Welcome to artscope magazine’s final issue of 2015, an issue we’re proud to be sending to Art Basel Miami Beach, where it will be exhibited and available in the Collective Booth. Any expanded issue is a challenging enterprise for our editorial staff, even more so with the responsibility of putting New England’s visual arts community in front of a national and inter- national art audience and collector base. As was the case this past June at Art Basel Switzerland, artscope ...

Artscope and New England Artists Prepare For Art Basel Miami Beach by Suzanne Volmer (Editor’s note: artscope magazine is proud to have been selected to be included at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach’s Magazines section, where we’ll be displayed amongst other leading international art magazines in its stands and collective booth. In this article, Rhode Island correspondent Suzanne Volmer provides a preview of what to expect and how some New England galleries are preparing for this year’s festivities.) Art ...

Art League Rhode Island Members' Exhibition by Suzanne Volmer As a clearinghouse, the mission of Art League Rhode Island (ALRI) “is to provide a venue for the growth and encouragement of artists, to promote high standards in the visual arts, and to encourage community participation and appreciation of the greater Rhode Island arts community.” Among their stated objectives is to sponsor an annual exhibition of Rhode Island artists. This year’s “Art League Rhode Island Member’s Exhibition,” on view at Newport ...

Fitchburg Pairs Historical with Contemporary by Donna Dodson “Land Ho!,” the impressive new show at the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM), is a must-see. Mary M. Tinti’s sixth curatorial project is the result of nearly one year of extensive research on FAM’s permanent collection utilizing her keen eye for contemporary New England art. Koch Curatorial Fellow Emily M. Mazzola, whose knowledge of 19th and 20th century American Art brought to light the personal stories behind many of the treasures that FAM ...

The 2015 Portland Museum Of Art Biennial by Jamie Thompson You can’t get there from here. This timeworn Maine saying has become a kind of cultural touchstone for the state, like blueberries or lobster. But Alison Ferris, curator of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, found a decidedly more artistic application for the adage. Ferris, who curated “You Can’t Get There From Here: The 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial,” was inspired by how the saying seems ...

Rockin’ The Casbah And Beyond by J. Fatima Martins With great rhythm and swanky style, photographer-filmmaker-designer Hassan Hajjaj brings his inclusive visual language to the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) this November. His bombastic site-specific exhibition, “My Rock Stars,” is a music video installation presented in dialogue with photographic portraits of featured musicians and performers. Full disclosure: While I did listen to examples of Gnawa (a beautiful traditional North African musical style rooted in the history of slavery and featured in ...

BCA’S 24TH Drawing Show by Elizabeth Michelman Flat, Flatter, Flattest. “Feelers,” the Boston Center for the Arts’ 24th Drawing Show at the Mills Gallery, is a biennial juried selection of 60 works from 56 artists hailing from as close as the Boston area to as far away as Iceland. Visiting curator Susan Metrican, director of the arts at Brandeis University, sought to capture a “certain something” about contemporary drawing practice through associations to Edwin A. Abbott’s romance “Flatland,” a dystopia ...

Answering The Call Of The Wild by Arlene Distler The paintings and prints in the Jules Olitski “Lakes, Mountains, Seas” exhibition currently on view at Keene State College’s Thorne- Sagendorph Gallery show an artist who was still in full command of his creative powers in the last decade of his life. He died in 2007 at age 84. The show consists of paintings the artist made on site during or that were inspired by his summers on Bear Island in ...

Only The Strong Survive by James Foritano With so many icons crowding into our national, if not global, consciousness, you have to wonder if wood, just wood, holds any longer those numinous qualities we hand out so profligately to tin-pot celebrities. The Druids worshiped wood in the form of living trees. And how many documents of iconic importance were penned under the regal branches of oaks and chestnut? Think of Boston’s own Liberty Tree, now just a bas-relief plaque on ...

