoted artscope staff — and a number of artists who allowed us to visit them in their studios to preview their work prior to it being transported to their respective galleries for show — we’ve been able to compile a large preview of exhibitions to see before year’s end.

Many of the artists who were just having their first solo shows when our first issue was published in 2006 are now being showcased in museum shows, as is the case in the Fitchburg Art Museum’s “Land Ho!” exhibition — reviewed in this issue by Donna Dodson. Jamie Thompson surveyed the Portland Museum of Art’s 2015 Biennial, “You Can’t Get There From Here.” The aforementioned Volmer made three trips to the Newport Art Museum in selecting her favorite pieces at its annual exhibition of Art League Rhode Island, the organization founded by Nancy Gaucher-Thomas and over 40 devoted artists in 2000.

J. Fatima Martins explored the recently finished renovations at the Wadsworth Atheneum and New Britain Museum of American Art, and how ongoing changes at the Worcester Art Museum will enhance the viewing experience of its “Hassan Hajjaj: My Rock Stars” exhibition that opens November 7.

Elizabeth Michelman contributes three feature pieces: a long-overdue artist spotlight on sculptor Nora Valdez, whose work can be seen at New Bedford’s Colo Colo Gallery this November; a thorough review of “Feelers,” the Boston Center for the Arts’ 24th Drawing Show; and a look at Gabrielle Rossmer’s unique collection of sculptures at HallSpace.

There are three shows having the benefit of time in looking back on major national and international events that are equal to any in the country. Franklin W. Liu visited Boston’s Grand Circle Gallery for its “Through the Lens of History” exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma, a show featuring still-heartbreaking images taken by James H. Barker. I had the honor of meeting multi-media artist Dawn DeDeaux at the “Katrina Then and Now: Artists as Witness: Part II” exhibition at the College of the Holy Cross, and sharing phone calls and emails with Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario, whose “Veiled Rebel- lion” series of photographs of Afghan women now on view at Milton Academy’s Nesto Gallery is worthy of a trip, regard- less of where you’re located.

This issue’s centerfold contest winner, with a metalwork theme, is Beverley Coniglio. Thanks to our judges: Angelos Camillos, director of the Kouros Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Ridgefield, Conn.; Asia Scudder, director of the Blue Wave Art Gallery, Amesbury, Mass.; and Andrew DeVries, director of DeVries Fine Art Gallery, Lenox, Mass. For our next contest, we’re looking for your original Sci-Fi/Fantasy work; full details can be found in our Classifieds section.

Special appreciation must be given to Vanessa Boucher, our media development associate, and copy editor Anne Daley, for their extra ordinary efforts that have made our two extended 2015 Art Basel issues possible.

As we close another year, I’d like to thank our writers, staff, interns, advertisers and readers for their support over the past year. If this is your first time reading artscope, welcome. We hope you’ll consider subscribing to us whether in digital or magazine format to continue to follow New England’s arts community. And, hint, hint, I’d like to think any art lover would love to receive a subscription to “New England’s Culture Magazine” in their stocking.

Have a safe and peaceful holiday season.

Brian Goslow, Managing Editor bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com