Welcome to the 56th issue of artscope magazine, which we’re honored to be bringing to Art Basel Switzerland, where we’ve been selected to join publications from around the world in its collective booth. Our publisher, Kaveh Mojtabai, will be attending the event as will our European (and former Connecticut) correspondent Lisa Mikulski. You’ll be able to follow their visit on our social media outlets — which you can access in one place through the artscope app, downloadable at app.artscopemagazine.com. We’re ...

On April 9, 2015, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh launched Boston Creates, an 18-month assessment of the city’s cultural health that will culminate in a long-range Arts and Culture Plan for Boston. Supported locally by both the Barr Foundation and the Klarman Family Foundation, the project will draw heavily on private funding both in the research stage and in its execution. Julie Burros, Boston’s new Chief of Arts and Culture, heads this effort. She has been assembling a broad-ranging team of ...

The Story of Janet Echelman's Greenway Aerial Installation World-renowned artist Janet Echelman is creating an aerial installation for Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway to be unveiled on May 11, 2015. Her iconic works of art have been exhibited internationally, but never before on the East Coast. Her current Greenway project promises to place Boston on the map as a destination for world-class public art. Echelman’s sculptures were recently ranked No. 1 on Oprah Winfrey’s “List of 50 Things That Make You ...

Driving Toward Complexity and Control Far from being “random” events, dreams and their symbolic features are, Sigmund Freud maintained, overdetermined from multiple sources and masked in daily experience. They function to bind anxiety, trauma and conflict. Like a dream, a work of art is fruitful when it funnels many converging forces, allowing it to bear not one interpretation but many. The frenzy of stimuli in Joan Jonas’ later multimedia spectacles belies the simplicity of her constrained early works. But as ...

International Artists Explore Font as Art The momentous emergence of the alphabet and subsequent typeface design endowed mankind with a pivotal, durable form of communication. The current exhibition, “StereoType — New Directions in Typography,” sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), demonstrates that utilitarian fonts, renascent in the digital age, are a vast springboard for resourceful thinking, yielding multifaceted visual expressions, including one rooted in profound scientific research. Font as art? One only needs to recall when this threshold ...

Zanger and Hamil Talman Go Deep Here are two women with their sleeves rolled up. I’m in Ginny Zanger’s studio in Jamaica Plain, Mass., watching and listening as she shows me the works she has selected for her upcoming two-woman exhibit at Boston’s Copley Society of Art: “What Remains.” Technique is important when attempting to import, for a gallery girded with tradition and safely above sea level — for now — just some of the freshness, luxuriant variety and sheer ...

A Worldly Voice With a Local Flavor Art and travel are often woven together. Travel informs art and process; art prompts and guides exploration. But the results aren’t always as stunning as they are for Aithan Shapira. “Painting was my compass, always,” he confesses. And a peripatetic compass it was, guiding Shapira from Boston to Gloucester, and on to England, Mexico, Israel and an aboriginal community in Australia. How lucky we are that the same compass led Shapira back to ...

Combining The Verbal And the Visual The Chandler Gallery’s salon-style show of small works combining language and image raises surprisingly large issues. Juror Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has focused on jarring experiments in crossing disciplinary boundaries. To deepen our understanding of how combining the verbal and the visual may destabilize our construction of meaning, Campos-Pons has narrowed her selection to 56 examples, often several by a single artist. While we organize language through order and orthography, syntax and sounds, we perceptually ...

Celebrating A Renaissance in Rockland Once in a great while we encounter a single piece of art that makes us forget where we are and become completely immersed in the work at hand. Our senses become stunned and we find ourselves rapt in attention as all the mundane minutia of time and place become absent. Such was the case the first time I encountered the marvelous triptych of Portland artist Nathaniel Meyer. As a small boy, I made my first ...

"The Idea Is Not To Live Forever, It Is To Create Something That Will" “A friend had written me a note saying that everybody we knew was writing a book so that made me want to keep up and do one too.” — Andy Warhol One of the most compelling aspects of the current “Warhol by the Book” exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art is the curatorial approach of showing personal items belonging to and relating to the artist, ...

Collecting Icons From A Progressive Culture When Stephen Miller paid his first visit to the Hancock Shaker Village in Hancock, Mass., it was not the light-filled interiors, or the glorious staircase in the main dwelling house with its curvilinear hand-railing, or the three-tiered round barn designed so that one person could tend to the needs of a large herd of dairy cattle that captured his imagination. Rather, it would prove to be the story behind these elements — the seamless ...

Photography Is Just The Beginning Working with light projections, digital and hand drawing, encaustic waxes, oil paints and other media, Lia Rothstein is transforming her photographs into highly abstracted, texturally nuanced, intriguing works on handmade Japanese and other fine art papers. An exhibition of her latest artwork will be on view at the Aidron Duckworth Art Museum from June 13 to July 26. This exhibition includes her most recent work, which Rothstein said represents a departure, to some extent, from ...

Anna Shapiro, Artist and Catalyst Anna Shapiro’s installation and performance sensibilities are about form blending feminism with cultural commentary, and it has a politicized relationship to place. In her “Make Waves” blog, she describes herself as an “Artist and Catalyst.” Her artwork conveys some of the habitual and resourceful ways that people, globally and individually, deal with the harsh reality of continuance. Inviting relationship to works by Richard Long, geographic mapping is in her ethos. Her latest installation in Maine ...

