Welcome to the 79th issue of Artscope Magazine, which celebrates our 13th anniversary. It features our annual special section in which we’ve asked our writers which artists they may have wanted to write about over the past year but the chance hasn’t presented itself. This year’s “13 for Our 13th” features a wide variety of New England artists that work in landscape and light, sculpture and color fields, marquetry and performance art, assemblage and mathematically-based constructions, documentary photography, and oil, ...

In 1983, German-born Otto Piene purchased a huge piece of property in Groton, Massachusetts, located approximately 40 miles northwest of Boston. He converted his new home into an “art farm” and residence where the ground- and sky-breaking internationally recognized avant-garde artist turned former grain silos into art installations and barns into a studio and workshop and the surrounding land into a test field for his inflatable “Sky Art” creations. “Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983-2014,” on view through ...

Sculptor and filmmaker Matthew Barney has been pushing boundaries for many years now — and his deeply complex multi-media exhibition, “Redoubt,” created during the years of 2016–2019, promises to take audiences on yet another far-ranging conceptual ride. The exhibition trains its lens on winter in Idaho’s deeply rugged Sawtooth Mountains, a place where one still encounters elk and Dall sheep as well as a pack of wolves that have been reintroduced to the wild. Through film and objects, including four ...

Two men, Saint John the Baptist and Honoré de Balzac, separated by 2000 years, by different cultures and languages, by geographical location and physical appearance, are brought to life by one of the world’s greatest sculptors, Auguste Rodin. The bronze sculptures of St. John and Balzac are exhibited at the Cantor Gallery of the College of the Holy Cross along with many other works by the famous French sculptor. Great art has longevity and Rodin’s works are as powerful now ...

The first thing that strikes you upon entering the Hood Museum of Art’s new atrium is the sense of space and airiness, inviting exploration of what lies beyond in numerous galleries and classrooms. The prominent entrance to the new and expanded Hood, with its large black-and-white mural and white walls, opens directly onto the Dartmouth College Green. It offers an inviting space where people can meet and where performances and other events can take place. Perhaps most importantly, it sets ...

James Oles, professor of Latin American Art History at Wellesley and curator of Latin American Art at the Davis Museum, has for the past 20 years been building up a Latin American collection befitting an important regional museum. The three-dozen works in the collection in 1996 now exceed 500. A third of Oles’ new finds are showcased in “Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey” through June 9. One-third of the featured artists are women. The exhibition’s depth and value are confirmed in ...

Much of our planet is choking on plastic. Images of swaths of plastic debris crowding the oceans; birds starved with bellies full of bottle caps; massifs of discarded containers climbing to the sky — it is enough to make one recoil from the truth of the impact our so-called innovation has had on our fellow creatures, on beloved landscapes and on ourselves. Clearly, hiding will not reverse the course of our human folly. To change our ways while there is ...

Juror Lisa Crossman certainly had her work cut out for her. The Cambridge Art Association’s 2019 Members Prize show features paintings, photographs and sculpture by 60 regional artists. This year’s selection shows strength across many media, including oil, acrylic, fiber, ceramics and mixed media, with a particular excellence in photography. With so many strong submissions, Crossman — Ph.D., art historian and curator at the Fitchburg Art Museum — “sought to honor artists working in a range of styles, techniques and ...

“Tempera — Nature and Narrative,” at Attleboro Arts Museum from April 6 to May 4, focuses on paintings by eight artists working with classic egg tempera as a medium of today. We usually associate egg tempera with Italian Renaissance paintings. These masterworks produced a luminosity of color created by glazing techniques. The labor-intensive method can build freshness of color and clear resonance in dark areas as well as light areas as it achieves a harmony of color. The painters glazing ...

Wadsworth Atheneum visitors are in for a treat: Sean Scully’s exquisite “Landline” series, just off a run at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has arrived in Hartford. It’s here through May 19. Works from this master of post-minimalist conceptualism enraptured viewers in 2015 at the Venice Biennale. The show explores the title through a variety of media with works inspired by his years in Ireland. The series also marks a significant shift in Scully’s work ...