Ancient Tradition Meets Modern Vision by Elizabeth Michelman Nora Valdez’s stone sculpture follows ancient traditions, but the insights found in her surrealistic visions are very much of our time. Born in Argentina, Valdez emigrated in her twenties to learn Italian in her mother’s homeland and then went to Spain on a fellowship to learn carving. After a few years assisting in carving public monuments there, she moved to the United States and settled down to raise a family. Since then, ...

Scott Tulay In Brattleboro by Greg Morell I happen to love color the more bold and brash, the better. I also have a proclivity toward figurative depiction and symbol. So how is it that I have been so taken by the monochromatic work of Scott Tulay, a sorcerer of black, white and gray? I first came across his work many years ago. My first Tulay encounter was with his depictions of the skeletal remnants of ancient New England barns teetering ...

Museums Shine In Connecticut by J. Fatima Martins The New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA, 1903) and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (1842) recently reopened after major building renovations and expansions, followed by reinstallation of their collections and exhibitions. Both institutions look spectacular. In this review I reveal my favorite works of art at each, a surprise even to myself. So, keep reading. The Wadsworth is the oldest continually operating public art museum in the United States, while ...

Exploring The Seen and Unseen by Meredith Cutler Bunny Harvey can locate the very place and moment in time that cemented her knowledge that she was, and would always be, an artist. Trailing her fashionable mother through the streets of mid-town Manhattan, the smell of oil paint wafting from the Art Students League of New York drew her in like a siren’s song. Always a creative child with a love of drawing, “that sensory experience was really the beginning of ...

The Mundane Goes Exotic by James Foritano We all know by now – having been told over and over again — that Americans didn’t invent paper. Well, what’s done is done and so we do what we’re good at, i.e., imagining the future. And that’s fortuitous since paper, as we all know, is in a fix right now – witness the heralded “paperless office” and realize with a shudder that if America’s business is truly business, where’s paper? Restless explorers ...

Expression Emerges Through Process by Marguerite Serkin Richard Heller’s background in literature led him to the visual arts as a way to express ideas and sentiments words cannot reach. “I read Brian Greene’s ‘The Elegant Universe’ and became interested in the multi-dimensional aspects of quantum physics,” Heller said recently from his home in southern Vermont. “It was amusing to see how they tried to communicate that through illustrations on a two-dimensional page. Obtuse and abstract ideas can be visually represented ...

Finding Truth In The Shadows by Elizabeth Michelman “Rigid Mobility,” a solo sculpture exhibition by Gabrielle Rossmer at HallSpace, consists largely of open space, broken up by seven polychromed pillars strategically dispersed throughout the gallery. Almost entirely composed of pedestal, they grow upward from a flared foot to culminate at eye-level in stacks of geometric forms pregnant with biomorphic softness. The gallery walls are sparsely punctuated by a handful of shelves holding diminutive representations of body parts. The focal objects ...

Pure and Simple At Coso by Linda Chestney “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” — Edgar Degas And what you make others feel, according to Robin Frisella, a pastel artist based in southern New Hampshire who loves nothing better than to make people cry. Well, to have her work connect so profoundly with viewers that they react with intense emotion. That reaction is based primarily on nostalgia. Something almost magical exists in her work ...

William R. Davis At The Guild by Marguerite Serkin William Davis began his life as a young sailor in and around Cape Cod. This early, visceral introduction to the sea continues to inform his painting, and has earned him the reputation of a masterful maritime artist. With a collection of pieces spanning several decades, Davis’ definitive style is best expressed through his meticulously crafted representations of seascapes and their accompanying forms. The Guild of Boston Artists will be “spotlighting” Davis’ ...

Artists Shine At Three Stones by James Foritano I must have passed nearly a million trees as I drove past Walden Pond en route to the broad granite steps of owner/photographer Jennifer M. Johnston’s Three Stones Gallery in West Concord. I was in the mood for nature and art and had come to the right place. Three Stones Gallery, having just passed its first anniversary, is young and feisty, like the growing center into which it’s snuggled – an eclectic ...

