Welcome by Brian Goslow Ten years ago, I received a phone call asking me if I’d be interested in being the copy editor for a new arts magazine that was that was due to go to press later that month; little did I suspect I’d soon become its managing editor, fully immersing myself in the entire New England region’s arts scene and, 60 issues later, finding myself pulling together our greatest number of stories ever for artscope’s 10th anniversary issue. ...

Beard & Weil Makes It Clear by J. Fatima Martins Upon entering the Beard & Weil Galleries, we’re immediately affected by the hypnotic fairy-power of clear glass. The first installation in “Theories of the Earth” is a three-dimensional still-life menagerie of transparent objects arranged cohesively to appear haphazard and jumbled on and underneath a long, rectangular, seven-legged painted white table. The entire thing projects a cold, alien world; it’s unsettling, yet completing, as if we’ve been transported into a magical ...

Koren's Capricious And Compelling Voice by Kristin Nord In this era of incivility there is something wonderfully touching about the inquiries of Edward Koren’s often clueless hairy creatures. Whether they are urbanites transposed to the rural outposts of Vermont, or are among the artist’s many loony flights of anthropomorphism, the challenges and aspirations of flora or fauna are often interchangeable. Edward Koren himself describes his cartoons as “frozen moments of storytelling” and his work as that of a cultural anthropologist. ...

Koren's Capricious And Compelling Voice by Molly Hamill “Keep Calm and Carry On.” This motivational phrase produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for the Second World War has had a massive revival in pop culture recently. You see the message on everything from t-shirts to tote bags. But what relevance does this notion of perseverance have for us today? Pam Campanaro, associate curator of exhibitions and programs at Montserrat College of Art, has curated an exhibit showcasing ...

Still Life Transforms at Danforth by J. Fatima Martins Danforth Museum of Art curator Jessica Roscio is disrupting the stillness of the popular and bucolic still-life arrangement. While studying the form, she noticed, “variations on the definition” of the genre, the most exciting element being the condition of flux. Roscio has designed another clever multi-component exhibition with a complicated theme: “Beautiful Decay,” a statement show featuring objects from Danforth’s permanent collection and three separate yet connected solo installations by invited ...

Tseng Illuminates At Tufts by Franklin W. Liu The beauty of viewing a retrospective collection of artworks is that it reveals the artist’s unique, life-long personal view of the world; when that body of work transcends the status quo, it often modifies our own perception spanning that same passage of time. Tseng Kwong-Chi was such an artist. Tseng Kwong-Chi (1950-1990) vibrantly lived a brief 39 years. Unhampered by conventional societal standards, he lived what must have been an enviable, charmed ...

Still Waters Run Deep by James Dyment A studio artist at the Brush Art Gallery and Studios (aka “The Brush”) for more than a decade, Pamela Wamala is an artist who has mastered the art of self-promotion, a skill with which many artists struggle. At one point, she vowed to support herself solely on her desire to create. From the age of five, she painted with her maternal grandfather and later, during her time at Wilmington High School, was one ...

Mythic Imagery At Newport Art by Suzanne Volmer “Outer Myths,” Jason Smith’s solo exhibition, on view at the Newport Art Museum’s Wright Gallery through May 1, explores Smith’s fascination with creation myths. It is a kind of global study he has mined methodically, continent by continent, and then translated into a pointillist, mixed-media drawing style. Included are 16 artworks shown as introductory vignette that showcase the young artist’s talent. All drawings are sized uniformly, giving order to the presentation. Color ...

The Beginning Is Near At Bates by Jamie Thompson The highly publicized Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 inspired the international Occupy Movement, which advocated for social and economic equality. Although much of the media attention to various Occupy protests focused on the sensational aspects of the movement — its tent communities and virulent social media campaigns, for example — participants utilized decidedly fewer melodramatic tactics to spread their messages. Posters, signs and banners, ...

Sight And Sound Harmonize At Rivier U. by Greg Morell When music and the visual arts conspire, a unique synthesis is explored. An interesting experiment opened on February 8 at a small liberal arts college in Nashua, New Hampshire. The Rivier University Art Gallery curators decided to delve into the mystique of Maurice Ravel’s interpretation of Modest Mussorgsky’s musical suite “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Their goal was to find and present a series of single images that conjured the moods ...

