Welcome Statement, May/June 2016 by Brian Goslow Welcome to our May/June 2016 issue. For the second straight year, Artscope publisher Kaveh Mojtabai will be heading to Art Basel Switzerland (which takes place from June 16-19), where we’ve once again been selected to have our magazine displayed in its collective booth among the world’s best art publications — and he’ll make a presentation on the magazine to the Basel staff. We’re proud of this honor and have worked extra hard to ...

by Donna Dodson Sculptor and Artscope correspondent Donna Dodson “met” Liz Augustine on Facebook one day when she sent her a text asking her if she showed her art in Provincetown at Gallery Ehva. One thing led to another and she invited Liz and her husband Robert Praetorius over for dinner. He arrived wearing one of Jennifer Maestre’s earrings and they became fast friends. Augustine and Praetorius reciprocated by inviting Dodson and husband, fellow sculptor and Myth Maker Andy Moerlein, ...

Varujan Boghosian in Provincetown by Marguerite Serkin Varujan Boghosian works from a place of poetry. Born and raised in New Britain, Connecticut in the 1920s, Professor Boghosian has not forgotten the teachers from his early life who influenced him the most. He credits these early teachers with instilling a lifelong passion for learning and discovery, notably poet Constance Carrier, who taught English and Latin at the local high school and was widely regarded for her translations of Propertius and Tibullus. ...

Debra Claffey Waxes Poetic by Marcia Santore “I’m after the sensation of being with the plants I paint and experiencing their shapes and edges, transformed in line and mark, to two dimensions,” said encaustic painter Debra Claffey, whose work is part of the “Beneath the Surface” exhibition on view through May 28 at the Saco Museum in Saco, Maine; it’ll also be shown in “The Mark of the Brush” exhibition that’ll take place May 23 through June 10 at the ...

David A. Lang's Journey by J. Fatima Martins “Journey...” is David A. Lang’s masterpiece self-portrait. The sculpture and installation is the story of how he circled back to himself. Rotating calmly, soothing and subduing chaos, “Journey...” is his personal monomyth. At the center is the artist, a type of Vitruvian Man, placed within geometry — circle and square — connected by dozens of lines. The continuous cycling, a type of masculine weaving, is Lang’s formal and conceptual signature. It is ...

Thinking Big at the MFA by Suzanne Volmer Al Miner, assistant curator of contemporary art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Laura Weinstein, Ananda Coomaraswamy curator of South Asian and Islamic art, have co-curated “Megacities Asia” by selecting 11 artists whose works explore the idea of critical mass with vocabularies that hinge on interpreting or actualizing an understanding of many. Miner says: “These artists are observing their cities and seeing the landscapes shift before their eyes. They’re feeling a ...

A Collector Displays her Gems by Franklin W. Liu Without acknowledgment of tradition, art is like a sightless adult; without innovation, that adult is comatose. Thus, only with an artist’s primed imagination may truth surge from the yoke of tradition to find new meaning and validation in an ever-changing world.” Walking that thin line some 500 years ago was a group of Northern European, Italian, and Spanish artists who are now deemed Old Masters, spanning from the Early Renaissance to ...

Robert Manning at Catamount by Marguerite Serkin For an artist or any interpreter of time, one’s personal past and the historical past provide a fount of material from which to create. Robert Manning’s early work grew out of his personal background — the life of an Irish American born in 1933 — and has pushed open the envelope to extend into the historical past. What better expression of that historical past than the ever-enduring stones and dolmens that have braved ...

Joan Baldwin's Marshes by Elizabeth Michelman At its inception following World War I, Surrealism was a mostly male enclave. Its female adherents went unacclaimed until later, when their work was taken up by the growing feminist movement. Successive generations of women artists appropriated surrealistic technique, with its bizarre juxtapositions and appeal to the unconscious, as a means to challenge the assumptions underlying a male-dominated discourse about the inner experience and erotic imagination of women. Joan Baldwin’s new oil paintings, ostensibly ...

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 ...

