Edd Ravn is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans growing bacteria, painting with rainwater, recording soundscapes and designing public furniture to co-create objects that question perception and connection. With a BFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art, Ravn’s work has been exhibited at RAINRAIN Gallery, New York, the Norton Museum of Art, Florida, and the Brazilian Embassy in London. He has served as visiting artist and critic at Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan. In 2017, he participated in the Porthmeor Studios Residency in St. Ives, England, and in 2020, he received an Art and Social Justice Initiative Award from Yale University. Ravn is currently part of the 2024-25 cohort of Fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, a unique seven-month international residency program … [Read more...] about RITUALS OF EARTH AND CHANGE
Artscope Issues
A SCULPTURAL DIALOGUE
Norad Mill in North Adams, Massachusetts is home to an assortment of quirky and highly visible businesses. It retains its vintage mill appearance while adding contemporary features, making it a desirable opportunity for businesses and artists to flourish. Within this winding megalopolis is a bright, clean-lined gallery space, Lapin Contemporary and its sister space, Lapin Curiosities. Cristina Barbedo is the proprietor and curator, bringing a unique focus to the Berkshires art community. Barbedo chooses a distinct array of artworks of all media — a mysterious combination of dignity and volcanic energy. John Gerding’s “Elements” is a good illustration of the relationship between curator and artist, the partnership and common vision immediately apparent. The light-filled space and polished original natural wood floors have had many incarnations. However, these pristine walls seem to be … [Read more...] about A SCULPTURAL DIALOGUE
A MASSIVE REUNION
How do you begin to engage with an exhibition of someone whose work you’ve followed for nearly 40 years, a period during which he documented many of your friends and, over time, as a reporter, had the honor of working with? In “Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs,” on view through June 1 at the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM), everyone seems to have been a friend of the Worcester-based photographer and Clark University professor. It’s one of those rare exhibitions that on any day, you’ll probably find one of the people captured on the walls standing next to you. Many of DiRado’s students were on hand for the show’s opening reception on February 8, searching for themselves in “The Classroom Series” that DiRado started in 2008 and continues today, documenting each new group of students; they weren’t alone. “So many people came to see it from my past, fans from afar … [Read more...] about A MASSIVE REUNION
BEATTY’S MELODIC WOODCRAFT
When the original Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, formerly in O’Kane Hall, was dedicated in 1983 Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J. president emeritus of Holy Cross declared: “An undergraduate liberal arts college is academically strengthened when its students and staff are exposed to works of art.” The current Cantor Gallery, on the third floor of the Prior Performing Arts Center designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that opened in 2022, is a glass-enclosed space with a soaring ceiling, a capacious light-filled room where exhibits are installed with encouragement to wander. It is a perfect space for the retrospective of former 25-year faculty member Michael Beatty’s “Fabrications.” Beatty taught Sculpture and 3D Design in the college’s Studio Art Department. Having recently explored the Henry Moore and Georgia O’Keeffe dual exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, … [Read more...] about BEATTY’S MELODIC WOODCRAFT
KNICK-KNACKS COME TO LIFE
Running through March 30 in the Kingston Gallery’s Main Gallery, Nat Martin’s “Over Days” exhibition invites the viewer to play a game of iSpy with new sculptures, prints and some photography, primarily completed within the last few years. Inspired by his daily life, knicks-knacks — and artists such Joseph Beuys and others of the modern and Fluxus movements of the 1960s and ‘70s — Martin reinvents recyclables and life’s little moments. The show also features some revisited projects completed in a new fashion for the show. All the works in “Over Days” are on view for the first time. A moment of a typical New England morning routine is captured in “Untitled V,” 2024, resin and mixed media. The sculpture — a frozen over Dunkin Donut’s iced coffee cup — perfectly captures what it looks like to find Friday’s mobile order frozen in your car on Tuesday morning after a snowy long weekend. A … [Read more...] about KNICK-KNACKS COME TO LIFE
WAINWRIGHT’S PATCHWORK POLITICS
Clara Wainwright’s new exhibition at the Paul Dietrich Gallery at Cambridge Seven, “GLORY: A Satirical Retrospective of Fabric Collages,” is a kind of hallucinatory storyboard of a trip through Wainwright’s mind as it considers the insane chaos of the current Trumpian political gestalt. Her fabric collages are not exactly quilts, though each has three layers like a quilt, but they are smaller in size compared to traditional quilts which are large. These are basically fabric paintings, varying in size from about 18” x 20” to a bit over 46” x 23”, some ironed on to fiberglass backing. “I love to sew,” she said, working mostly by machine, sometimes hand-embroidering or painting over designs and adding sequins. Though she said that it was Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso who influenced her style originally, she's been involved with so many multicultural and multiracial communities over the … [Read more...] about WAINWRIGHT’S PATCHWORK POLITICS