Black Males Get The Conversation Going by John P. Stapleton Over the past few years, there has been an ongoing conversation about race in the United States. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is rallying against the shooting deaths of black Americans by police officers and is constantly met with controversy from those who don’t find the problem to be about race. Despite where one stands on the issue, a lot of the backlash against the aforementioned movement touts negative stereotypes about black ...

Current Visions At South Shore Art by Don Wilkinson For 127 years, the National Association of Women Artists has worked relentlessly to foster public awareness and interest in the work of female visual artists. Sponsored by the organization’s Massachusetts chapter and curated by painter Jennifer Jean Costello, “Current Visions: Tradition Meets Innovation,” on display at the South Shore Art Center until April 3, does much to draw in viewers with an exhibition that lives up to the title. Tradition, in ...

Artworks A Cut Above At Fuller Craft by Don Wilkinson Paper may be the most ubiquitous man-made material on the planet. Even in an increasingly digital world in which cash, books and handwritten letters are slowly being supplanted by debit cards, Kindle and Facebook, it endures. There is something about the tactility, about the crispness of a page turning or the sound of an envelope being crumpled, about its faint wood pulp aroma, that deeply engages us. As an art ...

Gallery Seven Whets Our Appetites by Brian Goslow Several times a year, artscope publisher Kaveh Mojtabai is asked to judge and/or curate exhibitions. For “FEAST: Images of the Edible,” on view through April 2 at Gallery Seven, he was charged to review an “eclectic” group of digital submissions on the theme of food. “I tried to pick work that would sell in a commercial gallery,” Mojtabai said, and select “work I could imagine being framed and going on someone’s wall.” ...

Navajo Artists Weave Magic by J. Fatima Martins There’s a Navajo/Diné story in which Spider Woman, the ancient goddess who mapped out the universe and invented the weaving loom, rubbed spider webs on newly born baby girls to ensure they’d mature into great weavers. Although weaving is the core feature in the Navajo/Diné creation story, sacred spiritual imagery and symbolism weren’t traditionally included as design elements in Navajo/Diné rugs and blankets. These objects were primarily utilitarian and decorated with geometric ...

A Visual Conversation With Nature by Alexandra Tursi Cameron Davis is a painter and senior lecturer at the University of Vermont. Her work includes paintings, installations and community art projects exploring the human-nature relationship. Her paintings are currently on view in Burlington at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont Medical Center and Burlington International Airport. Alexandra Tursi: Why did you become an artist? Cameron Davis: I have a childhood memory of twirling round and round while the wind ...

Magic From The Mundane by Elizabeth Michelman It’s not hard to discern how Laura Evans’ ironic objects are made — it’s what they’re made for that’s puzzling. Her forms are pithy and precise. Her structures are paradoxical until one relates to them through bodily experience. Evans puts together the most mundane of materials and found objects — folded paper bags and their non-paper offspring, cardboard tubes cut up and refitted, cloth, plaster and chicken-wire, plumbing apparatus and knobs and handles ...

Keeping Up With The Active Activist by Donna Dodson In addition to being a fabulous administrator of public art as the director of the Boston-based non-profit organization Now + There, Kate Gilbert is a fabulous artist. From 2009 to 2011, her abstract work in painting took a turn toward sculpture when she started cutting the canvas to access the depth beyond the surface. Her graduate work from 2012-2013 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston led her ...

Time Machine To The Present by Sarah Rushford “Compound Vision,” Emma Hogarth’s site-responsive interactive video installation, is a time machine that delivers us to the present. Currently featured in the “You Are Here” exhibition on view through March 26 at the New Art Center, 61 Washington Park, Newtonville, Mass., it operates as a portal through which the viewer passes in order to re-experience time and place. By viewing recorded and live video projections of the New Art Center’s architectural details, ...

Much Of A Muchness by Elizabeth Michelman “Did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?” the Dormouse asks Lewis Carroll’s Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. It’s a maddening “muchness” Providence artist Kirstin Lamb draws and paints in her campaign against rumors of the Death of Painting. But Lamb is not mad, she is simply committed to the critical debate about what painting can be — and can no longer be. Excess is her ...

It's About Time by Suzanne Volmer During a visit to Nathan Miner’s Somerville studio located near the intellectual epicenter of Harvard and MIT, the artist described his paintings as being about time. He is interested in the aesthetics of inversion, and his painterly content has a geometric push and pull against equilibrium that addresses the space-time continuum. Miner’s premise is particularly apropos considering the announcement in the news of folds recently discovered in the spatial fabric. While discussing his artwork, ...