Age, wisdom, the accumulation of experience and its imprint on the human body have attracted fiber artists Deidre Scherer and Jackie Abrams, both pioneers in their media for many years. Collaborating for an exhibition called “Connections,” at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont, on view from March 9 to June 16, 2019, they have created strongly textured vessels that beautifully and uniquely reflect the human image. The vessels on display, resulting from their collaboration, derive from reconfigured and ...

Chalkboard Studio in Barnstable Village, Cape Cod, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year with an open house on April 27. The three core founders, Jackie Reeves, James “Jamie” Wolf and Richard Neal met at Cotuit Center for the Arts (which Wolf originated) — and started painting together there, for the hell of it. Reeves, who was looking for studio space, said, “I was used to working with other people around. I grew up in a big family where we ...

The 35 days of the United States Government partial shutdown in late December through late January left the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. barren and vacant of visitors. Tourists and locals, temporarily not working, roamed, as in a sci-fi movie, the nation’s capital looking for open, free cultural exhibitions. Private museums, including the Phillips Collection and Kreeger Museum, charged fees that tourists were unwilling to pay, and locals at this time could not pay, not knowing when the situation would ...

For artisan Craig Altobello of Peterborough, New Hampshire, marquetry, the art of assembling thin slices of wood to form an image, is an act of perfection and serendipity. His perfectionist tendencies propel him toward combing through numerous bins of hundreds of color-organized wood slices to find that piece. That’s where serendipity — finding the perfect slice — intersects with skill. The art of marquetry is not new, but it is rare. In the 16th century, Italian craftsmen began using marquetry ...

It was 1970 when artist David Arsenault first saw a reproduction of a painting by American Realist Edward Hopper. Called “Gas,” it depicted a rural gas station at dusk with three red petrol pumps; he’d found it in a grade school library book. More than twenty years later, a professor in a graphic arts program reintroduced him to Hopper’s work and Arsenault decided to study painting. It seems fair to say that “the rest is history” when it comes to ...

Although many artists seem to languish or burn out at mid-career, Michelle Benoit is thriving. She has found a way to survive by working constantly, experimenting consistently and along the way she has gotten some very good advice, support and mentorship. Benoit is truly an inspiration to artists at any stage of their careers. Since graduating with her MFA and MA from the University of Iowa in 1999/2000, Benoit has had a successful career in college teaching. But in 2008, ...

Whenever I go into a gallery, exhibit or anywhere art is exhibited, I crave enlightenment and I am always full of expectation. I seek, I want, I expect to be blown away by something that affects me in a way I never imagined. More often than not, I come away disappointed even at the international venues. When I’m asked to critique the work of another painter, I’m usually hesitant. The hesitation comes from worrying that I can’t or won’t be ...

Emerging artist Becci (pronounced Becky) Davis explores race and gender identity issues through performance art. I liked the idea of inviting Davis to my studio so we could have a conversation about her work, share art perspectives as colleagues and discuss the trajectory of her career. She was still reeling, in a good way, from the opportunities and responsibilities afforded to her as a recipient of multiple artist awards in 2018 and was in the midst of finishing up an ...

Julie A. DeRosa’s mixed-media sculpture, “How to Be Happy No Matter What Happens,” arrives in our physical reality at a poignant time in which the condition of happiness has lost its natural variable state of being, and instead is an idealized commodity to be constructed, purchased and, therefore, faked. Of the sculpture’s conceptual origins, DeRosa wrote, “Over the years, my thoughts on happiness have evolved quite a bit, and I get angry at the ‘happiness industry’ that prescribes all these ...

