Welcome to Artscope’s first issue of 2024, In my formative years of 1964 and 1965, I benefited from my mom bringing me to the New York World’s Fair, with its motto of “Peace Through Understanding” backed up by exhibitions from countries around the world introducing visitors to their culture and people, be it Michelangelo’s “Pietà” in the Vatican pavilion, Thailand’s ornate roof replica of the Mondrop of Saraburi Buddhist shrine, and through its singing marionettes dressed in costumes and performing ...

Joanne Mattera’s 2001 book, “The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax,” has been a guiding light for encaustic artists since its publication in 2001. She founded the International Encaustic Conference, IN 2007, which will be held for its 17th year from May 31 through June 3 at the Providence Inn and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill; she’s now its Director Emerita. Built on several years of entries under the same ...

“The Myth of Normal: A Celebration of Authentic Expression,” currently on view at MassArt Art Museum, was inspired by guest curator Mari Spirito’s reading of “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture,” a 2022 book by Gabor Maté (written with Daniel Maté). The show, which reopens after the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s winter break on January 18, is a platform for artists to speak their truths. The exhibition is a globally inclusive distillation ...

For Nayana LaFond the issue of violence against women is personal. Not only is she a survivor of domestic violence, she’s also a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario with roots in the Red River Settlement and a descendant of the Anishinaabe and other Indigenous groups. As a cancer survivor as well, art is vital to her healing process, she said. “Art is medicine for me. In indigenous cultures, it’s medicine. I see the work I do as sacred.” ...

“INTERCESSION,” a meditation on personal and community agency, started as a response to the current war in Gaza. The exhibition asks, “How do we navigate when we begin to question who and what we understand? Is there a way to speak, when both speaking and being silent are equally volatile positions?” The photographic work of Alonso Nichols, Philip C. Keith, Sam Williams and Lauren Miller at the New Art Center’s Corridor at Trio Gallery in Newton, Massachusetts, explores these questions ...

For the third consecutive year, New England Sculptors Association (NESA) members have juried works placed throughout the outside area surrounding the Alternatives’ Whitin Mill Complex in Whitinsville, Massachusetts (where they’ve been since late fall) and, starting January 12, they’ll be joined by sculptures by NESA members inside the Spaulding R. Aldrich Heritage Gallery. ValleyCAST, the arts and culture arm of Open Sky Community Services, runs the exhibit. Formerly Alternatives Unlimited, Inc., Open Sky provides services for individuals with behavioral health ...

Myles Danaher’s studio in Brattleboro, Vermont has the aura of authenticity from an artist dedicated to his craft and willing to work hard. Tubes of partially used oils oozing slightly around their caps are stacked haphazardly across a paint-stained table in front of a cluster of brushes standing upright in glass jars as if petitioning to be used. Multiple vintage stereo speakers – KLH, Advent – are stacked to the ceiling, pouring out pastoral orchestral music into the sunlit room. ...

These words from E.E. Cummings’s “Maggie and Milly and Molly and May” could be used to describe Penelope Jones’ oil paintings on panel and precision-cut paper collages which are anti-heroic in scale, and yet her stripped-down abstract visions, often no taller than her outstretched hand, could easily fell a Goliath. If Jones’ recent paintings in oil and gouache come from the heart, the compressed collages of her “Border Series” spring from the head. Jones’ decades of teaching painting and drawing ...

I first saw the photography of Chelsea Bradway at the Franklin Square Salon at the Hanover Theatre in Worcester, Massachusetts. The September 2021 reception for her “Be a Lady They Said” exhibition, presented by ArtsWorcester, had the double benefit of being an opening and the first time many people felt safe coming together again in a public gathering. My notes from that afternoon said that Bradway was a self- proclaimed whimsical photographer who aims to construct a collective voice through ...

After living in San Francisco for 30 years, in a post-pandemic dimensional shift, Alison Pebworth took to the road exploring artist residency after artist residency (including the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire), before she landed in the Berkshires. After staying with her nephew for a short while, she settled into a small cabin in the woods, experiencing the complete opposite to the residencies: solitude and meditation. Here she undertook a personal journey, pointing inward, turning out deeply contemplative drawings. ...

