Welcome to our first issue of 2023! Our devoted Artscope Magazine staff have worked overtime throughout the holiday season to ensure we provided you with a strong selection of exhibitions for viewing over the next two months and artists to put on your must-investigate and must-see lists over the year ahead. We start with the Bates College Museum of Art that has two great exhibitions — “And So Did Pleasure Take the Hand of Sorrow and They Wandered Through the ...

Only 45 minutes beyond Portland, in Lewiston, Maine, a winter trekker will revel in two exhibitions at the Bates College Art Museum unique to its own holdings, on view through March 18. On the main floor, in conversation with Bates’s renowned Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, Museum Director Dan Mills has brought together eight contemporary artists whose works illuminate the wide-ranging sensibility of this Modernist giant who styled himself the “Painter of Maine.” The lower gallery showcases the cream of a ...

Rachel Portesi was nine years old when she took her first Polaroid of a Sunday morning cartoon on the television screen. At 16, she began taking photographs of people and places with a Pentax K1000. Nearly three decades later, she continues refining photography in her Vermont studio as a uniquely personal art form while adding new techniques such as wet plate collodion tintypes, film and 3D imagery to her multimedia art forms. Portesi’s work in various media is featured in ...

All the senses will trigger memory, but for many people, a visual image opens a locked door to personal history, often forgotten or detached from the routines and obligations of daily living. Gail Winbury’s extensive body of work currently at the Southern Vermont Arts Center is a powerhouse exhibit that explores the joys and struggles that we all experience as we add layer upon layer of history to the being that transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. The ...

As I was about to interview Andrea (Andi) Sawyer, Provincetown artist, about her dozen oil on canvas, 18 by 24-inch paintings memorializing beloved portraiture artist Ilona Royce Smithkin (who passed away in 2021 at the age of 101) in her Provincetown atelier, I saw a sweatshirt logo, “Be Who You Want to Be,” and then read a line about one’s presentation of self as “the curated performance of identity.” “That fits Ilona perfectly!” Sawyer said with a smile. Both bits ...

The experience of the annual Juried Exhibition at the Catamount Arts Center begins about an hour before you get there. Sure, you could take the highway for most of the route, but you would miss out on immersion into the desolate beauty of this northern life. If you opt for the back roads, unplug from your devices, and listen only to the white noise of your radiator fan, you’ll find yourself surrendering to the pleasures of quiet contemplation. You will ...

In a year that we reached for normal — new normal, old normal, what exactly is normal, anyways — the show introducing the Copley Society of Art’s latest members won’t necessarily take you anywhere new, but they’ll take you back to the places you’ve missed visiting over the past three years. “This group of artists represents people coming from a variety of backgrounds that share a united focus of representing their everyday surroundings,” said gallery coordinator Paige Roehrig. “Whether it ...

The much-anticipated Members’ Exhibition, on view at Attleboro Arts Museum through January 27, is an annual event that provides an opportunity for members of all ages and artistic backgrounds to exhibit up to three artworks with guaranteed inclusion. Always an interesting percolation of ideas and trends, the current iteration of the survey includes 411 artworks by 201 artists. 2023 happens to be Attleboro Arts Museum’s 100th Anniversary and the Members’ Exhibition is certainly a signature event to begin an auspicious ...

The materials messaging in “Social Fabric: Textiles and Contemporary Issues,” on view through June 11 in the Cushing and Morris Galleries at the Newport Art Museum, is certainly of the moment and contextualized by the inclusion of excerpts from the National Aids Quilt and work from Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” her 1970s landmark installation that remains just as significant today as an activist’s expression of contemporary art. Many of the artists included in this show have used the soft ...

Beverly, Massachusetts’s Montserrat College of Art begins the new year with a selection of shows that celebrate its newest and oldest talents and make space for inner and external explorations of form, color, trauma and politics. The range of the college’s teachings are spotlighted throughout its four galleries of exhibitions featuring the psychedelic works of Isaiah Hope, a recent graduate of the college, to samples of the timeless works of Reno “Ray” Pisano, Montserrat’s last living founding faculty member who ...

Sky Painter, Nadia Parsons, has been an artist from a young age. When her mother recognized her dyslexia, she introduced her daughter to creating art, hoping that it was a place where she would flourish. Parsons immediately took to painting, and her high school and college years brought her to explore drawing, acting, photography and printmaking. After college, she returned to her childhood passion for painting, working with acrylics when her children were born (they dried faster), and after taking ...

The age-old problem. Artist displacement is not new. It’s happened for decades, and it continues to the present day. It’s the age-old gentrification cycle: artists/creatives move into a run-down, undesirable, low-rent neighborhood. Through creating art, they bring more creatives to said neighborhood, which then attracts bars, restaurants, cafes, book and record stores, which then brings people to want to live among the valued neighborhood culture. Then property values go up, forcing the artists out. In Greater Boston, we’ve lost hundreds ...

Can anything good or beautiful come out of a nasty, brutish war? The rape, murder and mayhem of the almost year-long war in Ukraine scarcely seems a place to look for goodness and creativity. But two Ukrainian icon artists, Oleksandr Klymenko and his wife, Sofia Atlantova, have managed to bring beauty out of brutality. Looking at the debris of war, they noticed that the wooden boxes that held ammunition look much like the wood backings on which icons have traditionally ...

Rising seas and high-rise buildings continue to coexist in Miami, a city threatened by climate change, vulnerable to constant floods and doomed to be swallowed by the ocean. While the water doesn’t claim part of southern Miami Beach, the art fairs continue to take over part of the landscape annually, trying to coexist and amicably blend in with nature. Artists have been, for decades, the leading voices echoing the need for social, political and economic changes while raising awareness about ...

Art Basel is like a meteor that falls to earth creating an energy crater in Miami Beach, with layers and layers of concentric circles of influence reverberating for miles. During my visit, I spent much time digging for diamonds, being attracted to art that spoke not only for the moment, but that radiated infinitesimal revelation of the past and projections of possible futures. As an artist, curator and gallery director, I naturally stood in awe of the logistical tangles of ...

“Flora & Fauna,” an exhibition featuring encaustic artists Debra Claffey, Patricia Gerkin, Kellie Weeks and Charyl Weissbach, will be held from January 7 through February 18 at The Brush Art Gallery & Studios, 256 Market St., Lowell, Massachusetts. Claffey focuses on the plant world, celebrating its beauty of form, shape, and infinite color. Gerkin challenges viewers “to note that space where two worlds meet—outer and inner” with her intuitive process allowing her materials (paint sticks, encaustic, metal leaf and disparate ...