Article Excerpts
Welcome
Welcome to our first issue of 2015. Between the holiday season and later exhibition opening dates at the start of the new year for many venues, putting together our January/February issue has traditionally been a challenge. This time around, we decided to take advantage of that challenge and allow our writers to expand their coverage and write about subjects that we otherwise might not have had the space to feature in these pages, wanting to provide coverage that’ll make you ...Artistry Times Two at Fuller Craft
MEMBERS SHOW & RECENT ACQUISITIONS STRENGTHEN COLLECTION There are any number of shifting elements that contribute to the longterm success of a non-profit art institution, including endowments and fund raising, devoted trustees and staff, public interest and support, and forward-thinking curatorship. One of the two most important pillars of a museum may be the membership, providing not only financial support through the collection of dues, but also offering input, contributing to discourse and promoting patronage. The other significant pillar is ...Mystical, Meditative, Mirthful
COSO’S NEW MEMBERS ARE FOR REAL If you are seeking some good examples of contemporary realism, look no further than the Copley Society of Art’s New Members’ Show 2015, introducing 18 new Co|So member artists who hail from as near as Brookline and Cambridge, Mass. to as far away as County Kildare, Ireland. They join the Society’s roster of over 400 living members. This exhibition focuses on realism from a variety of approaches including painting, drawing and photography, with only ...Peter Halley: Big Paintings
SIZE MATTERS For nearly three decades, Peter Halley has deployed his geometric icons — “solid cells,” “gridded prisons” and “linear conduits,” using modern geometry as raw source material. He dissects the human condition: exploring our isolation and capacity for interconnection, looking at the ways in which technology affects how we communicate and probing the ways in which our living and working environments shape us. His paintings are executed in industrial and boldly artificial DayGlo paints in metallic and pearlescent colors. ...Masters in the Studio
BONNIE FAULKNER AND CAROLANN TEBBETTS As a girl, Bonnie Faulkner recalls endlessly drawing circles — “circles and circles and circles,” as she emphasized — and, inspired by the way light played with colored glass, she hit upon the novel idea that she could “paint” with that fragile material. Eventually, she literally fused those two ideas into colorful, intricate glass renditions of the mandala, a circular symbol that represents both the cosmos and the self. “It’s analogous to life,” the Heartwood ...Fine Arts Work Center Fellows
ALEXANDRIA SMITH AND BRIDGET MULLEN Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center’s Fellowship Program provides a unique opportunity for 10 artists and 10 writers to serve seven-month residencies during the developmental stages of their careers. Over 1,100 applications come in annually with the hope of being selected for the cherished experience that runs from October 1 through May 1. Over 800 fellowships have been served since FAWC’s inception in 1968. There will be a FAWC Fellows at PAAM exhibition from January 23 ...Public Art: PLACEMAKING
NEW ENGLAND PUBLIC ARTISTS LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR OTHER REGIONAL ARTISTS TO FOLLOW As the garage door to Susan Champeny’s workshop studio opened, it revealed the test version of her “Snow Saucer Lady Bug” sculpture now on display in Washington, D.C., along with a portion of her “Laundry Bottle Totems” and two Hornbeck Boats Adirondack-style canoes used to install her “ReinCARnation” hubcap lily pads in a pond along Atlanta’s BeltLine Rail Trail in 2012 and neighboring Elm Park in Worcester, ...Artist Profile: Two Heads are Better than One
THE STORY OF LESLIE FRY’S COLOSSAL ACORNHEAD Leslie Fry had a vision for her work and set out to find the means to realize it. A temporary installation she created at Wave Hill in the Bronx had given her a taste for wanting to cast her five-footlong plaster “AcornHead” in bronze, so Fry took matters into her own hands. She created a GoFundMe campaign through United States Artists in 2010 and successfully raised over $15,000 to cast her plaster “AcornHead” ...The Perils of the Possible
WE ARE ALL CURATORS, NOW! Artists and curators often seek attention through impulses as subversive as they are creative. In a recent attempt to gather a range of curatorial concepts that court the limits of the imaginable, New York City’s Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts called for a “Theoretical Show” of the “most audacious, outrageous, or impossible” ideas for an exhibition. From 71 proposals, the jurors chose 15 works to be realized in a late fall exhibition entitled “A Wicked ...Kiss the Ground
FINDING THE “NEW” ARMENIA The question is: What does the “new” Armenia look like? While attempting to understand “Kiss the Ground,” I kept an impression from a quote by famed Armenian-Canadian master photographer Yousuf Karsh in mind: ”Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” The old Armenian word “Yergurbakootyoon” means to be in “total submission.” In English, the word and concept translates to “kiss the ground,” used here to mean heritage reverence. Contemporary Armenians are removed from the original source ...Business: Timing is Everything