“There are three types of days. Days where I can do everything, days where I’m fine but can’t do it all, and days where I’m interrupted, and we have to start again.” Clad in paint-spattered coveralls, artist Bethany Noël shows me around her 500-square-foot Holliston Mills studio in Holliston, Massachusetts. We’re “supervised” by her four-legged studio mate and trail companion, Sargent, a large and soulful-eyed German Shepherd mix. “He’s named after the painter,” she confirmed. Under filtered winter light, a ...

Tinja Ruusuvuori is an international artist currently in her Second Year Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC), Provincetown, a renowned residency with seven months of uninterrupted time, housing, studio and a stipend. Her first year as a Fellow, 2022-2023, had the joys and complexities of being in a new place. Returning this past October for another seven months, she found herself in a different scenario. “I had friends, knew the town, people recognized me on the main street ...

Joseph Grigely’s exhibition, “In What Way Wham? (White Noise and Other Works, 1996-2023),” on view at MASS MoCA through March, is a visual conversation about deafness. The titular pieces, “White Noise (monochrome),” 2000, and “White Noise (polychrome),” 2023, are a pair of cylindrical rooms the insides of which are plastered with handwritten notes on white and colorful paper, respectively. The conversations are fragmented, some in neat lettering and some quickly scrawled. The papers vary from stained napkins to notebook paper ...

Carl Austin Hyatt is calling us “Westerners” to a paradigm shift. Some might call it a dramatic point of departure for our culture. Others would call it an “it’s about time” movement. Whatever you choose to call it, Hyatt lives by it, feels it in his bones, believes in it. What is “it?” The connection to nature — that nature is alive, conscious, playful. But it’s more than that. Hyatt says nature speaks to him. Rocks speak to him. Even ...

How refreshing to review the artwork of someone who actually knows how to draw and is not afraid to use that skill to express strong emotions and political opinions! Francisco Goya did it! Pablo Picasso did it! Theodore Gericault did it! Nomi Silverman does it! Silverman’s exhibition, “Palpable Process,” at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, is a small sampling of her artistic output which includes sculpture, painting, pastels and bookmaking, in addition to her prints. The theme uniting all Silverman’s ...

Born in Ghana in 1990, Emmanuel Manu Opoku brings a fresh touch to experimental art styles from the past with his paintings powered by vibrant colors from his homeland and sculptures that give new use to everyday items from here in the United States.  It’s a great combination. “When I studied art in Ghana, I was exposed to African art and global art concepts focusing on western art prac- tices,” Opoku said. “My work therefore currently involves Ghanaian cultural elements ...

As we get settled into 2024 after the onslaught of global conflict, pandemic fluctuations and the unique brand of Futurism or dystopia that we live every day, many artists pro- vide a balm for this time. Appropriated from ‘Eco-Mysticism for Apocalyptic Times,’ a blog about an enchanted and care- based approach to seeing and understanding the environ- ment around us, art for apocalyptic times recontextualizes and repositions art as a beacon that brings us together during hardship, contains answers for ...

The 2023 Art Basel Miami Beach emerged as a powerful antidote against our times’ prevailing agony and frustrations in a world grappling with the unsettling shadow of war and facing various challenges, standing as a beacon of artistic excellence. Hosting a dazzling array of 277 galleries, its 21st edition enriched the region’s cultural fabric and served as a powerful economic driver, infusing a much-needed vitality into the local businesses. Beyond the walls of the main event at the Miami Beach ...

Casting a net into the Northern Berkshires community and attracting a wide range of artists since opening in mid-2022, Future Lab(s) Gallery, 43 Eagle St., North Adams, Massachusetts, has collected a membership and orbiting friends who enjoy their exhibitions. The “Berkshire Invitational,” the opening of which coincides with North Adams FIRST Fridays, takes place from January 5 through 27 and features “a myriad of methods” of art by Ricky Darell Barton, Jenny Bergman, Carlos Caicedo, Richard Criddle, Brian George, Ghetta ...