New Perspectives on Familiar Themes Through Rose Marasco’s lens, disparate worlds — from the urban jungle to the domestic sphere of women — are revealed through intimate details and quiet revelations. Working with myriad subjects and techniques, Marasco shows tremendous range, but above all, a purity of line, tone and perspective characterizes her photographs. “Rose Marasco: Index” is the artist’s first-ever retrospective, on view now at Maine’s Portland Museum of Art. PMA Chief Curator Jessica May worked with Marasco for ...

18th Annual Juried Show At Newburyport Art As you would expect of any show centered in a location as picturesque as Cape Ann, the Newburyport Art Association’s 18th Regional Juried Show — juried by Artscope publisher Kaveh Mojtabai — replicates its most beloved features while spotlighting them alongside other global wonderlands that make this more than a regionally themed show. Mojtabai said it took four nights to go through the approximately 450 entries before selecting the final 153. “I approached ...

Two Shows Exuberantly Celebrate Summer Celebrating summer, the Providence Art Club presents two exhibitions: “Color and Light” is a solo showcase of colorful interpretations of Italian landscape by the exuberant Madolin Maxey, while “A Sense of Light” is a group exhibition featuring contemporary traditionalism and expressive-realism. Maxey’s landscapes are explosions of feeling. They communicate what she describes as a “burst of joy” and creative energy after almost four years struggling with and recovering from serious eye surgery. The Italian landscapes ...

Controlled Capriciousness in 2-D and 3-D Emphatic whimsies are on display at two separate, unrelated exhibitions in Groton, Mass. “Past, Present, Paper,” at the Conant Gallery is a group exhibition presenting skillfully crafted collage arrangements in mixed-media by four New Hampshire-based artists: Soosen Dunholter, Jane El Simpson, Vivienne Strauss and Margaret Baker. “Less the Distance,” at the de Menil Gallery, is a site-specific, immersive style, kinetic installation by Laura Hughes who lives and exhibits regularly in Portland, OR. While these ...

Cuban Artists Escape The Routine Cuba is turning a new page in its international relations as we speak, but flip back some in the book of Cuba’s history and you’ll come upon equally transformational moments you wouldn’t have found on the front page of the New York Times. Fresh and alive for viewing at the Cambridge Multicultural Art Center, “Still Running: Afro-Cuban Art” samples one of the many branching artistic currents which have and still do enrich Cuba’s vital past. ...

After-Life At Seen Gallery Sunflowers in the drawings of Tyler Vouros are really portraits of flora mort super-sized and emerging from the depths of their velvety black backgrounds. Through May 24, SEEN Gallery in Pawtucket presents a selection of Vouros’ works that emote expressive hyperrealism, featuring gigantic owls drawn by the artist. Titled “AFTER-LIFE,” his solo exhibition puns upon the notion of things organically dead while aiming for a style of aesthetic freshness. Vouros’ works also can be interpreted as ...

Asking Questions at Van Vessem In anticipation of an exhibition featuring the work of painter and mixed-media artist Tom Culora, I visited his studio in a wasabi-green cinderblock building that once housed a handkerchief mill in Warren, Rhode Island. Thirty-something years ago, Culora received a full scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, earning a BFA. Delving into the art history of the late 19th and early 20th century, he developed an unbridled appreciation for painters ...

After Images The woman, eyes closed, body tinged an earthen orange-red, gently caresses the breast of an attendant crow cradled in her hand. It is a tender image, for she and the (stuffed) bird appear in repose and adoration, content with one another’s company. But for the classic art literate, there is something hauntingly familiar here, a shadow, a gossamer memory. Only upon reflection does one realize it is a living homage to Pablo Picasso’s “Woman with a Crow,” crafted ...

Art Blooms in Greenwich Spring on Connecticut’s Gold Coast and the outside world is imbued with light, scent and color. At the C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich, the “Art in Bloom” exhibition is underway. Within the 2,000 square foot space are many variations from 15 of the gallery’s artists. In conjunction with the gallery’s monthly lecture series, art historian Dr. Jessica Winston is giving a talk on Van Gogh timed to coincide with the upcoming Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, ...

A Celebration of Craft in Northampton If you really need an excuse to visit Northampton, the Paradise City Arts Festival is a good one. Two times a year, over the holiday weekends bookending the warm weather season, hoards of artists and crafts practitioners descend upon the Northampton Fairgrounds, transforming the agricultural barns and fallow fields that were once the playground of horses into a grand emporium of fine crafts. Jewelry, fiber and fashion, photography, fine woodworking and elegant expressions of ...

The Artist Wears Many Hats Artist. Teacher. Blogger. Filmmaker. Vermont’s Samantha “Sam” Talbot-Kelly fits into all of these categories, and many more. “I’m not a filmmaker yet,” she responds, modestly, when I run by the list of descriptions I’ve amassed for her work. “I happen to go between disciplines, that’s for sure, but I’d just say that I’m an artist and depending on the concept, I decide whether to do it in painting or film or installation or sculpture or ...

We’ve never forgotten the surrealistic experience of finding ourselves in Jay Critchley’s beach sandbox at the Schoolhouse Gallery in the early days of this magazine — especially since it was a 90 degree day with the ocean only 300 feet away — and it only makes us wonder how spectacular his seriously humorous installations will be in “Jay Critchley, Incorporated,” a survey of his works that’ll be on view from May 1 through June 21 at the Provincetown Art Association ...