CELEBRATING A 20-YEAR COLLABORATION by Kristin Nord Since 1995, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking (CCP) has cultivated a vibrant network of artists who use its equipment and services. This fall, visitors to the non-profit center in Norwalk, Conn. will be treated to what promises to be a spectacular 20th anniversary celebratory retrospective. The exhibition, partially underwritten by the International Fine Print Dealers Association, will showcase high quality prints from leading artists of the 20th century. From the painterly woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler to the eight-color screen prints of poppies by Donald Sultan, the show will display a wide range of work by artists who are masters of various techniques. There will be prints by Michael Mazur, Robert Andrew Parker and Robert Cottingham, and gems culled from the CCP archives, including works by Rufino Tamayo, Robert … [Read more...] about Center for Contemporary Printmaking

SALUTING 75 YEARS OF COMMUNITY by Greg Morell Artists have strong personalities, passionate and independent, and making art in most cases is a very solitary labor. Artists, usually driven by economic need, band together to form co-ops and collectives; unfortunately, the result is often short-lived. However, this year the New Hampshire Art Association (NHAA) celebrates a 75-year history. Their membership boasts 250 members and an ample storefront gallery at 130 State Street in downtown Portsmouth, just a block from the city center. Its 36th Annual Parfitt Open Photography Juried Exhibition (juried by Julee Holcomb) takes place from September 2 through 26, and in October, they will hold a members-only plein air showcase. Plein air painting is a mainstay of the Association and is hosted in weekly “Paint Outs” in and around the Portsmouth environs. Much of the success of the NHAA … [Read more...] about New Hampshire Art Association

ROZHON AND WHEELER’S AUTUMN EQUINOX by J. Fatima Martins In a time when many contemporary commercial art galleries are closing, business acumen and good old fashioned “people sense” is the “secret sauce” holding together the successful art partnership between gallerist Anita Trezvant and her cadre of artists, notably regional favorite Ann Rozhon. Trezvant’s Hope Gallery, located in Bristol, Rhode Island’s charming historic downtown, celebrates 11 years in operation in December. It is a highly approachable space reflecting Trezvant’s authentic personality. Her common sense coupled with a clever and experimental instinct often direct her to taking in new artistic voices in hope of attracting a broader audience of savvy collectors, sometimes exhibiting abstraction, new-media photography and design-focused sculpture. “My customers want to take home something beautiful that they … [Read more...] about Give The People What They Want

PAUL ROUSSO ADDS ANOTHER DIMENSION by Meredith Cutler Candy wrappers. Currency. Newspapers, movie posters and comic books. At once crisp, well-worn and confrontationally familiar, Paul Rousso’s larger-than-life sculptures are ... unavoidable. A Southern child matured in the post-Pop, neo-expressionist Bay Area and New York City cultural scenes of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Rousso iconizes paper with a curatorial eye, a wealth of culture- buff detritus and an obsessive attention to finish detail straight out of the commercial design world where he started his “on paper” career as an art director for Revlon Cosmetics. Rousso’s work focuses around an idea he’s coined “flat depth.” Noting that the arc of Western art history has traced artists’ attempts to first render the illusion of perspective on a flat surface and then to refute depth in modern and post-modern art Rousso’s … [Read more...] about Flat Depth

SIKANDER’S ADVENTURE OF THE MIND by Franklin W. Liu Shahzia Sikander savors art as a fundamental, erudite process, a wonderful, exuberant adventure of the mind. It’s an academic endeavor that yields a rich array of cultural symbolisms that she culls directly from those distant, exotic places she traveled to worldwide. What she distilled from those locales sparks a vital, cutting- edge conversation between life’s essential truths pitted against baffling human conventions, thus delineating a “Parallax,” a curious social complexity in life to behold. Pivotal visual elements within Sikander’s drawing, watercolor and painting have been harvested and seeded seamlessly into her latest large-scale, digital-formatted animation-work that’s also infused with newly composed sound, music and poetry, producing a mesmerizing mixed-media sensory experience. Accepting the advantages offered by … [Read more...] about Parallax

ENAMELING IN AMERICA, 1920 TO THE PRESENT by Don Wilkinson Enameling as an art form is not nearly as well known save to connoisseurs of the craft as painting, sculpture and photography. Curators Bernard Jazzar and Hal Nelson of the Los Angeles based Enamel Arts Foundation, perhaps the preeminent scholars on the medium, have made great efforts to correct that esthetic injustice by putting together an exhibition that is equally bedazzling, bewildering and bewitching. The field is studded with heady European terminology and phrasing (basse-taille, champlevé, guillocheé, sgraffito...) that belie its origins and give clue to the techniques utilized. By manipulating glass, metal and foils at high temperatures, enamel artists are able to create works that are virtually unmatched in luminosity, translucence and intensity to create two-dimensional imagery and engaging items … [Read more...] about Little Dreams in Glass and Metal