Welcome to our May/June 2021 issue, which I hope finds you in good health. When we started planning this issue, our team was in full self-protection mode, going out, at most, a few times a week, rarely for anything other than acquiring life essentials or visiting an exhibition if restrictions allowed. Then, as our copy and production deadlines neared, we found ourselves working around vaccine appointments and the added protection of a few extra days for any residual effects. And ...

On the day after Patriots Day, 14 months after my last visit to Newbury Street, there’s a small sign of pre-Covid life as outside restaurants are busy and visitors are entering galleries, albeit in ones and twos. But the street feels alive. “We’ve had a nice April,” said Guild of Boston Artists gallery director Alex Ciesielski. ”We’re seeing a nice turnaround. It’s tentative, but you can feel it.” Visitors to the gallery have been appreciative. “People felt we were producing ...

What a feeling of freedom! Two Covid vaccine shots, a beautiful spring day and an opportunity to see, in person, inspiring works of art at the South Shore Art Center (SSAC). Hopefully, you will all be venturing out soon to share in the joy that art brings to our lives. Katherine French has selected 65 excellent works created in a wide variety of recognizable media, and some created in ways that will never be replicated. Subjects range from abstract to ...

As a mixed media artist who has long combined acrylic paint with a wide variety of collaged elements, Alison Wells knows all about layering, and the way in which complex visual depths can be achieved. With “In the Neighborhood,” her current exhibition in the Braitmayer Gallery at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, she utilizes her skill as a collagist — and her perception as a keenly sensitive observer of the human condition — to reveal layers and depths of other ...

Artist Youngsheen A. Jhe paints everyday scenes with rare resonance. After an initial glance, her work quietly deepens in both tone and symbolism; it conjures the world as a space in which shadow and color are not merely byproducts of light and objects, but significant clues into emotional states. Fashion runways, city streets, and rooftops serve as backdrops for silent networks of people who are merely crossing paths. Their gazes, often pointing far into the distance, evoke a curious magnetism. ...

Jennifer Wen Ma’s massive “An Inward Sea” installation, which opens on May 13, is part of the New Britain Museum of American Art’s 2020/20+WOMEN initiative celebrating female-identifying artists throughout American history and its NEW/NOW series spotlighting emerging and established contemporary artists. I recently discussed “An Inward Sea” with Ma prior to its completion. We spoke about content, the artist’s career in overview, and how the pandemic impacted her life and creative practice. Our conversation also touched on the unexpected delay ...

Painter Jo Ann Rothschild has always registered the political through the personal. The daughter of a prominent Chicago civil rights lawyer, she arrived in Boston as the Vietnam era was ending. Her abstract vocabulary of marks and grids already betrayed a singular responsiveness to human turmoil and social justice. By 1989, Rothschild was creating luminous off-stretcher canvases of heroic scale. A few years later, her looming expanses of intersecting lines and translucent blocks of color garnered her the first Maud ...

Michael C. Thorpe is a working artist. Unlike many of his young age and position, he doesn’t have a second job to buoy his passion; he doesn’t teach. His artistic output is his vocation. He has a studio, a dedication and affability, a work in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s collection and now, his solo exhibition “Meandering Thoughts,” running at LaiSun Keane Gallery in Boston’s SoWA district through May 29. In Thorpe’s opinion, he’s living the dream. Textiles are ...

When Scott Prior walked into the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, he said it was a “very emotional experience — after such a difficult year — to look back” over five decades of his life’s work. “They did a spectacular job hanging the pieces” — some 35 of his Cape Cod related paintings, prints and drawings in his long overdue first solo exhibition on the Cape. (His work has appeared in over 100 exhibitions and hangs in at ...

Nestled between a candy shop and an upscale eatery in downtown Keene, New Hampshire, The New Leaf Gallery inhabits a sun-drenched single room on the second floor of a shared office building, the gallery’s temporary home while a spacious, completely remodeled new location is readied a block away. Epitomizing the resilience and determination required in the post-pandemic economic landscape, The New Leaf Gallery is a rising phoenix, thanks to the vision and dedication of its co-founders, Taryn Fisher and Matt ...

As a reviewer, it is a pleasure to discover more in an artist’s body of work, the more closely one looks. I often have to own my subconscious prejudices as I respond to the range of creative and critical impulses that shape contemporary art. Skimming Lori Mehta’s modernist realist paintings on her website, I had to confront my initial skepticism. Her color sense was unusual, but was she anything beyond a gifted painter of New England beach scenes? A week ...

According to Tom Robbins, in a 2014 article in Harpers, “...When Oscar Wilde allegedly gestured at the garish wallpaper in his cheap Parisian hotel room and announced with his dying breath, ‘Either it goes or I go,’ he was exhibiting something beyond an irrepressibly brilliant wit.” Breath. Breathing. It is also defined as a respite or a suggestion. With that in mind, checkout the “Digital Breath: Video and Sound Art in the Age of Global Connectivity” installation that’s on view ...

While many galleries and museums have, and are holding Covid-era art exhibitions, almost historical retrospectives displayed while the period is still in-progress, with its upcoming “Turmoil and Transformation” exhibition, Hera Gallery aimed to present art that suggests a post-pandemic world. The exhibition, open to artists nationwide, was juried by Francine Weiss, senior curator at the Newport Art Museum. Most of the work was made between 2019 and 2021, with a few earlier pieces. The exhibition stands as a strong survey ...

Changing each day, and sometimes each hour, the art world has been digitally revolutionized as discoveries are made and challenges met within this new world we are all experiencing. We had been thrust into the virtual world before the pandemic, but it has been gaining ground because of our required online interactions due to pandemic isolation requirements. Over the past year, we’ve all come together virtually, learning new ways to form communities, have our art seen and support ourselves as ...

As we enter the second half of spring in dire need of inspiration and the feel and warmth of the familiar, here are a series of exhibitions to slowly move you into a summer mood and help you plan a safe, careful series of New England art wanderlust road trips. The 2021 South Coast Artists Members Invitational exhibition takes place through May 31 at Gallery Four, 3848 Road, Tiverton Four Corners, Rhode Island — as beautiful a part of the ...