Everything is Dada at Yale by Kristin Nord Nonsense “sound” poetry, nonlinear musical compositions, irony-laden cinematography and the blurring of lines between fine and applied arts were considered highly radical ideas 100 years ago when the Dada movement burst upon the scene. The movement was in many ways a response to the ravages of World War 1, as an irreverent and anti-hierarchical group of male and female artists sought refuge in the safe haven of neutral Switzerland their ideas began ...

Exploring the Roots of a Fine Art by Brian Goslow Intended to celebrate “an intrepid and colorful group of photographers at the turn of the 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic who fought to establish photography as a fully-fledged fine art, coequal with painting, sculpture and etching,” this exhibition, organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions, represents much more than an art form. I’d argue that “Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography,” currently on view at the D’Amour Museum of ...

O'Donnell is Seriously Humorous by Molly Hammill When I pulled up to the house Patrick O’Donnell’s grandfather built on the North Shore of Boston, he was standing on the front porch waiting for me — hands in his pockets, eyes on the lookout for his expected guest. O’Donnell doesn’t have a cell phone. No website. No computer. No email address. I’d called his home phone a few days earlier to set up a time to interview him and see some ...

Landscape as a Portrait of Humanity by J. Fatima Martins Be it skyscape, seascape or cityscape, the art of landscape is a much-loved ubiquitous and eclectic subject. It can be depicted in countless physical and conceptual manners — realist or abstracted, subject pure or hybrid, hard-edged or expressive. It contains the all-encompassing sublime; it’s a metaphor, symbol and a dichotomous place, and the foundation and diorama containing everything. To celebrate the enduring power of this form, the Providence Art Club ...

Mill Brook Beckons in Full Bloom by Marcia Santore Signs of spring were few and far between in April in New Hampshire this year, but Pam Tarbell, owner of Mill Brook Gallery and Sculpture Garden in Concord, is providing a “Spring Celebration” nonetheless. The exhibition features work by eight painters and one sculptor from New England, and will run through June 26. The Mill Brook Gallery and Sculpture Garden is an appropriate venue for this exhibition based in the natural ...

Compelling Progressions at Art Complex by Elizabeth Michelman The encaustic paintings of Pat Gerkin, Donna Hamil Talman and Charyl Weissbach being shown on the walls of the ArtComplex Museum in Duxbury this spring share in a knowing dialogue. The three artists in “Compelling Progressions” first became acquainted through participation in the New England Wax Society. Happily, they fall close together on the spectrum of current work in this evolving medium. It requires deftness and consummate control to manage the pyrotechnics ...

National Prizes for a Wealth of Talent by Brian Goslow In jurying the Cambridge Art Association’s 15th National Prize and Open Juried Show, Paul C. Ha, director of MIT’s LIST Visual Arts Center, culled through over 1100 entries from 400 artists located in 20 states. The end result is a high-level, should-see exhibition of 61 selected works, starting with Kate Holcomb Hale’s “No Cars Falling Down,” a mixed-media installation constructed of charcoal, paper, latex paint and vinyl that was awarded ...

Instinctive Formations at Shattuck by Don Wilkinson Westport, MA - Midway through April and in anticipation of an exhibition at the Dedee Shattuck Gallery in Westport, Mass. that would not open until June, I visited the studio of Rebecca Hutchinson in bucolic Rochester, Mass., just north of New Bedford. Hutchinson, who has been a professor of ceramics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth since 2001, has a multifaceted workspace including a small and simple woodshop, printmaking studio and papermaking gear, ...

The State of Clay in Lexington by Taryn Plumb Clay: What does the word bring to mind? Earthenware pots sold along a desert road amidst swirls of dust? Armies of identical figurines? Mass-made tchotchkes? Then you’ve never really seen what clay can do.

Casavant's Seasonal Expressions by Taryn Plumb For Arnie Casavant, it’s not the subject itself that entices — but the light hitting it, giving it life, shadow, color, dimension, personality. “It’s the time of day that it’s painted,” said the Quincy artist. “I have absolutely no interest in painting from 10 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. It’s the least inspiring time. The colors just aren’t there for me. The sunlight in the morning and the evening provides me ...

