The weeks leading up to this issue’s publication have made us feel as if we were working out of a variety of offices, which — during the period publisher Kaveh Mojtabai was attending Art Basel Switzerland — we were. While those of us back home were putting this issue together, Mojtabai was transmitting reports and images from exhibition halls filled with people of all ages and experience in the art world, from a 21-year-old just out of college, to three ...

Contemporary Artists Answer the Call By Elizabeth Michelman “Look Again,” a hybrid summer-long exhibition of master prints paired with contemporary interpretations, is the happy outcome of a collaboration between the curators of the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury and the Boston Printmakers. To showcase highlights of the historical print collection in the Art Complex’s Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Library, curator Craig Bloodgood decided to seek contemporary responses to a selected group of works. The exhibition contains new works by 57 artists ...

Addison Explores Early 20th Century Paris By James Dyment Of course, any exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art is an educational experience. Susan Faxon, curator of art before 1950, did a wonderful job of summing up Alfred Maurer’s life during my visit. “Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard of Modernism” is an exhibition that takes a peek at what was happening at the turn of the 20th century in Paris. It has been carefully planned for approximately seven years ...

A Master Continues to Evolve By Laura Shabott On an unseasonably cold day in June, I am preparing to meet with Paul Resika, a remarkable man and a brilliant artist, to discuss his current exhibitions at both the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Berta Walker Gallery. A painter who has created “thousands of pictures” (as he calls them), he was given his first show in 1948 at the age of 19 with George Dix Gallery on Madison Avenue ...

The British Museum Dazzles at Museum of Russian Icons By Suzanne Volmer Located in Clinton, Massachusetts and facing Central Park (the town common) are adjoining historic buildings that are home to the Museum of Russian Icons, which currently features a special exhibit, “Byzantium to Russia: Origins and Development of Russian Icons, 1200 - 1900.” This exhibit newly informs the content of founder Gordon Lankton’s collection and gives viewers an opportunity to see some of the British Museum’s most noteworthy icons. ...

The Eternal Feminine at Newport Art By J. Fatima Martins The “eternal feminine” is a layered and contentious construct that describes a set of defining idealized traits that is the archetypal “woman.” In the exhibition “The Eternal Feminine,” the concept is revealed and challenged, offering new expository possibilities that blur the line between Icon and Image. Newport Art Museum curator Nancy Whipple Grinnell worked in partnership with artist, professor and collector James Baker, who originated the exhibition idea and serves ...

The Brush Uncovers Teenage Supersleuths By Taryn Plumb It’s the 1930s. Three stately women in chic slim-fit dresses, heels and finger wave bobs stand clustered at the edge of a lake, inspecting a piece of jewelry. Flash-forward roughly 30 years, and the same three women are depicted as decidedly younger, more confident and casual, even tomboy-ish — they walk barefoot in the water, button-down shirts tucked into rolled-up jeans. In the intervening decades, the trio, featured on the cover of ...

Gorvett and West in Ogunquit By Eric Taubert If you plan to head through Southern Maine this summer, set aside some time to turn down Shore Road at the logjam intersection in downtown Ogunquit and visit Maine’s oldest artists’ group, the Ogunquit Art Association (OAA). Originally founded on September 16, 1928 at the Perkins Cove Studio of painter Charles Woodbury, the OAA currently consists of 90-plus juried local artists who exhibit at the Barn Gallery on the corner of Shore ...

By Suzanne Volmer The City of Pawtucket, Rhode Island recently launched ArtBridgesPawtucket.org to stimulate dialogue about the city’s changing infrastructure. As a conversation starter, it brings city planning concepts into focus to further encourage participation in the innovation process. Susan Mara, assistant director of the City of Pawtucket’s Office of Planning and Redevelopment, wrote the Our Town Grant proposal that successfully secured $75,000 in National Endowment of the Arts funding for the city’s purchase of public art in 2014. That ...

Annual Juried Exhibitions at Danforth By J. Fatima Martins It’s impossible to examine all of the quality work represented in this year’s ambitious Annual Juried Exhibitions at Danforth Art. This review will spotlight a small sample that I consider to be intellectually poignant; not all of my selections match those artists awarded prizes or honorable mentions by the exhibition curators. These artists have created compositions that encourage dialogue about the complex and often paradoxical nature of living. They talk about ...

Talent for the New Millenium at Sharon Arts By Linda Chestney What is life if not change? We all resist change to some extent, but inevitably, change occurs. As they say, change is a constant. And so it is with art. What innovative changes does the new generation of artists offer? How does culture infuse their art? What is the “sign of the times” for millennials? Born roughly from 1980 to 2000, the millennials are featured in an exhibition currently ...

