Just as we were readying to go to press with this issue, Richard Florida, whose 2002 book, “The Rise of the Creative Class” popularized the concept of “The Creative City” and subsequently, the creative economy and the importance it plays in the development and success of a city looking to reinvent and reinvigorate itself through the arts, announced the results of a new survey on citylab.com that found that a large portion of our country’s workers could be classified as ...

Founded in 1969, the Fuller Craft Museum begins the celebration of its 50th year with the opening of “Striking Gold: Fuller at Fifty” on September 7, and its 50th Anniversary Gala that takes place on Saturday, October 19. The landmark exhibition aims to celebrate the museum’s rich past and provide a look at its future direction through the works of 57 artists for whom gold is central to their work. The exhibition was co-curated by Fuller Craft Museum Chief Curator ...

Susan Danton, owner of Miller White Fine Arts on Cape Cod, said the exhibit “Love Letters,” that she originated and curated, was inspired by an 1846 letter from Gustave Flaubert to his lover, Louise Colet: “I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die.” If you are wondering if there is a further French connection, no, she isn’t a descendant of the ...

Alane Hartley and Russell Braen, owners of Park Hill Orchard in Easthampton, Massachusetts, harmoniously blend into a single vision — their commitment to land conservation, sustainable farming, culture and community. While September through October are peak months for visitors of all ages to come to the 127-acre pick-your-own orchard, there also is the added treat of seeing the Art in the Orchard biennial (AIO 2019), which continues through November 24. There is no admission fee to enjoy this exhibition. The ...

“Fabrication of Imagination,” on view at Arts League of Lowell through mid-September, works on several levels in presenting recent developments in the fiber and paper arts genre and shows how artists are attempting to balance the current political and social climate with their art. The show was juried by Karen Hampton, an assistant professor in 3D fine art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. A conceptual artist whose works address issues of colorism and kinship within the African-American community, ...

Ask folks who know Vermont artist Charlie Hunter’s work to describe it and you might hear words like “ethereal and mysterious,” “straightforward and real” and “highly evocative.” Ask them to describe the man, and they are likely to say “funny,” “smart,” “sensitive” and “thoughtful.” They would all be right. Hunter, who lives in the small town of Bellows Falls, once a mill town, on the banks of the Connecticut River dividing Vermont and New Hampshire, works in a sprawling studio ...

Barbara Eskin professes to chart disasters without a leg to stand on —  multiple disasters, pieces flying everywhere. Before you think about her person — “What a pessimist!” and about her art: “What a downer!” — listen to some history. Eskin was born in Germany during the waning years of the Second World War. She was taken out of Germany by her parents when still a toddler, and then before she came to America, 20-some years ago, she was a ...

While Mary Lang’s latest exhibition at SoWa’s Kingston Gallery, “Here, nowhere else,” could have featured a strong collection of images from her travels to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California and the isles and highlands of Scotland, she decided to also include more localized works that seem to hold personal importance to the Auburndale, Massachusetts-based photographer. The show serves as a valuable exercise at a time we’re asking ourselves, more and more in the Instagram age, what makes a great ...

What does an artist do after a devastating divorce and death of her mother? With the invention of psychoanalytical theory by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and others, the path was open for artists to make emotional self-examination a physical reality in painting, sculpture and the arts. Susan Darwin’s inventive oil paintings, that open the fall exhibition schedule at Regis College’s Carney Gallery, flow directly from the emotional highs and lows that she has faced in life. Her paintings ...

Photographer Tad Malek knows a bit about patience. With a background in color landscape photography, Malek has spent full days immersed in natural surroundings, waiting for the perfect still. Malek’s current exhibition, “People at Work and Other Environmental Portraits,” on view at Springfield Museums, marks a departure from the restraint of waiting for that consummate shot into the realm of portraiture in the moment, with all its alluring fallibility and epiphanic fulfillment. Choosing almost exclusively black-and-white images for “People at ...

I like to joke that I found freedom in Maine. And in a way, it’s true. Recently, I traveled up the coast to the small town of Freedom for a much-needed weekend away. While there, I was delighted to find not just the peaceful, bucolic scenery I had been craving but also a region bursting with local flavor — from lobster shacks, farm-to-table restaurants and an Amish charcuterie to open studios, galleries and off the beaten path museums. Though summer ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“Local Ecologies,” which will be exhibited at three University of Massachusetts institution galleries during the 2019-20 school year, features commission artworks by artists who have lived and worked in eastern Massachusetts. The traveling exhibition was organized by Kirsten Swenson, an associate professor and art history coordinator at UMass Lowell; Sam Toabe, gallery director at UMass Boston; and art historian and curator Rebecca Uchill, a full-time lecturer in art education, art history and media studies at UMass Dartmouth. Onsite curators are ...

Burlington Vermont’s South End is the place to be if you are an artist or if you want to immerse yourself in art because art is everywhere — indoors, outdoors, on the streets, on building exteriors, in repurposed dairy facilities, reclaimed warehouses, and yes, in dozens of galleries. You could spend days there and still not see everything. But you could break up your art consumption with samplings of local craft beer in the many tasting rooms and even stop ...

The body is physical, but the soul is not. It is soul that defines our soft truth, but it is body that defines our everyday tangible hard reality. If you can’t walk, your daily reality — the actual physical living — is challenged, but if the soul is solid, it can and will motivate you to find and create beyond the challenge, beyond the diagnosis. It is soul and spirit that motivated Patricia Weltin, founder and curator of “Beyond the ...

“Human Figure,” an exhibition featuring works by Jamie Bowman, Holly Curcio, Erika Hess, Lavaughan Jenkins, Jessica Liggero and Tamar Nelson, artists that use the human figure expressively, “going beyond verisimilitude in order to express inner life through outward appearance,” opens on September 1 and continues through November 8 at the Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College, Annenberg Library, 400 Heath St., Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. “They create powerful images of humans for as many reasons as there are artists: to represent ...