Grand Circle Pays Tribute To Selma and The Civil Rights Movement by Franklin W. Liu On November 4, 2008, Reverend Jesse Jackson sobbed openly on live TV as the nation’s electoral-vote count was tallied: a black man, a novice-politician, Barack H. Obama would historically become the 44th President of the United States of America. Fifty years ago, at the height of America’s Civil Rights Movement, this improbable election’s outcome was not even a remote dream when the March from Selma ...

Rebuilding Lives Through Art by Brian Goslow Born and raised in New Orleans, multi-media artist Dawn DeDeaux had been working on “lots” of large-scale digital works when Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. “I was suddenly unplugged,” she told a lecture audience at the College of the Holy Cross recently. She said her response was to “go hands-on in reconfiguring my world” through her art. DeDeaux traveled to Pass Christian on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where her parents had ...

A Labor of Love And Imagination by Franklin W. Liu A disciplined process of experiential application pushing an extraordinarily flexible medium, fueled by an unyieldingly inquisitive, artistic mindset forged on discovery, uniquely describes printmaking. For printmakers, beauty is clearly inherent in the process itself, as much as in the finished print. Since 1948, the Boston Print- makers have hosted a juried biennial printmaking awards exhibition to foster traditional as well as cutting- edge printmaking. They recognize that in a digital ...

Every Picture Tells A Story by Brian Goslow It is a stunning collection: a 25-year-old woman giving birth to twins at a Faizabad hospital; veiled women worshiping at a shrine to Shahzada Qasim, a descendent of the prophet Muhammad, in Herat; a health and hygiene class being taught by a traveling midwife in an isolated village in Badakhshan Province. Afghan policewomen firing AMD-65 rifles at a shooting range outside Kabul and a 15-year-old girl from Mazar-e Sharif who responded to ...

Portraits Take It From The Top by John Paul Stapleton The Hampden Gallery is almost hidden in the city that is UMass Amherst’s south- west residential area. Its current show, “Head,” fits right in with this setting, as if it were in a metropolitan arts district. Curator D. Dominick Lombardi has brought together contemporary work from all over the United States, Europe and Asia. Every piece shows the breadth of representation that comes with portraiture. Lombardi placed textile pieces by ...

A Continued Dialogue with Paint by Taryn Plumb For Carol Gove, it’s all about the dynamism, the fluidity and the lively play between texture, lines and shapes. “It’s the back and forth between collage and paint, of push and pull, as you’re working,” explained the Peterborough, N.H.-based collage artist, originally trained as a graphic designer. “It’s kind of a continued dialogue, a discussion with the painting as you’re creating it.” Her charismatic, thought-provoking work will be on display in “Continuum” ...

Naoe Suzuki's Thirst For Awareness by Taryn Plumb Especially in first-world countries, water is a resource that’s very often taken for granted – it comes out of the tap, streams out of the shower, is poured into plastic bottles and driven in by the pallet-full on the back of diesel- belching trucks. In her latest body of work, Tokyo-born artist Naoe Suzuki strives for viewers to reassess and deeply contemplate their relationship with water – in all its forms. Her ...

A Win-Win For Artists, Patients and a Health Center by James Dyment ArtUp is not your average exhibition. The viewers are here for a different reason — they are visiting doctors and health professionals. Jurors who sorted through hundreds of submissions after a prospectus was sent out by local arts organizations curated the artwork. Donors have the opportunity to purchase the work to be permanently exhibited within the hallways and common areas of the Lowell Community Health Center. Some are ...

Thirteen large-scale works in oil by Vermont- and Massachusetts- based David Brewster — who says his creative process has always “sought out a kind of theater, often choosing opulent interiors and sylvan landscapes that are somehow distressed” — are featured in “Power- line” from November 4 through 28 at Chase Young Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave. #57, Boston. “Throughout my development I have continued to revisit these same scenarios, with their heightened sense of drama, movement and collapse, inviting the spectator ...