Artscope Magazine

New England's Culture Magazine

Artscope Magazine | November/December 2019

Subscribe to the Magazine

A vibrant, dynamic magazine with arts news, reviews and info you can use, delivered right to your door!

Subscribe now

Sign up for our Email Blasts!

Special Artscope updates in your inbox every two weeks!

Sign up

Artscope Online

NANCY NESVET AND LARRY RINGGOLD: ENDANGERD AT ZENITH GALLERY

// Artscope Online, Current Exhibits, Exhibits, Visual Arts

by Elizabeth Ashe

Nancy Nesvet’s photographs and large-scale oil paintings, on view alongside sculptures by Larry Ringgold in “enDANGERd” through November 16 at Washington, D.C.’s Zenith Gallery, take entirely different turns of portraying the sea. In the paintings, the sea is vast, changing and tumultuous: in the photographs, murky depths pull me to look closely at the details. Those details are both threatening and beautiful, making the photographs look like a coming environmental apocalypse. There is a masterful handle on scale in her paintings. We know polar bears to be substantial, but in Nesvet’s eight paintings, they are microscopic, appearing in the far distance, unreachable and not treacherous at all. The bears are stranded on icebergs broken off from the mother glacier, with strong seas pushing them apart. “If but all the seas rise up,” 48” x 58”, the unending seascape shows two polar bears, … [Read more...] about NANCY NESVET AND LARRY RINGGOLD: ENDANGERD AT ZENITH GALLERY

WHERE ART IS MADE: WALTHAM OPEN STUDIOS NOVEMBER 2 AND 3

// Artscope Online, Current Exhibits, Visual Arts

by Olivia MacDonald

This brisk, fall weekend, November 2 and 3, from noon-6 p.m. is a perfect time to step into a piece of history and art at the Waltham Mills. Located at 144 and 289 Moody Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, the brick buildings used to house textile mills in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, but today houses the studios of over 85 artists in a community environment with a variety of art on each floor. Visitors can make their way across the wooden floorboards, observing the colorful paintings, drawings and sculptural pieces on the walls with sunlight flooding into the studios through the wall-sized windows. Speak to artists first-hand about their processes, inspirations and lives as creators. Take the old-style open elevator up to the third floor of 144 Moody Street, building 4, to enter Roberta Nigro Hall’s space in studio 3, where the white walls are filled with large … [Read more...] about WHERE ART IS MADE: WALTHAM OPEN STUDIOS NOVEMBER 2 AND 3

ART IS HER WORLD AND THE WORLD IS HER ART: NATASHA STOPPEL

// Artscope Online, Exhibits, Visual Arts

by Olivia MacDonald

Natasha Stoppel’s thirst for travel and adventure seeps into her illustrative and whimsical ink drawings, watercolor pieces and wood-burned jewelry. Also known as Artist Explores the World on her blog and social media platforms, she tells small stories through her artworks of landscapes contained within animals, a collage of ink-drawn cats and cascading waterfalls painted on bamboo earrings. The places she has visited whether backpacking solo through Asia or exploring the canyons and mountains of the United States, are a part of her when she speaks. Her intense passion feeds her artwork, giving her compositions movement and life. As a New Hampshire native, Stoppel’s studio is located in Exeter’s Art Up Front Street, an inviting space for artists to practice their craft. Yet, Stoppel’s artistic roots spread further as she graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, … [Read more...] about ART IS HER WORLD AND THE WORLD IS HER ART: NATASHA STOPPEL

CAPSULE PREVIEWS: November/December 2019

// Current Issue, Exhibit Openings, November/December 2019, November/December 2019

by Brian Goslow

With work ranging from paintings, mixed-media and graphics and sculpture, digital art and photography, the Rockport Art Association & Museum’s Experimental Group holds its 12th group exhibition, “Unexpected No. Twelve,” from November 2 through 17 at the Rockport Art Association and Museum, 12 Main St., Rockport, Massachusetts. “The Experimental Group is a creative forum whose main mission is to increase public awareness and to foster self-expression by bringing artists together to explore and share ideas that cultivate creative freedom.” The exhibition is followed by the Rockport Art Association and Museum’s National Show 2019 which opens on November 23 and continues through January 1. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and on Sunday from noon-5 p.m. Elegant landscapes and still life paintings, evocative portraits and painted nudes, beguiling drawings … [Read more...] about CAPSULE PREVIEWS: November/December 2019

JUDY CHICAGO’S ACT OF PRESERVATION: FEMINIST ART ARCHIVES ONLINE AND IN WASHINGTON

// Featured, November/December 2019, November/December 2019, Visual Arts

by Nancy Nesvet

On October 17, 80-year-old artist Judy Chicago launched a research portal preserving her archive of feminist art at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. The portal will serve to bridge collections of Chicago’s work located at Penn State University, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. , and Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Some background: In an early work, “The Dinner Party,” now based at the Brooklyn Museum, Chicago resurrected renowned women of the past and gave them a seat at the formerly men’s-only table. In the “Birth Project,” pieces of which now belong to several permanent museum, university and college collections, she treated the topic of birth from all angles, analyzing and commenting on the process. She dealt with the deaths of her first husband and father, in “Bigamy Hood,” part of her “Car Hood” series. In her … [Read more...] about JUDY CHICAGO’S ACT OF PRESERVATION: FEMINIST ART ARCHIVES ONLINE AND IN WASHINGTON

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: SOURCE OF DONORS’ WEALTH ROCKS THE ART WORLD

// Current Exhibits, Featured, November/December 2019, November/December 2019, Visual Arts

by Nancy Nesvet

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie family, Maine’s Farnsworths and Arkansas’ Waltons founded museums to enlighten and educate the workers on their railroads and in their steel mills that produced and sold the goods that made their families wealthy, exposing them to the arts. Money from an inheritance earned through the Irish linen trade and investment in mining opportunities by her father, David Stewart, allowed Isabella Stewart Gardner to amass a fabulous art collection that became so large it needed its own museum. Subsequently, the owners of these private collections generously opened their doors to the public. The Morgans cleaned out their attic of treasures taken from colonial outposts to fill multiple large galleries comprising the decorative arts wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They donated Roman sculptures, casts taken from sculptures at Karnak, the Parthenon and Notre-Dame … [Read more...] about ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: SOURCE OF DONORS’ WEALTH ROCKS THE ART WORLD