Fruitlands Speaks A Language All Its Own By Elizabeth Michelman The slope down to the farmhouse at Fruitlands is a cultivated one. It expresses a “language” of architecture and agriculture.When Bronson Alcott and his fellow Transcendentalists arrived here in the early 19th century to begin a communal farming experiment, this landscape was already far altered from its primitive state. Forests were hewn to make way for fields and stones harvested to fence them in, orchards were planted for fruit and ...

Southeast Vermont Celebrates Art & Craft By Arlene Distler Daylilies, roses, hollyhocks and delphiniums are in bloom — it’s deep summer in the hills of southern Vermont, colors bursting in the July sunlight, a perfect time to celebrate the beauty of fine art and crafts produced in this southeast region of the state. Congregating in the towns of Williamsville and Newfane, some of the most accomplished artists and artisans in New England create their work here. This year’s Rock River ...

A Gallery Crawl By Laura Shabott On August 27, 1916, the Boston Globe declared that there existed “the biggest arts colony in the world at Provincetown.” Now that’s a lot of pressure for a small place only three miles long. Have we lived up to this legacy? There is a collection of 3,000+ works at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) representing 100 years of art made by the people who think of Land’s End as their muse and ...

A Sojourn Beyond the Guidebooks By Kristin Nord Natural beauty. Art and athletic activities of all kinds. For some, it’s a 26-town playland; for others, it’s a state of mind. Weekend visitors have flocked to Litchfield County for more than a century now, drawn to farms and secluded country homes sprinkled about the wooded hills. With its easy access to Manhattan, the region has long been a magnet for artists and writers. In recent years, a great deal of money ...

Playing By His Own Rules By Taryn Plumb Robert Saunders has never found amusement in other people’s games. As a kid, for example, he would sit down to Chinese checkers with his grandmother, and although he recalls “hating it,” he would keep playing, just following his own private imaginary strategy. Similarly, in lieu of baseball – the traditional pastime of many boys – he concocted a way to run the bases, score and strike out simply by rolling four dice. ...

Opening the Door to the Unexpected By Taryn Plumb Imagine you’re relaxing in your cozy, mid-century modern home. You’ve got a book, a drink, a comfy chaise lounge. And then you look out your living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Where there might normally be a manicured lawn, kids at play or beatific waving neighbors — this is the unblemished post-war 1950s, after all — instead, here is the bottom of the ocean with driftwood, sea ferns nudged by the current, and ...

The Alberettis at CWAC By Kirstin Nord Bob and Mary Lou Alberetti have trawled for materials and ideas for their art in trips to nearly 30 countries throughout the past 20 years. Encountering the same scenes and vistas, galleries and museums, their individual creativity leads them to work in characteristic ways. Bob most likely will sketch or do preparatory watercolors, while Mary Lou will pull out her camera and zero in on a particular culture’s architectural fragments that speak to ...

Keeping the Body and Soul Together at Narrows BY Brian Goslow Reaffirming the vitality and resilience of the human figure as the subject that can’t be ignored for long is guest curator Don Wilkinson’s goal for “The Tenacity of the Human Figure,” the Narrows Center for the Arts’ mid-summer exhibition. “Much like the end of painting and the premature report of the death of Mark Twain, the demise of the figure as significant has been greatly exaggerated,” said Wilkinson, a ...

Blueway Wants You to Get Out By Greg Morell The majestic bend in the Connecticut River that winds its way down throughthe valley of Western Massachusetts, known as ”The Oxbow,” has a long history as a source of inspiration for artists. A rich heritage of expansive tableaus of the curious loop of blue water has been documented by such luminaries as Thomas Cole, Lewis Bryden, Thomas Locker and Robert Masla, to name a few. This August a troupe of painters ...

Art Basel- Anything but Neutral By Clara Rose Thorton Art is a reflection of human life as lived. The tenuous process of creating art mirrors life’s path: projection, uncertainty, connection then disconnection, and navigating surprise. Thus it makes sense to look to collections of contemporary art and individual pathways through the market as vibrant manifestations of a zeitgeist, the mime’s shadow we cannot see. At noon on June 15 in Dublin, Ireland, I received an unexpected Facebook message from the ...

By Brian Goslow   One of our “25 Artists to Watch” in our 2013 seventh anniversary issue, Christina Pitsch has her first solo show at Boston’s Kingston Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., #43 from July 1 through August 2. “The show will include grand porcelain and brass sculpture highlighting intersecting dichotomies,” Pitsch explained. “The series explores fluid and shifting boundaries between high brow and low brow, beautiful and macabre, elegance and kitsch.” Central to the show are her chandelier forms created ...