PROVIDENCE: ENTREPRENEURIAL VENTURES ARE IN When Rhode Island found itself in the recent recession with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, Providence decided to re-brand itself and make the transition from “Renaissance City” to “Creative Capital.” The hope was that prosperity would follow. The rationale was like Manhattan turning its “Mean Streets,” Ad Men-style, into the charismatically approachable “Big Apple,” and later driving that point home with its “I Love New York” campaign. In the “Creative Capital” ...Community: Climate Change in Providence
FRESH CURATORIAL AND ARTISTIC PERSPECTIVES It is noticeable, looking at artwork made in Providence as we enter 2015, that the flavor of the city is changing. Facilitated by a re-branding process that seems to also address anti-intellectual posturing as an impediment to global context, the city is willing, at the moment, to entertain the concept of varied aesthetic languages informing its learning curve with sophistication and surprise. Fresh curatorial perspectives are afoot, both institutionally and independently, that are beginning to ...Sight, Sound and Tactility
THE SENSES COALESCE AT BEARD AND WEIL Thanks to its cross-cultural and historically deep in-house permanent collection of approximately 6,000 objects in a wide variety of media, as well as a substantial archives department and a superb on-site display area in the form of its Beard and Weil Galleries, Wheaton College is a perfect setting for the training of future art curators. Wheaton’s Museum Studies department — directed by professor Leah Niederstadt in collaboration with an extensive team of colleagues ...Good Vibrations
NIHO KOZURU AT HESS GALLERY Niho Kozuru rides the razor’s edge between craft and sculpture in a purposeful and inquisitive way. Best known in Boston’s art circles for her otherworldly cast-rubber sculptures, she also maintains a brisk, Etsypowered business selling beeswax candles re-envisioned from the forms of found wooden architectural elements. Born in Japan to a family of ceramic artists, the Boston-based Kozuru takes her heritage seriously and into the new millennium, casting a gaze backward to the turned and ...A Body in Fukushima
THE GUILD OF BOSTON ARTISTS' LEGACY CONTINUES The radioactive land cemetery that is Fukushima may have been overshadowed in recent years as news outlets have trained their lenses on other human and natural disasters, but in Japan, a country only 50 years removed from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fallout is psychological and physical — and ongoing. “More than three years have passed since the meltdown, and the ruined facility is still spilling radioactive waste into the ocean. ...The Blue Prophetic Alphabet
JULIA ZANES EMBRACES CONTRADICTIONS There is a magical realm of flora, fauna, celestial bodies and mystical beings at the Dianich Gallery in Brattleboro through January, brought to you by sorcerer and painter Julia Zanes, whose show, “The Blue Prophetic Alphabet,” consists of 52 (as in a deck of cards) paintings on plastered board mounted to screen printing frames. Do not think Picasso’s Blue Period or blue as in “the blues.” Zanes’ blue is light-emitting. She shared method: “If you use ...Open House: A Portrait of Collecting
People collect everything! Really! Everything! Pokémon. Famous peoples’ autographs. Bars of soap from all over the world. Historical peoples’ hair. Toasters. Happy-Meal toys. Penises (honestly, a man in Iceland has a museum). Dalmation-spotted items. Coca-Cola cans (8,000 different cans). The collections included in the “Open House: A Portrait of Collecting” at the Lamont Gallery on the Phillips Exeter Academy campus are fascinating. Director-curator Lauren O’Neal said that over 10 private collections are part of this exhibition that includes hand-carved sculptures, ...Reaching Out in Hartford
DRIVING TOWARD GREATER ACCESSIBILITY If the gathering felt a good bit like a family reunion, there was good reason. For more than 25 years, Margaret Bodell, now on the staff of the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Department of Economic and Community Development, has made it her personal mission to support artists on the autism spectrum. Bodell founded one of the first galleries in New York to feature these New England-based, so-called “outsider” artists and help gain recognition for their ...Five Tips to Protect your Creative Work on the Internet
Online image theft is one of greatest concerns for artists in this digital age. How do we protect our intellectual property once it’s uploaded onto the Internet? One solution is not to upload it at all — to not put your work out into cyberspace. Does this solve the problem of piracy? Yes. However, connecting through social media, websites and blogs is, for many of us, a fundamental part of our creative expression and how we do business. Prior to ...Capsule Previews
While creating his installation “Divination X,” which will be installed on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade from January 6 through June 29 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, Boston, St. Andrews, Jamaica-born Nari Ward explored his personal responses to the question, “What does my future hold?” Described as “a contemporary piece that resembles anx-ray of a cowrie shell reading,” the work is the result of a recent return stint as the Gardner’s artist-in-residence by Ward, who weaves ...