Gary Duehr Isn't Just Looking by Franklin W. Liu To Gary Duehr, photographic art offers a precious, unique opportunity: a rich, life-long visual conduit to examine, to deliberate and to challenge all things attributable to humanity both great and small in life. He is a vibrant artist/thinker whose keen cultural awareness and intellectual curiosity are manifestly vigorous and infinite. Duehr is also a published poet, a teacher and an award-winning artist whose public installations and artworks have been exhibited worldwide.

Addison Seeks A Connection by James Foritano An extremely ambitious, some would say busy, exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art curated by Maurice Berger intends to reveal the multifarious connections between modern art and the “birth” of American television. As a thesis, i.e., that television and modern art of the early- and mid-20th century are in any meaningful way connected, this exhibit seems to this viewer both to prove and disprove itself around every corner of the lavish ...

Liz MacDonald's Ceramics by Kristin Nord I’m descending a steep stone staircase to Elizabeth MacDonald’s studios — past banks of glistening myrtle and her well-appointed kitchen garden. The property itself exudes Litchfield County charm, from the circa- 1790 white colonial out front to the stone walls and the way the buildings fit the land. I find the artist already at a work table, gouging crevices into wet slabs of clay. This is a process with a number of stages, and ...

Unleashing What Lies Beneath by Elizabeth Michelman Ellen Raquel LeBow’s large sgraffito paintings in her “Every border can be cross” exhibition at the Groton School resemble the familiar grade-school project of scratching designs through a wax-covered board to reveal variegated color. But there is nothing child-like in LeBow’s black-ink-on Claybord figurative panels, many of which tower seven feet high. Her monochromatic palette and all-over technique hint of Orozco’s and Jackson Pollock’s murals, and mirror the latter’s early fascination with Jungian ...

Enfolding Natural Processes at Groton by Elizabeth Michelman For some artists, the practice of their art form permits them to experience a meditative separation from the incursions of an urbanized, mechanized and consumption-driven society. The art of painter Deborah Barlow, photographer Kay Canavino and ceramic sculptor Ramah Commanday, whose works are on exhibit together at the Groton School’s Brodigan Gallery, enfolds natural processes into the making of their aesthetic objects and images. Whatever form their discipline takes, they use their ...

A Living Narrative by J. Fatima Martins Installed in a shoebox-shaped gallery, “Sonograms” by Karen Margolis offers a dialogue about the hybridization of conceptual art, domestic craft, alternative abstract painting process, science, architecture and design. The installation is intellectually dense, yet appears physically delicate. In color and form it is joyful, elegant, light and airy, projecting the illusion of simplicity. This “easy quality” is a smart conceptual trick, seducing the viewer into a complicated world that is psychologically probing and ...

Contemporary Works at Sharon Arts by Brian Goslow The New Hampshire Institute of Art is celebrating the grand reopening of its Sharon Arts Center Gallery with an exhibition built around “The Thing in the Spring” series of concerts and art events presented by the Glass Museum that takes place annually in downtown Peterborough. The reopened gallery, which features new walls, floors and museum-quality lighting, was renovated by Dennis Mires and builder Hutter Construction and will provide area artists with a ...

Looking for Direction at Thompson Gallery by Ali Russo It’s the first piece I see and, from a distance, it almost looks like a photograph: a man and his son stand on the sidewalk of a crowded, urban, black and white street, the man’s attention held entirely by the phone in his palm. Clinging to his leg is his son, peering past the foreground with his back to the viewer as he stares down the road, almost looking to the ...

by Brian Goslow Art work of dresses and shoes by Patricia Canney, Susan Freda, Holly Gaboriault, Larisa Martino, Kelly O’Neal and Kyle Ragsdale are on view through May 27 in “Fashion Statements” at the ArtProv Gallery in the Doran Building, 150 Chestnut St., Providence, R.I. “The pieces in this exhibit are as beautiful as they are varied,” said the gallery’s co-owner Michele Aucoin. “Yet what unites them is the artists’ love of fashion icons.” There’s a series of events tied ...