Dear Artscope reader, As we near the end of 2022, I look back at how we slowly regained our ability to get out and view art together – still carefully – and how we seem to have learned how much we appreciate what each of us does to contribute to the art community and life in general. We also learned how important it was to not be silent on issues important to us and how much we count on artists ...

“Sixty Years of Collecting,” a two-semester exhibition at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at UMass Amherst, showcases 112 works from the museum’s permanent art collection. To some visitors, descending the concrete plazas, steps and ramps of 1960s Brutalist architecture leading to the Fine Arts Center’s entrance may recall academic fortresses and student protests. To younger ones, it’s a skateboard park. Although backpacks must stay outside, inside around the corner hangs Ryan McGinness’s silkscreened skateboard, lush with vegetation, and ...

For every step forward, there are, in the case of the year 2022, a dozen steps backward. Call this the year of the tumbling dice. Where does the strange momentum backward in the realm of human rights lead? Some saw it coming. Most didn’t. There is a cost associated with divisiveness, with complete lack of empathy and understanding. Most of all, when the tide moves in a certain direction, the attempt to stifle basic autonomy and human rights affects every ...

A trend of social commentary has emerged among the latest generation of glass artists, a conceptual development evident in “Fired Up: Glass Today,” an exhibition curated by Brandy Culp, Richard Koopman Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. There are over 100 artworks by 57 artists in the exhibit. Included are works by luminaries of contemporary glass such as Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra and others, that foundationally frame perspectives by a new ...

Merriam Webster provides a primary and secondary definition of Indigenous: “produced, growing, living or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment” and “of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group.” Both definitions might be applied to the cultural foundations of two expansive exhibitions running concurrently at the Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire. “Park Dae Sung: Ink Reimagined” and “Maḏayin: Eight Decades ...

How about a wonderful, wandering art-filled day trip (or two) through Seacoast New Hampshire and north to Portland? Sometimes it’s just plain exhilarating to jump in the convertible, head north to Maine (or whichever direction you begin from), and simply have fun. Let’s take a leisurely trip and check out some art venues. This trip covers everything from a start-up museum in an up-and-coming artsy town, to a chi-chi boutique-y gallery in Kittery, Maine, a historic former library for one ...

I’ve written hundreds of reviews of galleries, museums and fine craft shows over the years, with many clever theme titles, but I must say this is among the cleverest titles I’ve seen. “Suspended Animation” is a fresh look at the concept and how it can be expressed as art. The mixed mediums of five artists span from assembly work, watercolor and oil paintings to found materials. The artwork selected for this exhibition offers perspectives on daily living and our connections ...

“The Sun Rises in the West and Sets in the East,” on view at Tufts University Art Gallery through December 11, begins in contrast. On one wall, two copper works by Nari Ward —“Restin’ Well” and “Restin’ Paradise” — draw the viewer to examine what look from afar like stars. The pieces radiate a spiritual energy, so bold they nearly have a sound and taste. On the opposite wall, 12 quietly vibrant watercolors by Ali Cherri hang in a row. ...

Upon entering the expansive, light-filled space on the second floor of the Williams College Museum of Art, one can’t help but notice the elegance of the placement of the two- and three-dimensional works by Mary Ann Unger. Each area of the gallery is immensely focused, and the exhibition reads as a chronological map of the artist’s experience. There are a significant number of drawings that not only support the sculpture, but clearly depict the artist’s process. The exhibition makes a ...

Diana Zipeto, the Lowell-based artist who has built her career on the practice of rendering images, was shocked to discover that an MRI is more of a map than a photo. This fact is one that she gleaned through a combination of life experience and creative inquiry: after looking at MRIs capturing the progression of her father’s recently diagnosed Alzheimer’s, she found herself compelled to understand and render the images herself. Zipeto’s solo show, “Resonance,” on view at Galatea Fine ...

Currently in its seventh exhibition at the Atlantic Wharf Gallery in downtown Boston, the group show Shared Habitat Earth is a vibrant and eclectic collection of works all connected to the central theme of combating climate change. The words “Shared Habitat Earth” came to local artist Barbara Eskin while walking through the woods, and the meaning behind them was revealed through conversations with her creative community. The intent of the show is to interweave art and activism, using the works ...

