Dear Artscope reader,
As we near the end of 2022, I look back at how we slowly regained our ability to get out and view art together – still carefully – and how we seem to have learned how much we appreciate what each of us does to contribute to the art community and life in general. We also learned how important it was to not be silent on issues important to us and how much we count on artists to interpret how we’re feeling about them through their work.
In our final issue of the year, Marjorie Kaye shares her highlights of 2022, spotlighting shows and artists that addressed “Gender awareness, racial harmony, womens’ right to control their own choices, the ongoing and building threat to the environment” noting how in their creative consciousness, “there is the ability to draw upon universal truths.” She also writes about the “warmth and sustenance” of the “Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone” exhibition, the first solo show dedicated to the late artist in over 20 years, featuring her watercolor and graphite drawings and sculpture, at the Williams College Museum of Art.
Elizabeth Michelman expanded what was to be an artist profile of Olivia Bernard—tied to her current exhibition at Stoneleigh-Burnham School’s Geissler Gallery in Greenfield, Massachusetts—and took the sculptor’s work in the “60 Years of Collecting” anniversary exhibition at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at UMass Amherst as the starting point for an extensive look at the exhibition that is greatly enhanced by her interview with Director Loretta Yarlow, who shared behind the scenes background details on how the show was put together.
Suzanne Volmer began working on her feature story on the “Fired Up: Glass Today” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in early August, doing thorough research prior to the show’s opening, attending its artist reception in September, talking to many of them before making a follow up visit prior to our mid-October deadline to ensure readers got a strong introduction to the “New Glass Movement” and the activism of young glass artists.
Marguerite Serkin dedicated two days to visiting Hanover, New Hampshire for an extended visit to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College to thoroughly take in their “Maḏayin: Eight Decades ofAboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” and “Park Dae Sung: Ink Reimagined” shows that provide a rare opportunity to experience two in-depth looks at unique global art forms in a single setting.
Linda Chestney provides the background for a weekend escape to Maineand New Hampshire through current exhibitions at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter, the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Portsmouth Historical Society, Loomis Gallery (profiling the artists in its “Suspended Animation” show) and the Portland Museum of Art.
Hannah Carrigan visited Diana Zipeto in her Lowell, Massachusetts studio to preview and discuss her December “Resonance” exhibition at Galatea Fine Art in Boston’s SoWa District in which Zipeto built a show around MRI images capturing the progression of her father’s recent diagnosis of having Alzheimer’s disease, using this work, Carrigan writes, “to present a portrait of one person’s struggle with disease and a loved one’s struggle to make sense of what it means.”
She also visited the Tufts University Medford Campus to review “The Sun Rises in the West and Sets in the East,” a show that took the fragile political state of contemporary global society as its starting point in exploring how traditional ways of knowing, living and relating “have collapsed and fallen into an arbitrary order (or disorder)” in today’s world.
Throughout 2022, over 40 Boston area artists have been participating in a series of “Shared Habitat Earth” exhibitions, talks and events aimed to help reverse the irreparable damage human activities have done and are doing to our communal habitat. SHE’s mission statement notes that, “Art invites empathy and keeps us from becoming numb and from passively enduring what looks inevitable, and it can help us live up to our humanity.” The exhibition is currently at The Gallery at Atlantic Wharf, where Rachel Flood Page took in its “Give Green a Chance” message.
Lee Roscoe wanted to call attention to Cape Cod printmaker Bethia Brehmer who is having a 40-piece retrospective show, “Art for Our Earth,” throughout November at the Seashore Point Gallery in Provincetown, a condominium space that reminds us that there are many opportunities to display one’s work.
Beth Neville initially visited The Art Complex Museum to see and review “Out Growth,” the recent solo show of Sarah Meyers Brent, the progression of whose multi-media sculptures and installations have been followed in these pages for many years. But Neville found herself equally captivated by how local community members had worked together to create its outside “Herring Run” mosaic wall.
Just before press time, I was able to attend the opening reception for photographer Vaughn Sills’ “This Precious Life” presentation pulling together 40 years of work at the Gallery at Anna Maria College that combined life memories, magic moments and places and the preservation, through her photographic lenses, of Mother Nature’s creative works in the form of flowers, that she told me, “is also about beauty and mortality, the beauty of a single life, the knowledge that life will end.” All the more reason to stop and appreciate it while we’re here.
James Foritano was able to visit Greenland and South Africa through the artwork of Peter Roos and April Claggett at The Conant Galleryat Lawrence Academy while Marta Pauer Tursi was able to explore Alice’s Wonderland through Valerie Hird’s “The Garden of Absolute Truths” at Burlington City Arts where it’s being shown along with Bill McDowell’s “Roxham Road to North Elba” in which the University of Vermont film and digital arts professor presents “a parallel narrative in the images of Underground Railroad sites in this part of Upstate New York” with those of asylum seekers on the United States-Canada border in 2017.
It’s been a year since Claudia Fiks first wrote for Artscope, reporting on the 34th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. In this issue, she reviews the Julia Csekö-curated “Sanctuary City” exhibition for which emerging and well-established local artists were asked to share their interpretations of the term sanctuary and the concept of a sanctuary city at the Somerville Museum, where Fiks has been giving tours of the exhibition in Portuguese and Spanish. In a second feature, she takes us all on an art wanderlust visit to Ireland, Scotland and London, stopping at both world-renowned institutions and castles and small-town mills that would make any fiber artist jealous.
Artscope will once again be an exhibitor and available in the Magazines Sector at Art Basel Miami Beach from December 1-3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center; Fiks and Kaye will be joining publisher Kaveh Mojtabai in sharing images and reports from the fair floor on our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages as well as Artscope Online at artscopemagazine.com.
Thanks for your support of Artscope Magazine throughout the past year; the response to our 100th issue was heartwarming. May you have a safe and warm holiday season and get out and enjoy the many shows of art that New England and the rest of our planet provides us.
Brian Goslow, managing editor
bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com