The new year traditionally brings with it the introduction of the next lineage of artists welcomed into the Copley Society of Art through its New Members Show. “Selected by the Membership Committee of the Copley Society of Art, new members are accepted for membership only if their work is truly outstanding. This year, our new artist members represent a great diversity of backgrounds and media, including pastel, photography and watercolor.” Joining CoSo’s roster are C.R. Bryant, Wray Clifford, Meghan Cochran, Scott Crystal, Whitney Dellea, K.E. Duffin, Pedro Gonzalez, Christy Gunnels, Whitney Heavy, Lai Sin Hew, Sandra Kavanaugh, Maryann Lucas, Amy Roberts, Jed Sutter and Melissa Post van der Burg. The exhibition takes place from January 9 through February 9 at the Copley Society of Art, 158 Newbury St., Boston.
“Natural Lineage,” an exhibition featuring paintings by father and daughter Charles and Natalie Arnoldi, takes place from January 16 through March 7 at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, 66 Elm St., New Canaan, Connecticut. The California-based artists’ styles differ — Charles creates brightly colored geometric abstract works while Natalie evokes light and atmosphere, but there are similarities. “Both enjoy conveying their creativity in series, encapsulating ideas and delving deep into their enquiry, painting several canvases of the same subject to fine-tune the aesthetic in question. Both are not shy to present their output in oversized scales, unabashedly captivating the viewer with patchworks of color or quotidian references, and both are equally deft at pivoting their magnitudes to smaller, more relatable sizes.” Both Charles and Natalie are scheduled to be on hand for a reception on January 30 from 5-7 p.m.
Los Angeles-based, Tufts and SMFA graduate Kate Costello returns to Boston to present “The Tip of the Tongue,” an exhibition exploring her ongoing interest in the shared abstraction of visual and spoken languages from January 16 through April 4 at the Grossman Gallery, SMFA at Tufts, 230 Fenway, Boston. The show will feature drawing, sculpture and photography from the past 15 years alongside a new, site-specific wall drawing for the Anderson Gallery. “If speech begins with and at the body — at the tip of the tongue — then Costello’s work lingers at this exact border, using figuration to explore the myriad ways in which communication flows and breaks down, on both the personal and societal levels. In her work, bold, simplified shapes engage with archetypes, ideas, and images that circulate through culture in narratives of gender and power. With a practice rooted in drawing and encompassing sculpture and photography, Costello charges her imagery to perform its own grammar, orchestrating a poetic narrative that is deeply legible yet completely allusive — much like a phrase at the tip of one’s tongue.”
To celebrate the retirement of original owners Joan Furchgott and Brad Sourdiffe and their selling of their business to longtime employee Lara Maloy and her partner Nico Sardet, the Furchgott Sourdiffe Gallery, 86 Falls Rd., Shelburne Village, Vermont, is hosting “Transitions,” its annual winter group show, through January 31. The show, featuring work by Leon Applebaum, Matt Brown, Leslie Fry, Jozie Furchgott Sourdiffe, Karen Henderson, David Maille, Janet McKenzie, Garrett Sadler, Joseph Salerno, Gail Salzman, Jessica Scriver, Dianne Shullenberger, David Smith, Adelaide Murphy Tyrol, Barbara Wagner, Shiao-Ping Wang and Richard Weis, is being called a continued celebration intended to display the past and current owners respect and devotion to promote “the arts, artists and makers who enrich our lives with their skill, dedication, perspective and creativity.”
Seoul, Korea-born On-Kyeong Seong’s first solo exhibition, “Embedment,” which runs from February 5 through 29 at the Kingston Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave. #43, Boston, uses “simple geometric forms, influenced by the De Stijl art movement and Supremacist composition” and are “inspired by the organic, such as cell biology and pathology, as well as the human-made issues of environmental degradation and genetically modified organisms.” A unique aspect of her colorful works is Seong’s sewing of materials directly onto her unstretched canvas. “My method of stitching onto the canvas is both incidental and laborious; it is my way of connecting the natural systems of our world with the artificial structures of our lives,” she explained. Her show coincides with“Inside Outside,” photographs by Vaughn Sills “that blend the genres of still life and landscape, combining bouquets of flowers with landscapes that Sills creates of Prince Edward Island, her mother’s home.”
“A Mind of Winter,” paintings, drawings and mixed media works by Michaela Harlow, remain on view through February 11 at the Gallery at Next Stage, 15 Kimball Hill, Putney, Vermont. “New Englanders love to complain about the weather — winter temperatures and precipitation in particular — and I’m no exception,” said, in explaining the inspiration behind the collection. “But have you snowshoed through an abandoned orchard in a late December snowstorm? The truth is, winter is my secret love. I’m fond of frozen pools, filled with wind-strewn leaves and sediment. I like the crud patterns on dirty, winter cars and frozen cobwebs lacing barn windows. Yes, it’s cold, but how easy it is to forget when you’re focused on green ice dotted by frost flowers and glossy, black seedpods.” The gallery is open for viewing 30 minutes before each Next Stage event, on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and by appointment with the artist through her website, MichaelaHarlow.com.
Creator of over 5,000 collage works made out of paper, card and mixed media — “the ultimate in recycling” — and now in his 90s, Malcolm Tillis shows no signs of slowing down. An exhibition of the UK artist’s work will be on view from February 15 through 29 at the Flying Crab Gallery, 8 Central St., West Brookfield, Massachusetts. “I have been asked if I work from
sketches. I can only start a collage with material I have to hand. The adventure begins with finding this material, when the eye is attracted to a color or printed form for texture, and the scissors show signs of excitement,” he wrote from his studio in western England “I draw with the scissors and, although once something is cut it cannot be uncut, the journey has started. I see myself as the witness as each collage unfolds not unlike a happy person fitting together pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. But here new forms bubble up and pop out. Something started in landscape-form may end up in portrait-form, even upside down. Prints of my own work have also been subjected to the will of the scissors occasionally helped along by crayon, watercolor and pen. Creative adventurism has no rules.”
While the debate on the lasting contribution of digital imagery to the art world continues, “Time Lapse: Contemporary Analog Photography,” on view through March 8 at the Shelburne Museum, 6000 Shelburne Road, Shelburne, Vermont, features 13 contemporary artists whose work was processed in darkrooms using “laborious century-old techniques,” including daguerreotype, wet-plate collodion and tintype, to cyanotype. “Time Lapse invites viewers to consider contemporary topics (such as identity, bias and class), but to see them filtered through photographic techniques and familiar art historical traditions of the past,” said associate curator Carolyn Bauer, the exhibition curator. “The affect creates tension in the works that adds emphasis to the subject matter and, rather than filtering, or softening the subjects, actually brings the issues into sharper focus.”
After earning a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Andy Sweet returned to his home in Miami Beach to document “the Old World Jewish Culture that then distinguished South Beach.” He would tragically be murdered five years later in 1982. “A Shtetl in the Sun,” an exhibition featuring many of those photographs, are on exhibit through March at the Brechner Gallery at the Yiddish Book Center, 1021 West St., Amherst, Massachusetts — and they show not only what was, but what might have been if Sweet had lived. “They were strong, humorous and beautiful images,” noted Mary Ellen Mark, who worked closely with Sweet (and who herself passed away in 2015), after his passing. Capturing the community’s daily rhythms in all their beach-strolling, cafeterianoshing, and klezmer-dancing glory, “The lost Jewish Miami Beach of Andy Sweet’s work is illustrated in precise small detail, like all great narratives, and in the individual faces of the oldsters we are looking at from our places in the future,” said Gainesvillebased novelist Lauren Groff.