Printmaker Bethia Brehmer’s Wisconsin youth has stayed with her through her changes of venues from Sheboygan to Madison, to Amherst, Massachusetts and Cape Cod, where she’s lived for decades. Her vegetarian, pacifist parents took her on walks through the woods instilling in her a desire for peace, harmony and nature. She’s a world traveler who lived in Ghana, and has visited India, China, Bali and Europe. Her passion is to connect people to nature through art (she loves that “ART ...

Somerville Museum is hosting the exhibition titled “Sanctuary City,” organized and curated by Julia Csekö, the recipient of the museum’s Community Curator Grant. The exhibition is a group show that includes emerging and well-established local artists. Invited by Csekö, artists were requested to present contemporary artwork that resonates with the theme by exposing sensitive considerations, challenging the idea, the significance, elicited by individual interpretations of the term sanctuary and the concept of a sanctuary city. In 1987, Somerville’s City Council ...

Everyone lives their lives with vivid memories of “how I spent the Covid years!” Sarah Meyers Brent ground out the Covid chaos by combing her home and the town dumps for debris to create romantic, entangling wall sculptures. Brent is an artist with an unerring sense for compositional line, texture and color, evidenced by her solo exhibition, “Out Growth,” at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Brent’s “masterpiece” is one of her smaller works, “Portrait of a WomanandMotherDuringaPandemic.”Clearlyasculpturalself- portrait, ...

If, as an adult, you have read Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” you will remember that Alice is confronted with paradoxes, contradictions in logic, disorientation of time and generally puzzlement at her place in that bewildering environment. The book you may have read in middle school as a fantastical tale takes on deeper, more introspective layers of meaning in the seasoned reading and may have prepared you for the current exhibits at Burlington’s BCA Gallery. The central figure in ...

To get to Lawrence Academy from Cambridge, you must fly over the super-highways of Route 2 (West) and 495 (North), then bear, with some patience, the horse and carriage — and sometimes tractor from a local farm — pace of Route 119 (North, again) to cover around 50 miles in just under an hour — with a few glances at our colorful New England foliage, before arriving in truly picturesque Groton, Massachusetts. Curator Laurie McGovern hailed us from the top ...

t’s probably not a coincidence that Vaughn Sills’ exhibition opened the day after the area’s first frost warning, the warm tones of “This Precious Life” bringing needed heat to those in attendance at its opening reception in the Art Center Gallery at Anna Maria College in the Central Massachusetts town of Paxton. The exhibition, billed as “a select retrospective view of the last 40 years of a photographic life,” is broken into four portions: “Knowing Our Distance” (images exploring the ...

Olivia Bernard’s exhibition of sculpture and two-dimensional work spreads out under the sloping roof of The Stoneleigh- Burnham School’s Geissler Gallery. Hanging sheets of white scrim bound the space on one side, separating her work from that of another well-known installation artist, Karen Dolmanisth. Bernard’s self-curated selections, which span her output of the last 26 years, combine earlier with later works to propose more of a gist than a direct path connecting the lot. Each sculpture demands enough space that, ...

“Live life with no excuses. Travel with no regret.” — Oscar Wilde The art of travel is traveling with art! Are we there yet? While traveling, experiencing the world through the eyes of artists has always provided me with a safe method to understand the context and experience events that instantly connect me closer to the local culture. Inspired by the hiatus provided by the virus spread, with gratitude to science, the traveling industry is bouncing back. This past summer was the perfect ...

“Artists for Ukraine: Transforming Ammo Boxes into Icons,” a powerful installation of three Ukrainian icons painted on the boards of ammunition boxes by Oleksandr Klymenko and Sofia Atlantova, a husband-wife artistic team from Kyiv, Ukraine, will be on view from November 3 through February 13, 2023, at the Museum of Russian Icons, 203 Union St., Clinton, Massachusetts. They’re part of the ongoing “Buy an Icon — Save a Life” project originally created in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine ...