Welcome to our 122nd issue of Artscope Magazine. Over time, I’ve learned the value of photographs in telling history otherwise not available and as such, I’ve found myself protesting with well-meaning fans of performers and roadside landmarks on social media who enhance images they find or take with AI, and in the process, destroy the historical document. Photographs and paintings might be our only way to learn of people, places and events of the past. A few weeks ago, after ...

Elizabeth “Libby” Schoettle’s alter ego of PhoebeNewYork first appeared in sticker form on the streets of Manhattan in 2015, stealing hearts and drawing the attention of city code inspectors. Slowly but surely, through her sharp declarations of independence that aimed right for the heart, she developed a devoted local base and through constant communication on Instagram, found an ever-growing national and international following. Over time, she was invited to display and sell her work inside and outside local business, to ...

It’s all about light at the Cahoon Museum of American Art's two indelibly joyful and haunting exhibitions, “Illuminations: The Art of Light” and “Tiffany’s Gardens in Glass.” As the museum writes, “While light has always been a basic consideration of any artist’s work, only recently has it begun to receive attention as a standalone medium. ‘Illuminations’ explores the diverse ways artists use luminous materials to create beauty and spark conversation.” In two of the upstairs rooms housing “Illuminations,” two artists ...

Happening upon JooYoung Choi’s universe on a gray, drizzling day was a welcome entrance to a world where joy, transformation, self-knowledge and pie are all very important. In Choi’s new installation at the Mead Art Museum, we learn that an all-powerful entity, the Quantum Soup Surfer, is continually in the process of rehabilitating the universe, one instance of love at a time. Choi creates a cast of characters, both recognizably human and cartoonishly surreal, who protect and inhabit a virtual ...

ClipArt Gallery at Clippership Wharf in East Boston mirrors the contemporary future-forward intentions of the complex, hosting art exhibitions in an open and airy space. The combination of pristine walls and brick work allows a partnership of textural variety. Found within the greater community of apartment buildings and retail establishments situated in a coveted spot on the waterfront, the gallery is available to both residents and the public, the latter invited in limited hours. The complex also hosts two outdoor ...

Sam Belisle is a master who paints in parable. I was taught in high school that parable is the highest form of poetry. His works are exceptionally painted poetry invested with deeply felt narrative intent. In his Newton Studio, Belisle explained most of his recent paintings lack a figure as he wants the viewer to wander through all the layers. His new paintings include detailed background landscapes or foreground floral imagery in high color to address the natural world around ...

Lowell has much to celebrate in 2026. Even as the United States honors its 250th year, the city of Lowell, founded in 1826, observes its bicentennial. Whistler House Museum of Art Director Sara Bogosian is passionate about her city. She personally curated the exhibit “200th Anniversary of Lowell 2026,” to mark the city’s historic anniversary. Bogosian selected work which ranges from realistic representations of the city’s factories and neighborhoods to allegorical images of Lowell’s innovations and will to survive, as ...

In stark contrast to the 250th anniversary of America art exhibitions which dominate the art world this year, “Of All the Worlds We Could Have Dreamed” is a distinct diversion from that theme. Be ready to be introduced to a multi-layered, creative experience. The artist. The “story.” The subject. The execution. All are unexpectedly delightful, different and distinctive. Enter Sam (Samantha) Modder, a 31-year-old Dartmouth grad who earned her BA in studio art and engineering, then went on for her ...

Art openings are a great place to meet interesting people and feel the pulse of a creative community, but they are a terrible place to actually look at art. On Friday, April 10, I found myself at the opening reception for “NEXT” at the Jamestown Art Center with the goal of looking at all the art. “NEXT,” a group exhibition featuring artists aged 19 to 39 “with roots in Jamestown, Rhode Island,” filled the Center’s main gallery space as did ...

There is something immediate about the work of Fernando Fula, a sense that each piece is made in a moment of intensity, without hesitation. His paintings do not feel overworked or overly controlled. Instead, they carry energy. You can sense decisions happening quickly, instinctively, as if the artist is responding in real time rather than carefully planning every move. Fula works primarily in portraiture, but what he creates moves far beyond traditional representations of the face. At first glance, you ...

Pablo Delano’s exhibition unfolds as an experience that lingers long after you leave. Spanning two vast galleries, “The Museum of the Old Colony” at the New Britain Museum of American Art abandons the conventional in favor of immersion, drawing the viewer into a single, unfolding environment. Image and sound converge, flooding the senses with a narrative that is both unsettling, essential and impossible to ignore, telling the story of United States rule in Puerto Rico since 1898. At its core, ...

“The Zone” is what Thomas Pynchon labels immediate post-World War II Germany in his mammoth novel “Gravity’s Rainbow.” It’s a district of political mirage where contradictions reign: lawlessness and exploitation are imposed through military strictures, shambling intelligence assets and seemingly peaceful actors, while a gloss of international conflict coats mutual deals between rival powers, negotiated under the table, leaving average people in the dark. It’s hard not to think of Pynchon’s “Zone” when viewing, in horror, the current war of ...

Long a part of our retail shopping experience, mannequins have been used as models for the latest clothing trends as well as, more recently, become a symbol to represent our more robotic ways of everyday life, especially in an age where cellphones have become extensions of our bodies. “Mannequin,” a collaborative exhibition by Clark University students Dante Diez, Simon Pinchbeck and Hoang Truongat the Harold Stevens Gallery at WCUW, combines photography, video and sculpture to examine how modern human identity ...

The capturing of an “ephemeral garden” is an elusive proposition, one that the eclectic practice of Jenine Shereos harnesses in her exhibition at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The artist grasps the wind-blown wisps of scattered natural debris, magnetizing strands of energy and decay into focused individual projects that mirror time’s passing and life abounding. The only attempt she makes to pull ephemeral events out of the ether comes in the form of photography, in which they are ...

In her exhibition statement, curator Crystalle Lacouture identifies the Concord Center for the Visual Arts, which occupies the former John Ball house built before the American Revolution, as a fitting location for her “Homages” exhibition, noting that, “This building welcomed Minutemen and Modernists alike.” The works in the show represent memorials, with references to masters in the arts to feminists in the vanguard, to shared stories and quotidian household objects and their uses and users. The variety of media and ...

“In the Thrice-Ninth Kingdom …” is the opening line for many Russian fairytales. Upon hearing these words, Russian children know that magic will flow in the story about to be told. Events will take place in some liminal space, perhaps the interstitial zone between “the other world” and the one we are familiar with, where different rules apply. Anything can happen there. And here, within the world we know, cultural differences between American and Russian children come into play. The ...

For the first time in nearly three years, people walking past the corner of Union and Purchase Streets in downtown New Bedford saw something unexpected in the windows of the Star Store — art. And in the words of New Bedford-based artist Carl Simmons, whose work has filled the building’s street-facing ground floor windows since December 2025, “people were stoked.” The Star Store, a 19th century department store-turned-satellite campus for UMass Dartmouth’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, closed in ...

Investigating “the progressive directional flow of currents in nature — tides, air, sound, and time,” Margaret Swan’s new series of polychrome aluminum wall sculpture, “Current,” will be on view from May 7 to June 7 at Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave., Boston, Massachusetts. Her organic gestural, curvilinear forms are, “intersected and punctuated by bright swirling aluminum tubing, create counter movement, suggesting rivulets of water, creeping vines, or musical notation, and coaxing the curving leaf-like, wave-like forms into a rhythmic ...