Welcome to the 79th issue of Artscope Magazine, which celebrates our 13th anniversary. It features our annual special section in which we’ve asked our writers which artists they may have wanted to write about over the past year but the chance hasn’t presented itself.
This year’s “13 for Our 13th” features a wide variety of New England artists that work in landscape and light, sculpture and color fields, marquetry and performance art, assemblage and mathematically-based constructions, documentary photography, and oil, glass and ceramic — and “heavy metal” nutcrackers. Some of these artists’ work will be on view as part of regional exhibitions in the months ahead, others can be seen in their workspaces during open studio weekends and others are regularly showcased in galleries and showrooms.
One of the most pleasurable aspects of overseeing Artscope over the years has been following the artists we’ve covered and seeing them grow and develop a market for their work and ideas. We always get great satisfaction from learning we’ve helped influence new purchases of art, so when we hear that one of the works featured in a recent issue was purchased for an exhibiting museum’s permanent collection or that a longtime advertiser was recently commissioned to create a new work by a collector in Miami, we feel the long days and nights spent putting together each issue is worth it.
Similarly, when one of our centerfold artists tells us that readers regularly recognize their work when attending gallery shows or open studio events where they can meet the artist in person, we’re thrilled; we’re aiming for those experiences with all our articles, as well as our social media and Artscope Online postings.
Since our first issue in March 2006, our aim has been to bring each of the region’s institutions, galleries, artists and arts districts to the attention of as many collectors and art lovers, both inside and outside of their respective regions, as possible.
It’s fulfilling to get letters from museums, galleries and artists with such reports after they’ve been covered in Artscope or we’ve been a sponsor for one of their exhibitions, such as the one we received from the Portland Museum of Art notifying us that their “Beyond the Pedestal: Isamu Noguchi and the Borders of Sculpture” exhibition, for which we were the media sponsor, generated nearly 39,000 visitors, adding that one of the works in the show was purchased for permanent view beginning this spring in its David E. Shaw and Family Sculpture Park in the Joan B. Burns Garden.
We see our responsibility to be a conduit for bringing New England exhibitions to the attention of our readership, many of whom we’ve learned are artists and collectors whose passion will take them wherever work that speaks to them and their heart is being displayed. We consider times of year when visitors to a region are at its highest point or if there is a show that is interesting enough to our readers that they would travel there at a time of the year they might not travel to that city or state.
When talking to galleries or museums, we aim to find out what exhibitions they’ve prioritized; sometimes, these shows could be many months, or years away, which was the case with the “Matthew Barney: Redoubt” exhibition opening March 1 at Yale University Art Gallery, which is previewed by Kristin Nord, who also previewed the just-opened “Sean Scully: Landline” show at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Fitchburg Art Museum director Nick Capasso, who normally avoids such requests, wrote me about how excited they were to be hosting “Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983-2014,” which I saw just as we approached our deadline and recognized how special an exhibition the show is not only for its connection to an artist who lived nearby, but to an internationally beloved artist whose work, over several decades, changed our view of what art could be.
We’ve recently received a series of calls asking if our front cover position could be purchased. While it would be financially beneficial to do so, it would compromise our editorial integrity and take away our ability to market the feel of an individual issue. It’s rare when we start the production process with an early favorite for our cover; it usually isn’t until all of the hundreds of images submitted by our writers along with their stories that we not only begin to see how our stories will best flow together, but which image or images capture the issue as a whole. As our issue is distributed throughout New England at a variety of venues, competing for potential readers’ attention, we look for something with dramatic and bold imagery.
To learn more about what goes into the selections of the stories that you read in each of our issues, visit the FAQ section on Artscope Online (artscopemagazine.com).
As we were going to press we learned that, for the fourth straight year, we’ve been invited to display Artscope Magazine in the collective booth at Art Basel Switzerland. We’re proud to be the only New England publication and Northeast-based publication outside of New York to be selected. By being available at Basel, we’re putting our coverage of the New England arts community in the hands of serious collectors with the hope they’ll consider investigating the artists and galleries we cover further.
These are the kinds of connections we strive for. As we celebrate our 13th anniversary, these connections are our very essence and we can’t stress enough how much we appreciate each one of you who’ve partnered with us, whether as a reader, advertiser, exhibiting gallery, museum or artist in sharing our commitment to the importance of art, culture and friendship in making for a better world.
| Brian Goslow, Managing Editor
bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com