Article Excerpts
Welcome: From Brian Goslow
While most of our writers get to view the shows and work that they write about in person, our fall issue comes with the challenge of previewing shows that have yet to open. In some instances, the work has yet to be fully selected, while galleries, artists and writers are in the midst of their summer vacations. This, coupled with our short lead time, brings a level of difficulty to our intention of timely and relevant content that is not ...Cornered: Heather Ferrell
As August was coming to a close, Heather Ferrell, curator and director of exhibitions at Burlington City Arts, took time from her busy schedule to discuss her vision and process for integrating the thriving downtown Burlington City Arts Center into the greater regional arts scene. In this discussion with Artscope’s Marta Pauer Tursi, she explained what constitutes the 21st century museum experience, how curators engage the community, how she views diversity beyond national or regional identity and the intersection of ...Traversing the Imagination: Wagner at Burlington City Arts
Burlington City Arts in Vermont is our own small-scale Centre Pompidou. I lived in the Marais district of Paris for close to seven years and the Pompidou, a short walk from my apartment, always offered up an experience of art that stayed long after I stepped back into the streets. Burlington City Arts is situated on Church Street, a four-block-long pedestrian downtown vibrant with cafes, local shops, bistro-style outdoor restaurants, pastry shops, street music and the occasional personal street drama. ...CHALLENGING BOUNDARIES: WICKED HARD AT ROOM 83 SPRING
Now entering its sixth year in a Watertown storefront, Room 83 Spring continues to insist local artists challenge their own artistic boundaries — and ours. To this end, directors Ellen Wineberg and Cathleen Daley invited painter Monique Johannet to guest-curate works by six abstract painters with Boston connections. Johannet views 20th century abstraction as an evolving family of practices intertwined with art’s changing history and artists’ personal timelines. Among the artists, who range widely in age and sensibility, she has ...POEMS, PLASTER & PAPER: MORE THAN WORDS AT SIMMONS
On the walls of the Trustman Gallery, shadows from plastic wire, fiber and thread constructions hover over the soft grey texts of blown-up poems, plaster and paper reliefs and white-and-black print-collages. “Linger and Shift” is a collaboration between Boston sculptor Julia Shepley and Scottish-born poet Audrey Henderson. Their separate, yet deeply intermeshed works grew out of monthly conversations begun over a year ago. The longtime friends were spurred to parallel play by a Boston Sculptors Gallery exhibition featuring verbal-visual collaboration. ...KINESTHETIC COMPOSITION: ARCH DEFIES GRAVITY
In her late summer, early fall exhibition at the Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College, Adria Arch explores the next stage of her painting evolution. It’s what she describes as hybrid painting, referencing a January 2018 article by Jason Stopa in the online publication “Hyperallergic,” where he stated: “This very approach might have something to do with the influence of performance invading the space of painting, in which mark-making is liberated from the traditional formal unity that previous paintings occupy ...A BOLD ARTISTIC VOICE: SHABOTT AT FOUR ELEVEN
Laura Shabott is not only an artist who has undergone what she calls “circuitous” life processes to find herself back at painting, drawing and figurative art, she is also, undoubtedly, an intuitive mark maker, a conduit for a glimmering network of centuries of artistic tradition in Provincetown and a person who greets each day boldly using her artistic voice. She creates directly from life, transmuting with a fearless hand all that she’s absorbed, cutting visual planes with lucid intent. Bearing ...SEEING IS BELIEVING: DODD AT OGUNQUIT
Technology says that an airbrush refines a painting. Tradition says it’s a paintbrush. Smart artists know that art is delivered by the eyes, which ignite the senses. Open your eyes at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, offering both natural and artist-created art. At times, you can’t see the boundaries of the two. Place and imagination are blended to the point of overload The entrance to this museum, set above the Atlantic Ocean on ledges of outcropping land, takes your ...OUT AND ABOUT IN CT: WAA SCULPTURE WALK
Nestled within the hills and dales of northwest Connecticut lies a world-class sculpture exhibit that envelops you into its bucolic setting. With pieces as diverse as a “giant tulip” that could have been transplanted from another planet to neoclassical nudes, the show presents bronze and marble figures as well as abstract, kinetic, whimsical, industrialized and thought-provoking works in stone, resin, glass and metal. Officially titled the WAA (Washington Art Association) Sculpture Walk, the exhibit is located in Washington Depot, first ...ROOM TO BREATHE: MALIK IN PROVIDENCE
Saberah Malik is a contemporary process artist deeply connected to the potential and integrity of her materials. She has a reputation of experimentation as a maker of emotive fabric sculptures. This autumn, the artist exhibits textile projects influenced by her Muslim and Pakistani-American background at Atrium Gallery and AS220’s Project Space in Providence, Rhode Island. The Atrium Gallery show, which runs from September 22 through November 10, exhibits Malik’s work in a group context juried by Rhode Island School of ...PARTICIPATORY GUESSING GAME: UNTOLD STORIES AT FOUNTAIN STREET
The immediate condition and activity conveyed within the pictures made by painters Anita Loomis and Alexandra Rozenman is extrapolation. As the title of their current exhibition, “Untold Stories,” directly tells us, the paintings allow and welcome conjecture. The artists have created environments that focus the viewer’s attention towards inference, encouraging the seer to intellectually step into and become part of vague spaces and curious scenes — to participate in a surreal guessing game. For the viewer, the stories within the ...START MAKING SENSE: HOULE QUESTIONS SPACE AND PLACE