Through the ages, thinkers and mystics have recognized that numbers speak to the order of things, but artistic visual expression of this discreet order has been historically intermittent. Mathematical constructs such as the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio appear in a broad spectrum of natural features, including snail shells, beehives, pine cones and our spiral galaxy; yet, their alignment with pure mathematics remains mysterious and for many, sacred. Greenfield, Massachusetts-based artist Xylor Jane follows in the footsteps of da ...

When I moved from Manhattan to a secluded mountaintop house in Vermont, my wonderment at the measurelessness of the landscape surrounding the house was boundless. At night, it was an endless universe of black space but in the morning light, even in April when snow covered the ground, there emerged at the edge of the distant woods the soft nuanced greens of willows and the soft reds of new growth on maples. A still-frozen stream far in the distance was ...

Photographs by Stella Johnson that focus on her 11-year immersive relationship with Greece are featured at the Leica Gallery in Boston Park Plaza Hotel March 7 though April 21. Johnson’s exhibition, titled “ZOI,” means life and coincides with the release of her book of the same name published by Wild Greek Press in Watertown, Massachusetts. To prepare for this profile, I spoke with Johnson who was in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she is engaged in a photographic exploration that has similarities ...

“Art as a form of communication takes over where language leaves off.” This assertion by glass artist Jeffrey P’an crystallizes his belief in art’s power. Art, he feels, “is very well equipped to communicate things that are not usually said in words.” From his studio/factory/store in the heart of Mystic, Connecticut, P’an is communicating his interpretations and reactions to life, nature and music through his glass creations. His art is desired by a growing list of collectors all over the ...

What struck me about a recent conversation with Kyungmin Park was her clarity — clarity in what she tries to convey as an artist and in how she wants people to see her work. A figurative ceramic sculptor, Park has been recognized nationally and internationally as a gifted emerging artist in her field. She is the featured artist in “Ceramic Sculpture Culture: Uniting the Figure” at Endicott College, where Park is an assistant professor of 3D studio art. The exhibit’s ...

While working for Tommy Hilfiger in New York City, Jess Hurley Scott took her first steps in developing her unique style of painting. Living in Manhattan on the bare minimum her $25,000 salary could afford, Scott managed to scrounge up enough money for a cheap, nude-model night course at The Art Students League. The class wasn’t meant for critique but to simply be an outlet where Scott could paint. Upon her second year of attending this class, the teacher, Hugo ...

“It’s basically my brain throwing up — because I have to get it out — I do the ‘thing’ and I feel a lot better afterwards. It’s like I have a record of it. This is what happened, and there’s the proof. It’s out of me and it’s in its container.” Samurai White has found a way to deal with the darkness. During her time at Rhode Island School of Design in the early 2000s, White studied graphic design and ...

Oh, the times they are a changing! Bob Dylan nailed it! The times are always changing. Dylan knew what it meant to change before change changed him. The audience booed him when he performed his first electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Why? It just wasn’t done — folk music was sacrosanct! The arts are a commodity. Art galleries are businesses. Galleries provided exhibitions and exposure to artists and viewing and purchase opportunities for viewers, collectors and ...

“Renewal” is the theme of this year’s “Annual Juried Members Show” that opened on February 28 at the Copley Society of Art, 158 Newbury St., Boston. The exhibition, which continues the gallery’s tradition of covering a wide variety of mediums, including painting, photography, graphite and pastel, was curated by Meg White, director of Gallery NAGA. First prize was awarded to Acadia Mezzofanti’s illusionistic photograph, “Self-Portrait: Untamed;” Carolyn Latanision’s watercolor painting of a rusted steel engine, “Powered Down, Bethlehem Steel,” took ...

VACATION TRAVEL FOR ARTISTS: WORK OR PLEASURE? Every vacation I take with my wife (and fellow Myth Maker), Donna Dodson, begins with goals: take a break together, hike landscapes, experience climates unfamiliar and see art that inspires. We prioritize exercise, abhor crowds and limit driving to four hours a day. After a year of working in our studios preparing solo shows and completing four monumental public art projects, the idea of unfamiliar art museums and walking blocks of art galleries ...