As we were putting together this issue, which celebrates our 8th Anniversary, the value of an art degree became a hotly discussed topic after President Obama, addressing a crowd at a General Electric plant in Waukesha, Wisconsin, said, “A lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” ...

Mother Brook Arts Flirts With A New Direction by Meredith Cutler Planted squarely on one of the oft-neglected borders between suburban and urban Boston, the former mill village of East Dedham has long remained an untapped opportunity for thoughtful redevelopment. Along the banks of the Mother Brook Canal, the oldest hand-dug mill pond in the United States (circa 1639), and former home to Dedham Pottery, the factory that produced the collectible, crackle-glazed ceramics from 1896-1943, the neighborhood had the bones ...

Holy Cross Honors Our Country's Rich History by Brian Goslow For its latest exhibition, the College of the Holy Cross’ Cantor Gallery utilizes the collections of four major New England depositories of history — the cross-town American Antiquarian Society (AAS) and Worcester Historical Museum, Old Sturbridge Village and the Rhode Island Historical Society — plus private lenders. The show’s curator is Professor of Art History Patricia Johnston, Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J., Chair in Fine Arts at Holy Cross, who ...

An Enigmatic Body of Work by Elizabeth Michelman   In addition to its well-publicized recent acquisitions a stupendous Veronese Venus and the medieval arsenal of the Higgins Armory Museum the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) has also long cultivated a commitment to collecting portraiture. To bring this preoccupation up to date, Curator of Contemporary Art Susan Stoops has marshaled a decade-and-a-half of minimalist and conceptual works in the current exhibition, most of them recently collected by WAM, to challenge our preconceptions ...

THE ATTLEBORO ARTS MUSEUM ELEVATES THE KID-SIZED CAR TO ART STATUS by Craig Fitzgerald There’s fine art, and then there’s the art of mechanical things. Sir William Lyons’ Jaguar E-Type and Hans Muth’s Suzuki Katana have had their day at the MoMA and the Guggenheim, and now it’s time for kid-friendly automobiles, planes and tractors to have their turn in the spotlight. The Attleboro Arts Museum’s Ottmar Gallery will present “Compact and Collectible An Exhibition of Vintage Pedal Cars” from ...

CONTEMPORARY KOREAN ARTISTS MAKE A CONNECTION by Elizabeth Michelman Carol Rabe, curator at Pine Manor’s Hess Gallery, has brought together five Korean-born women artists working around Boston in different media: graphic art, photography, painting, fabric art and ceramic sculpture. Each has from five to eight works in this exhibition. Most of them have studied in the United States as well as in Korea. Several are mothers. One wonders what conflict these cultural transplants might feel between the authority of their ...

DOUG BOSCH THROWS US A CURVE by James Foritano Catenaries have been around long before Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defined them as “The curve formed by a perfectly flexible inextensible cord of uniform density and cross-section hanging freely from two fixed points.” Catenaries existed even before Galileo misidentified a catenary as a parabola and was then berated by his contemporaries with mathematical formulae that proved the famous astronomer so very wrong. The Spanish architect Gaudí used catenary curves, reversed, ...

FRIENDS FIND COMMON GROUND by Linda Chestney Sometimes in life it’s difficult to discern where reality ends and fiction begins. That’s sometimes true in the art world, too. “A Shared Vision,” currently at the Lyceum Gallery at Derryfield School, features photography that looks like painting along with painting that emulates photography. But it keeps you guessing even at close range. But whether the finished work is a photo or a painting, the results are sumptuous. Showcasing the work of photographer ...

MARGARET KRISTENSEN’S PUBLIC EXPERIMENT by Marguerite Serkin Margaret Kristensen knows the 1950s well. Although she is in her twenties, Kristensen’s eclectic collection of prints, created from negatives dating from the 1940s through the 1960s, are a frank and authentic lesson in the history of the times. “UNCOVERED: Collected Photo- graphic Memories” includes just a few of the over 1,000 negatives the photographer has collected in the past year. “Most of the appropriated images I work with are discarded family photos ...

IS THE TERM “PRIVATE CITIZEN” OBSOLETE? by Alexandra Tursi In every introductory art history class, students learn about “the gaze,” that is, who is watching who and when, how and why they are watching. As humans, we have endlessly gazed at one another. That gaze is politicized when it is the state focusing its lens on its people. I came face-to-face with this on a recent trip to the Terror House Museum in Budapest, Hungary, a space dedicated to exploring ...

MIGRANT UNIVERSE by James Foritano Bosnian-born artist Tanja Softic inscribes her 10 large works on paper with the delicacy of a miniaturist and the scope of a cosmologist. Grace and tension, intimacy and transformation vie with each other so energetically to claim the viewer’s attention that one feeling seems to ignite its opposite, one glimpse open a shutter upon another. Looking at “The Heart of the Matter” (2011), I can’t describe the sum of the materials — acrylic, pigment, chalk ...

CUTRONA’S DICHOTOMIES MAKE A STATEMENT by Elizabeth Micheiman In his mind, as in his art, Richard Cutrona seems to be in two places at once and sometimes more. Since getting his MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University a few years back, he has frequently returned to Massachusetts to exhibit his work exploring Muslim-American themes and cross-cultural dialogue. His own “Good Question Gallery,” formerly bricks-and-mortar in Pennsylvania, has rematerialized in independently curated projects and pop-up shows in ...