Layered In Intensity by Brian Goslow Beverly Rippel’s work has many layers, both in materials and subject matter. Whether it’s her not-so-traditional still-lifes, abstract bodyscapes, dramatic renderings of seemingly unworthy cigarette lighters, matchbooks and eight-balls, ghostly white and monochromatic works and en plein air paintings from the Gloucester shore or her “big sky studio” in the woods of Easton — or her thought-provoking “Water Pistols and Cap Guns Series” — you always feel the intensity of her paintings in oil. ...

Don't Judge A Book... by Marcia Santore With paper and fabric, stitches, ribbon, lace, embroidery and reclaimed antique objects, Gail Smuda uses the contemporary art form of the artist’s book to reach into the past, creating intriguing objects that convey stories of another time. Artist’s books can be a challenging medium to understand. Most people expect to view art at a distance, eyes only, perhaps from behind a rope or a painted line on the floor that reminds them not ...

A Colorful Social Conscience by Kelly Kasulis The evidence of Wen-Ti Tsen’s colorful life congests his at-home Cambridge art studio. Shelves are heavy with rolled papers and sketchbooks, slumping downward with the threat of collapse. In the next room, a paint-splattered drop cloth lines the floor. Using a 2” x 4” wooden stick to reach over piles of artwork and flip on the light switches, Tsen has just enough aisle space to view his pieces from afar. His life’s work ...

Emotion In Motion by Marguerite Serkin A winding, grooved sidewalk leads down a short hill to the Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. Reminiscent of the historical charm of Old Montreal, the Gallery is just steps from Otter Creek and adjacent to the center of this bustling college town. Illuminated through large paned windows complemented by ample indoor lighting, the Edgewater Gallery exudes warmth and vibrancy. With varied offerings of handcrafted jewelry and delicate watercolors, the gallery is at once spacious ...

Three Artists Muse On Maine by Eric J. Taubert With its rustic authenticity, picturesque harbors, hidden coves, sentry lighthouses and the grand drama of sun-glittered surf ceaselessly smashing in salty sprays against a rugged and weather-worn shoreline, coastal Maine has long inspired artists of all disciplines. What follows here are the musings of three hard-working artists with names intimately attached to the Maine seacoast, describing what it means to work along this stretch of land where tides, tourism and elemental ...

A Joyfully Lugubrious Family Affair by Kristin Nord Catching up with Robert Andrew Parker and his son Geoffrey proved the perfect antidote to a grey and rainy day not too long ago. Bob was putting the finishing touches on his homage to the British artist Richard Dadd, a man who worked in obscurity from the confines of the London insane asylum St. Mary Bethlehem, and who posthumously was seen as one of the greatest and most original British artists of ...

Estey Exuberantly Welcomes Spring by James Foritano We wound our way north from Boston on Interstate 95, through its outlying industrial districts, marshes and bird sanctuaries, before leaving the highway for the twisty lanes of Newburyport’s colonial-era houses until we arrived at 3 Harris Street, home of the Paula Estey Gallery (PEG). The gallery, which celebrates its second anniversary on April 12, is welcoming spring through its “Encouraging the Bloom: Early Signs of Life Through Art” exhibition. Newburyport, says Wikipedia, ...

The Eliot School's Divine History by James Foritano After exiting Jamaica Plain’s Green Street Station, I channeled the intrepid spirit of the Reverend John Eliot (1604-1690), “Minister to the Indians,” as I wended my way to his eponymous school on foot. 24 Eliot Street was located in a woodsy neighborhood that enfolded a panoply of self-respecting Victorian houses, their curious woodwork decked out in proud and tasteful colors. I entered the Eliot School — which was founded in 1676, endowed ...

That's Good Theater! by Greg Morell As artscope magazine makes its 10th anniversary victory lap, keeping its unique eye on the New England arts scene, I thought it prime time to congratulate and capsule a small arts organization that has made an impressive and substantial impact on the Portland, Maine art scene. My accolades go to Portland’s Good Theater, consistently producing some of the city’s finest drama from its modest headquarters. Good Theater is located in the gentrified historic neighborhood ...

by Brian Goslow “Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945” remains on view through April 24 at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Mahaney Center for the Arts, 72 Porter Field Rd. (just off Route 30), Middlebury, Vermont; the show, organized by Art Services International, is built around nearly 200 works drawn from the Levenson Collection, the world’s premier private collection of Japanese art in the Deco and Moderne style, as well as 20th-century examples of metalwork in traditional styles. ...