Viera Levitt, director and contemporary art curator at the UMass Dartmouth University Art Gallery, has launched an exciting fall exhibit agenda with lots of interesting backstories and behind-the-scenes collaboration. The gallery is located in the Star Store Campus building in downtown New Bedford. It follows the momentum started with “(The Air) As It Moves,” a site-specific installation created in response to the airflow of the gallery by Rhode Island artist, Elizabeth Keithline, that opened on May 24 and ends on September 12. Keithline’s installation was inspired by Summer Winds 2019, the first festival presented by New Bedford-based Design Art Technology Massachusetts’ (DATMA) that is presenting event-related exhibitions through the end of the year. As summer nears its completion, so are other University Art Gallery shows by Spencer Finch, a well-known New York City artist, whose … [Read more...] about CHALLENGING STEREOTYPES: RAQUEL PAIEWONSKY IN NEW BEDFORD
Exhibits
SHUTAN’S PLAYFUL ELEMENTS: ARTIST’S VISION MATERIALIZES AT UMASS AMHERST
Suzan Shutan is a multidimensional thinker who works naturally with geometric space, being able to visualize the possibilities and limitations within unique installation areas. “Where Waters Meet” a tar paper landscape that meanders across the two walls and the entire floor, that was on exhibit at Kaneko in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2016, and “Slicey Dicey,” a three-dimensional math inspired arrangement featuring “pom poms,” that will be on view at UMass Amherst this September, are examples of her signature process: creating first in the studio and then taking the various components into the gallery architecture to problem solve and arrange the pieces into a site specific sculptural installation environment that is open to flexible interpretation. “My work is as much about process and visceral transformation, as it is driven by a conceptual exploration of our human condition,” she explains … [Read more...] about SHUTAN’S PLAYFUL ELEMENTS: ARTIST’S VISION MATERIALIZES AT UMASS AMHERST
THE CHIPS HAVE FALLEN: HARTSHORN’S STRETCHES GRAPHIC DESIGN AT CCRI
With one hand on the tiller and the other on the mainsheet, the sailor tests the wind, sensing the speed of the boat and the air slipping against his face. He shifts his weight and adjusts his course, and the sail billows around the landmarks in his field of vision. A moment of calm: then, swifter than a gull, he glides through an ever-changing perspective of his own invention. A rising star in Boston’s world of corporate advertising, Mark Hartshorn began to weary of sacrificing his creative freedom to the demands of the client. Leaving his career as art director with hardly a glance behind, he returned to the Art Institute of Boston, now Lesley University College of Art and Design, to get his M.F.A. in interdisciplinary forms and works on paper. An identity crisis flared again when the Community College of Rhode Island asked him to teach 4D design and web design. He was forced to … [Read more...] about THE CHIPS HAVE FALLEN: HARTSHORN’S STRETCHES GRAPHIC DESIGN AT CCRI
AMERICA DECONSTRUCTED: KENTUCKY ARTISTS INITIATE CONVERSATION
When I was younger — a true farmer’s daughter from South Dakota — I absorbed the implied social lesson: “Don’t discuss money, religion or politics at the dining room table.” These days, people don’t seem to understand this social norm we all once learned. Coming from a homogenous small-town-USA environment, religion was never a touchy subject because everyone believed basically the same thing. I assumed everyone believed what I did. In our town, out in the plains of the Midwest, we’d say the Pledge of Allegiance parroting our teachers’ “one nation under God.” So why shouldn’t we talk about religion? Your views are your views, and everyone has a right to believe in what they want. Some religions are so paradoxical that wars have started over them. Recently people can’t seem to stop talking about politics. This never ends well. I personally avoid talking about politics, even with my … [Read more...] about AMERICA DECONSTRUCTED: KENTUCKY ARTISTS INITIATE CONVERSATION
ART WITH A MESSAGE: SAMANTHA FIELDS’ RECYCLED CLOTHING PROJECT
This six-week pop-up public art project in a downtown storefront is the brainchild of School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University professor Samantha Fields. It combines spectacle, public participation and hands-on learning. The ongoing, performative deconstruction of clothing resembles sculptor Ann Hamilton’s transformations of objects through bizarre, slowly repeated motions. Fields’ purpose is political, to redirect the expectations of consumers in a prime shopping district. The project fosters awareness of habits of consumption that connect to patterns of social injustice and environmental destruction worldwide. Funded under the Now + There Accelerator Program and the City of Boston’s Transformative Public Art Program, Desires was to launch before Artscope’s September publication date. But the dicey retail environment of Downtown Crossing has yet to yield an empty … [Read more...] about ART WITH A MESSAGE: SAMANTHA FIELDS’ RECYCLED CLOTHING PROJECT
MASTERFUL COLLECTIONS: MAINE’S UNIVERSITIES SHOWCASE AMERICA’S BEST
Driving across the Piscataqua River Bridge, connecting Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with Kittery, Maine, a magnetic force seems to pull me to the end of the North American continent, east to the sea. Stately evergreen trees bordering the highway end as pines appear, their fragrance and statuesque beauty announcing that northeastern state where the sun first rises on America and a new Maine day. My Maine college art museums tour begins at Bowdoin College, with some of the oldest American art in any museum. With over 5000 art objects in its collection, and a statue commemorating the bear brought back from 1898 graduate Donald B. MacMillan’s 1915 Arctic expedition guarding its campus and Andy Warhol’s 1983 graphite drawing “Polar Bear” in its permanent collection, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s Maine-focused work emphasizes the state’s wild environment and constant struggle with … [Read more...] about MASTERFUL COLLECTIONS: MAINE’S UNIVERSITIES SHOWCASE AMERICA’S BEST