CHAWKY FRENN PAINTS IT AS HE SEES IT by Cole Tracy Chawky Frenn is a great activist in many realms. He is dedicated to teaching new artists at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia; produces books on the fine arts of the underappreciated city of Boston, with which he has close ties; and is an active figurative painter whose work focuses on bold topics such as the human condition and governmental issues. “If realism is painting reality, then I am ...

JULIE S. GRAHAM’S PAINTED CONSTRUCTIONS by Franklin W. Liu All categories of art and architecture have a common bond of union as if connected by blood relationship; this familial dialogue completes what nature cannot emulate. Julie S. Graham’s formal journey in art began with painting she is now resolutely drawn to re-examine the rich, textural language of vernacular architecture. She calls her artwork, “Painted Constructions.” Her mixed-media construction with pigment on different sizes and shapes of cut wood pieces is ...

PAMELA ELLIS HAWKES CASTS PALE SHADOWS by J. Fatima Martins There is something old and something new, something real and something ethereal, something true and something false about the simply complicated images made by Rockport artist Pamela Ellis Hawkes. For over two decades, she’s studied the cycle of light and dark and tried to control its shadows. Her tools are various photographic methods and light-transformative, image-making techniques both ancient and modern. Her ways pay respectful homage to the great masters ...

ABBIE READ PAYS HOMAGE TO THE WRITTEN WORD by Taryn Plumb Abbie Read grew up in a literary household, surrounded by books of all kinds (and yes, her last name is a rather stark coincidence). So, as the world has begun to alter the tangibility of books — from paper to screen — the Appleton, Maine artist has been compelled to create a living, growing homage to the volumes and sheaves that for so long held the various iterations of ...

QUINTíN RIVERA TORO’S LAYERS OF MEANING by Suzanne Volmer Whether creating art of intimate scale or exploring monumentality, Quintín Rivera Toro can and does ply extremes for the meaning within. His artworks are an investigation of identity and belonging and, perhaps most intriguing, he uses art to explore feelings and behaviors that link him to the world. His sophisticated perspectives have outsider art roots. He is from Puerto Rico, where belonging is influenced by the culture’s struggle to maintain identity. ...

MONIQUE SAKELLARIOS by Linda Chestney Tuscany. St. Lucia. Compiègne. The Czech Republic. Nice. Jamaica. Sounds like an adventure travelogue, doesn’t it? Instead of “Memories,” perhaps Monique Sakellarios’ current show at the Whistler House Museum should have been called “Worldly Travels,” based on the locations featured in her paintings. And after experiencing her work, you’ll surely feel as if you had traveled right along with her. Whatever they’re titled, it’s apropos that Sakellarios’ works — aptly labeled impressionistic rather than representational ...

EVERYTHING OLD BECOMES NEW AGAIN by Suzanne Volmer Exploring the conceit of preciousness attached to Meissen branding, Arlene Shechet’s sculptures and the installation format she designed meet the antiques and object-filled Period rooms of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art in a head-on spoof and serious deconstruction of old versus new. What porcelain “is” and what it “was” are, frankly, very different things. Working at bridging that divide, Shechet explores an archived Old World ceramics vocabulary to ...

A Merry Band by James Foritano Finally, almost at the end of its 10th season, I was catching up with Actors’ Shakespeare Project. Guided both by our eccentric GPS and the seat of our pants, we were threading our way through the fanciest streets of Chestnut Hill toward the even fancier Dane Estate, just inside the gates of Pine Manor College. So what was a “Project” that proclaims to disdain bricks and mortar for a “whatever/however” approach to community outreach ...

BIDDEFORD WELCOMES THE HEARTWOOD COLLEGE OF ART by Jamie Thompson The Pepperell Mill Campus in Biddeford, Maine was already home to several artists’ studios and galleries — now, it has an art school as well. Last summer, the complex welcomed Heart- wood College of Art as the 20-year-old college embarks on a new chapter. “The impetus behind the move to the mill in Biddeford was multifaceted,” explained college president Berri Kramer. “The most pressing concern was to relocate from a ...

ARTLIFTING PROVIDES BOSTON-AREA HOMELESS AND DISABLED ARTISTS A MUCH-NEEDED OUTLET FOR SELLING THEIR WORK by Brian Goslow Who knew we’d be art dealers?” That’s what ArtLifting co-founders (and brother and sister) Liz and Spencer Powers found themselves asking each other in January. They had just arrived at a Boston-area office building for their first attempt at selling art made by local homeless and disabled artists to a commercial property. “We were walking in loaded up with these pieces of artwork ...

by Kristin Nord Downtown New London is easing into this late-winter’s morning, with passengers arriving and departing from the H.H. Richardson-designed Union Station and locals bursting through the front door of the funky Muddy Waters Café, just a short walk away. Across the street, Hygienic Art is open, with founder Jim Stidfole, an Arlo Guthrie look-alike, perched on a stool at a once-active counter, his elbows on Formica worn smooth by the coffee mugs of many generations. Saved from the ...

It’s been gratifying to see a number of new galleries opening up in the New England region in recent months. As we went to press, Ellen Wineberg and Cathleen Daley opened the doors to their room 83 spring gallery, which they call “A site for experimentation and process.” The space is intended to host a mix of creative disciplines, provoca- tive installations and engaging exchange. “We are artists who wish to foster and celebrate other artists. Arts without exception, it’s ...