Warm greetings, Artscope readers,
We, like you, have watched federal funding be cut for both public and non-profit cultural organizations, be they for the visual orperforming arts and found ourselves asking, as we always have, how can we best support our arts community and through it, contribute to a better understanding of each other and the world?
Many passionate conversations went into planning this issue, especially with our writers who are also artists that have spent several decades working to better the world through their art. Longtime Artscope Magazine contributor Elizabeth Michelman reminded me that this has always been a group effort, initially started on a small scale, that serves as a guideline to “take back” whatever programs suddenly find their funding cut.
“I’ve seen the power of grassroots connection to jumpstart hope in this regard,” she wrote. ”Down the road, public art may no longer be publicly funded art. How, if this happens, can community-minded artists and critics survive? How can Artscope, which has become an important institution serving the New England arts community, take the lead to support creative risk? As I see it, supporting freedom in the arts and in the society at large is a matter of mutual survival.”
Elayne Clift, who has traveled to over 80 countries, both as an explorer and travel writer, shares how art has shaped her experiences stateside and abroad, and how those not able to get away on extended trips this summer can still travel through exhibitions at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Springfield Museums, Hood Museum at Dartmouth College and Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York.
Lee Roscoe has had a long career as a playwright, starting in New York City in the 1960s. She was about to produce an online theatrical film on the challenges facing us, politically and socially, as Covid arrived; only now is she able to share “IMPOSSIBLE?” and its companion production, “Dreams from a Planet in Peril,” through her YouTube channel.
Sculptor Madeleine Lord is always looking to sell and place her work,and share what she’s learned with others. She interviewed movie director and writer Henry Chaisson, who spent much of last year scouring New England to find art to place in his next film project, “Recluse,” which he filmed in Massachusetts last November.
Lord also reviews “Selfhood,” an exhibition of five artists exploring identity within personal and cultural context at the Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University and “Weaving an Address” at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, Massachusetts, where, she points out, visitors, through the work of one of the show’s artists, Sharon Chandler Correnty, will learn of Brister Freeman, whose role as one of the first Black property owners in Walden Woods should be considered as much a part of our history as that of Emerson and Thoreau.
Last year, the cover to our July/August 2024 issue featured Tara Sellios’ chromogenic photograph “Lux (after Saint Lucy)” in conjunction with its appearance in the “New England Now: Strange States” exhibition at the Shelburne Museum. What we didn’t know, at the time, was that the Fitchburg Art Museum had just scheduled a large year-long exhibition of her works, each one as stunning, if not more so, than that cover. Before writing our feature on the show and Sellios, I visited the exhibition three times, and I hope you’ll make it a point to travel to North Worcester County to see it (at least once) before its end in early 2026.
Two Maine shows are reviewed in this issue: Linda Sutherland visited the Ogunquit Museum of American Art to see its “Nicole Wittenberg: A Sailboat in the Moonlight exhibition,” of which she writes that the New York City artist abandons all the rules of conventional art while Carolyn Wirth explored the “Jo Sandman: Skin Deep” show of works from the artist’s 1998 transitional period exploring photograms at the Portland Museum of Art.
Wirth also shares the long history of the Whistler House Museum of Art — where she notes that “The American realist tradition is alive” — and the contribution its artist-in-residency program has made to the Lowell, Massachusetts community.
Suzanne Volmer brings us up to date with Argentina-born sculptor Nora Valdez and introduces us to Nirmal Raja, originally from Chennai, India, who recently resettled in Cambridge, Massachusetts from Milwaukee; the duo is paired this May at the Boston Sculptors Gallery.
Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art has long provided a showcase for breakthrough artists; Lexie Gondek reviews its “MATRIX 196” presentation by Steffani Jemison, currently based in Brooklyn, who explores “flight, air, sea and sky, not simply as natural elements, but instead as political metaphors” using sculpture, lenticular prints and drawings on brass and silvered glass.
Milton Academy, an independent college preparatory K–12 school based in a southern suburb of Boston that takes pride in its goal of cultivating its students with a passion for learning and a respect for others, has a long history of strong exhibitions intended to contribute to that mission, so it’s no surprise that the “Celebrating 50 Years of the Nesto Gallery” features “a thoughtful and robust cross section of visual art.” Sawyer Smook-Pollitt, who many of you know through his role as editor of our bi-weekly Artscope email blasts!, received an early tour of the exhibition from long time Nesto curator, Ian Torney, to preview the show.
Born in Kuwait before moving to Puerto Rico, Alia Farid returns to the campus where she was the David and Roberta Logia Fellow in 2023-24 to present “Talismans (Kapor LR3303)” at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Isabel Barbi reports on the large-scale installation that Farid created primarily using a resin material manufactured by the United Oil Projects. It’s a reminder that we’re part of a much wider world.
Last month, I was talking to a friend about the Berkshires, and he pointedly asked who would want to live there; I half-jokingly responded that many of the people now living there were artists that had been priced out of Boston. Whether that’s true or not, the “North Adams Now” exhibition previewed by Marjorie Kaye that serves as the inaugural exhibition at Mixed Media Space might make you want to join them.
This issue will be available to attendees of Art Basel Switzerland in its Magazines Sector from June 19 through 22, and we always hope our presence there will introduce artists from our part of the world to new audiences, buyers and collectors who may be learning of them for the first time. If you’re included in that group, welcome, and please follow us on Instagram, Facebook and at artscopemagazine.com, where you can acquire access to each of our issues through the Current Issue section of our website.
If you find yourself going to one of the exhibitions covered in this issue, please tell someone at the museum or gallery that you read about it here in Artscope Magazine. We’ve been in this together for over 19 years and we’ll continue to do our best to support our artists, museums, galleries and art organizations any way that we can.
Brian Goslow, managing editor
bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com