2026, anyone?
At the start of October, Elizabeth Michelman proposed reviewing the “Unspoken Resilience: Healing from the Lewiston Shooting Two Years In: Work by Artists of the Maine & National Deaf communities and Photographs by Michael Kolster” exhibition at the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. It was a show that she noted, “has stuck in my mind for the feat of representing three different takes on the 2023 massacre of 18 people, including the shooter, in Lewiston, Maine, which happened three months after I’d moved to southern Maine.”
Her story arrived shortly after the shooting of 11 Brown University students, two of whom died, and the killing of an MIT professor, and before the discovery of the shooter, dead by apparent suicide.
Art is something that we depend on to help us through the passing of loved ones. Marta Pauer-Tursi visited Burlington City Arts to see its “Do We Say Goodbye? Grief, Loss, and Mourning” exhibition after having lost a close friend the previous day. She notes, in her review of the show, “The eight artists open up this very personal space that houses pain and longing. Instead of feeling vulnerable and fragile with what I brought to the show, I found solace in community.”
Our own Artscope community keeps growing, as I was reminded at a recent talk at ArtsWorcester attended by a number of artists that we’ve featured over the past 20 years.
In creating the photos seen in his “Off the Hill: Portraits from the Fitchburg Community” exhibition at Fitchburg State University in North Central Massachusetts, Ricardo Barros set out to celebrate a city of people that “were working hard to achieve a common goal.” While some photographers use the point and shoot method to create their images, Barros spends time studying the people he’s going to photograph in a style that I call documentary portraiture which captures them in their natural settings with a unique twist. I asked a few of the Fitchburg residents seen in the show to explain how his process works and what it feels like from the subject side of a photograph.
As we were putting together our idea list for this issue, New Hampshire sculptor Carol Lake told us she was on her way to Europe for the 2025 Paris Animal Art Fair. I suggested it to Linda Sutherland, who previews the annual League of N.H. Craftsmen Fair for Artscope each year, that she’d really enjoy looking at and talking to Lake about her experience overseas and how she chose her artistic path. That “Cornered” interview opens this issue.
Prior to departing for Miami Beach to work at and report on Art Basel 2025 for Artscope, Claudia Fiks met with Donald Langosy to talk about his then-upcoming “The Journey of Eduardo Gunkla” exhibition at the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Upon her return, Fiks viewed the show in person to write a review and profile of a person whose story I hope provides inspiration for readers dealing with major health challenges.
Langosy has a rare form of multiple sclerosis, an illness that has gradually altered his physical mobility and daily life over the past 30 years, yet it never stopped him from creating. Now a wheelchair user with limited mobility in all but his left hand, he continues to work daily in his home studio, making art at an age and under circumstances that would have silenced many. Please share his story with anyone that you think would gain strength from reading it.
Fiks opened TAG | The Art Gallery at New England Art Center in Boston’s SoWa District in 2024 and it’s become a home for dozens of artists who have their own controlling investment in its success, providing experienced and new artists with an invaluable inroad to the Boston market. I asked Cathy Weaver Taylor, whose work can be seen throughout the region and at most TAG shows, to write about the gallery and share her experiences there from an artist’s perspective. Everyone will benefit from learning about how their shows are promoted on social media.
If you find yourself in SoWa before January 25, stop into Boston Sculptors Gallery to explore “The Lise Hoffman Archive (a fiction),” an exhibition from the imagination of Carrie Crane. The show’sartwork and artifacts tell the story of a scientist and her career discoveries. As Crane regularly integrates new materials and technologies into her creations, it’s not surprising that she’s utilized Artificial Intelligence (AI) for this show. However, in her review, Isabel Barbi isn’t sure that’s helpful to Crane’s concept. I’m glad she’s helped us further the conversation on AI in contemporary art.
Madeline Lord visited my local coffeeshop in a growing snowstorm determined to pitch three stories: R. Douglass Rice at the Blue Door Gallery in York, Maine, promising that his brilliant colors would warm the pages of our first issue of 2026; how planned oversight of her sizable archives is ensuring that the legacy of the late Nan Tullis protected through donations of her paintings to educational institutions allowing art students to be able to study her work for generations to come and through an exhibition covering her career from 1976-2023 at Anderson Yezerski Gallery.
Lord then worked with Attleboro Arts Museum Executive Director Mim Fawcett in tracking down and talking to a few of the artists that will be participating in its upcoming “Focus on the Past” exhibition combining historic works from the museum’s collection with fresh pieces made in response to them by former winners of its annual “Visions of Eight” competition.
It’s one of many exhibitions that will be held in the year ahead as the United States nears its 250th anniversary. On a larger scale, The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College is presenting a dozen shows celebrating “America’s Sestercentennial.” Sawyer Smook-Pollitt talked with several curators and Director John R. Stomberg about how the Hood is presenting our country’s history through its substantial collection.
History has been made modern at the newly opened Arms and Armor Galleries at the Worcester Art Museum. Beth Neville writes that not only has the former Higgins Armory Museum collection been displayed in a fresh light, but it’s been done in a way that younger museum visitors will find themselves able to engage with it through animated projections and trying on a helmet or handling a gauntlet.
Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” is brought to life in “Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance, An Installation by Heidi Whitman” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. In reviewing the show, Heather Stivison notes that it’s taking place just steps away from Seaman’s Bethel, the very church Melville attended in the weeks before departing on the whaling voyage that inspired his novel.
Lexi Gondek had the honor of reviewing iconic paintings by Hans Hofmann that are on view through June 28 at the Yale University Art Gallery. “His paintings do not demand to be read or decoded, they are asking to be felt, through tension, rhythm, vitality and movement,” she writes. Plan your road trip now.
On the starting end of art history is photographer Robb Kurkjian, who, after 10 years of documenting their urban exploration of decaying buildings, is setting out to make a living through images which, Vanessa Boucher, writes, “transforms the forgotten into something reverent, asking us to look closer at the dialogue between creation, decay and the fragile stories left behind.”
Wendy Edwards, who recently retired from her role as professor and chair of Brown University’s Visual Art department, currently has eight large scale paintings on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. “If the eight paintings in “Flourishing” — and the many other recent works viewable on her website — are a harbinger, we should all be excited to see what’s to come,” writes J.M. Belmont in reviewing the show.
And we at Artscope Magazine are excited to have you dig into this issue’s contents while we start working on March/April issue that will celebrate our 20th Anniversary of covering the arts and culture communities of the New England region and beyond.