Warm greetings, Artscope readers, We, like you, have watched federal funding be cut for both public and non-profit cultural organizations, be they for the visual orperforming arts and found ourselves asking, as we always have, how can we best support our arts community and through it, contribute to a better understanding of each other and the world? Many passionate conversations went into planning this issue, especially with our writers who are also artists that have spent several decades working to ...

In the dimly lit Ronald M. Ansin Gallery housing Tara Sellios’s solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum, the darkness creates a translucent view of the photographic work on display in “Ask Now the Beasts,” the hundreds of skeletal parts that make up each work slowly revealing themselves as the viewer’s eyes adjust to the room. Mine were first beckoned to the color of blueberries on the lower portion of “Abundantia,” 2023, each surrounding item, of which there were many, ...

Lowell’s Whistler House Museum of Art is celebrating the 200thanniversary of its historic 1825 edifice with a comprehensive exhibition of its artists-in-residence and associated studio artists. The Artist-in-Residence program spans a period from the very early years of the 20th century to today: Artists have the use of a spacious third-floor studio in the historic home in exchange for participating in the museum’s public programming. Director Sara Bogosian stewards the birthplace of artist James McNeill Whistler in its many missions: ...

In 2006, the Danforth Art Museum was gifted work by sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, known for work that expressed the African American identity. The importance of her work was a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. This core collection provides an esprit de corps for the museum’s “Selfhood” exhibition that’s on view through June 8. It includes five artists dedicated to their visual narratives of identity within personal and cultural context. Danforth Museum Director and Curator Jessica Roscio’s texts posted ...

I recently went to see artwork in the studios of Nora Valdez and Nirmal Raja in advance of their month-long solo exhibitions at Boston Sculptors Gallery. Both are mid-career artists whose work reflects focused and mature intention. Both are first generation immigrants. Raja is originally from Chennai, India, Valdez from Villa Mercedes, San Luis, Argentina. Although the artists are of singular vision, it is also true that their respective aesthetics loop through some of the same conceptual terrain — plying ...

The “MATRIX” is an ever-evolving exhibition space at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Launched in 1974 through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the space was envisioned as an experimental platform for contemporary art. Over the last five decades, “MATRIX” has presented more than 1,000 works by over 160 artists, many of them early in their careers. The gallery has consistently served as a site for work that is challenging, provocative and firmly grounded in the ...

On January 10, 1975, the newly established Nesto Gallery at Milton Academy opened its inaugural exhibition, showcasing 35 works by 1969 Milton Academy graduate William Nesto. That exhibit would set the stage for decades of artwork, life-long friendships and impactful teacher-student relationships. Now, just over 50 years later, a multi-generational team of 10 current and former Nesto Gallery directors have assembled “Celebrating 50 Years of the Nesto Gallery,” a show that pulls 10 artists from the gallery’s half-century of solo ...

Alia Farid’s latest large-scale installation, “Talismans (Kupol LR 3303),” was created primarily with a material called Kupol LR 3303 which is a resin manufactured by the United Oil Projects (UOP). Farid collaborated with UOP in Kuwait to fabricate the material. The exhibition, curated by Meg Rotzel, the curator of exhibitions at Harvard Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, is on view through June 21 in the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, located in Byerly Hall. Farid returns to Radcliffe after ...

Jo Sandman is a painter and multidisciplinary artist, now aged 93, who has exhibited nationally and internationally during her long career. Sandman attended the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1951, where she studied with Robert Motherwell and Aaron Siskind, among others. At Maine’s Portland Museum of Art, Sandman’s 1998 suite of images, which make up “Skin Deep,” reveal these important early influences. At Black Mountain, Sandman experimented with painting, collage and interdisciplinary media of all kinds, including ...

When you enter the “Weaving an Address” exhibition at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, Massachusetts, your gaze is directed to the central wall of the Allie Kussin Gallery. It’s there that Perla Mabel’s “Morir Soñando” hangs like the nave rosette window in France’s Chartres Cathedral. Mabel created this multi-media piece during Covid to find herself, and to “speak her truth without fear.” She told me that her art is her love language. A sunflower ornament, owned by her mother, ...

Ogunquit is a sleepy little coastal town in Downeast, Maine — until the summer hits and then it rivals Las Vegas. Great restaurants. Terrific boutiques. Super fun places — Perkins Cove for shopping. The Marginal Way for spectacular ocean views and getting your steps in. And then, there’s theater. For nearly 100 years Ogunquit Playhouse has drawn crowds — and celebrity actors: Carol Channing, Bette Davis, Steve McQueen, William Shatner, Patty Duke, Betty White and endless other stars. A regular ...

Beginning in mid-May, 46 locally-based artists will inhabit the walls, floor and ceiling of Ivan Stojakovic’s Mixed Media Space gallery located in his expansive Groundart Studios building in North Adams, Massachusetts. The exhibition seeks to serve specifically as a survey of the ever-growing artist population in North Adams, documenting the interchangeable, perpetual process of absorbing the influence from the larger institutions such as MASS MoCA while building self-sustainability and giving weight to the broader local artists’ community. Through the upcoming ...

All my life, I have disagreed with Henry David Thoreau who thought it wasn’t “worthwhile to [travel] around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” The joy of travel has been in my blood since I was a child when our family summer vacation was a trip to visit our Canadian family. Our favorite stops included the gorges in Ithaca, the Thousand Islands, and Niagara Falls, especially when they were lit up with rainbow colors at night. Each of ...

I was talking to Artscope Magazine’s editor, Brian Goslow, about my play “IMPOSSIBLE?” a story of what happens to friends in a small New England town when a tyrannical president takes over the nation, and he asked me to write a piece about it. I call it a guerilla theater recorded Zoom performance. Because of my lack of any production budget, this is an inexpensive way to get a play up and out there. I gathered actors, gave them visual backgrounds to use ...

Award winning movie director and writer Henry Chaisson was scouring New England in 2024 to find art for his next film, “Recluse,” which he filmed in Massachusetts last November. He was born in Newton, Massachusetts and is known for “Servant” (2019), “Antlers” (2021) and the script of “Diary of a Murderer.” His latest, “Recluse,” was filmed at the Hawthorn Hill Estate in Lancaster, Massachusetts. This 1914 mansion served as the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center that was once famously visited by ...

“Hear, Here,” an exhibition of new works by Ann Steuernagel derived from listening to and working with the natural environment will be on view from May 2 through June 27 at the Gallery at WREN, 2011 Main St., Bethlehem, New Hampshire. “This captivating exhibition highlights Ann’s unique artistic approach, blending alternative photographic processes, sound, and video to evoke the intricate rhythms and gestures of the natural world.” The 13th Biennial “State of Clay,” a juried show and art sale for ...