On a recent visit to the sites of ancient cave drawings in France, Jenn Houle couldn’t help but be awed and humbled by their sheer majesty and history — but what most struck her, she said, was the “drive and the earnestness” of their prehistoric creators. In some cases, the “artists” would have had to scale rock walls to heights of 25 feet or more; in other instances, they would have been required to squeeze through a 3-foot-wide opening and ...GALLERY NIGHT PROVIDENCE: SHOWCASING URBAN VIBRANCE AND SYNERGY
The vitality of a city is evident from your first moments in it. Urban vibrancy comes from the synergy of different factors — economic opportunities; diversity in all its expressions; dense, concentrated centers with a variety of businesses and architecture where pedestrian traffic is facilitated and encouraged; and, most essential, a city government who sees the success of the arts and culture sector as a quality of life indicator. Providence, Rhode Island is a vibrant city. Its long history of ...FLOWERS OR SEX? CREATURE COMFORTS AT CAA
Four local artists will create an installation of “Creature Comforts” at the Cambridge Art Association’s Kathryn Schultz Gallery from October 6 through November 2. The installation will be accompanied by the sound of spring “peepers” — small frogs that make a resonant pond chorus in the spring with their mating calls — serving as the backdrop for a New Gallery Concert Series event on October 20 at 7 p.m. that brings together new pieces of music and visual art. The ...FROM BOGOTÁ TO BOSTON: STREET ARTISTS AT SSAC
Before Kim Alemian, graphic designer and webmaster for the South Shore Art Center, visited Colombia in 2015, she hadn’t seen street art (or graffiti) as a genuine art form — she saw it as vandalism. That changed during that trip to Bogotá after she and her students were invited to create a mural project for the Hogar Nueva Granada school on the campus of Colegio Fundacion Nueva Granada. The project was a direct result of an earlier visit to Colombia ...ROCKING AND ROLLING: GONSON GOES BEYOND THE IMAGE
“Visages de Punk,” CambridgeSeven’s current exhibition, is Boston photographer JJ Gonson’s ode to Boston’s vibrant punk scene of the mid-to-late 1980s through the first half of the 1990s. This show features fairly unseen photographs of Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith and the many fans and independent artists who made up the music scene of that time period. The work shows a new side to these artists that was only seen by close friends and core members of the music community. In ...COOPER AT LESLEY: CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
In a world where image and imagination merge, Lesley University, in celebration of the recent opening of their newly expanded VFX/Animation Department, is enthusiastically highlighting Kyle Cooper’s signature work in a cursive, vibrant, sequential exhibition, “Kyle Cooper: The Art of The Title,” currently being presented in the Lunder Arts Center’s Roberts Gallery. Since the 1930s, film-credit-sequence design has taken a progressive, quantum leap in purpose and in presentation; its encompassing manner has now evolved into an art form of its ...FUNCTIONAL OR FANCIFUL? BROWN’S SCULPTURAL CONGLOMERATIONS
The motion and glint from the mirrors are the first things to catch your eye. Then you see it: a big metal fish — a yellowfin tuna, in fact — with a propeller in its mouth, gently revolving in the breeze in front of the granite monuments, just past the U-Haul place as you drive west on Tenney Mountain Highway in Plymouth, New Hampshire. “It’s sort of an eclectic combination of working with what I have to make something new,” ...KEEPERS OF THE FLAME: ROCKWELL AND FRIENDS IN STOCKBRIDGE
I first saw him standing beside the pool at a hotel in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. Wavy grey hair, a slender, erect posture and his trademark cravat were unmistakable. It was Norman Rockwell. The year was 1972 and I was on my honeymoon while he and his wife Molly were vacationing. My husband and I greeted him with trepidation, marveling later at his cordiality. That evening, we had drinks with the most famous illustrator of his time and his wife. The ...COMPLEMENTARY CONTRAST: BOBACK AND LEITNER AT GALATEA
Two coinciding solo-artist shows, Jo-Ann Boback’s “Revealing the Obscure,” and Rose Leitner’s “Quiet Chaos,” are on display at Galatea Fine Art this September. Both feature abstract and colorful pieces, and each artist’s body of work complements the other’s perfectly in their oppositional ways of mark making. Boback’s work is full of angular lines. When asked about the significance of the marks, she spoke about her background in design and how “horizontal and vertical lines give definition and also create a ...CAUSE AND EFFECT: THREE VIEWS AT GALATEA
This October, Galatea Fine Art presents three concurrent shows featuring members Philip Gerstein, Barry Margolin and Ronni Komarow. Five-time Galatea exhibitor Gerstein will be showing a new series entitled “Sometimes There Is Bliss.” In a collection of minimal abstract paintings produced with an experimental medium — glass bead gel — Gerstein plays with the medium which lends texture, dances with ambient lighting, and produces visual change dependent on the viewing prospective of the audience. The end product results in rich, ...EARTH’S ADVOCATES: UNCOVERED AT CATAMOUNT
Gerry Bergstein and Gail Boyajian have been addressing the complexities of the human condition and threats to our natural world in distinctly different ways throughout their artistic working lives. Now, in “Gerry Bergstein and Gail Boyajian: Uncovered,” running at the Catamount Arts Center through October 27, these longtime Stratford, Vermont seasonal residents serve up what amounts to a state of the union address on our planet. These two are partners in life, and one can only imagine their dinner conversations. ...CAPSULE PREVIEWS
Featuring “an accomplished group of professionals who are active practitioners of disciplines ranging from digital media, photography, drawing, painting and sculpture, to printmaking and artists’ books,” “SUMMA: Visual Arts Faculty 2018” features artwork created by full- and part-time faculty members of the visual arts department at the College of the Holy Cross, and will be on view through October 12 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, 1 College St., Worcester, Massachusetts. Participating artists include Michael Beatty (associate ...MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH DONNA DODSON
Sally Eyring is a renaissance woman. She is equal parts studio artist in glass and fibers, innovator of 3-D loom techniques and fibre de verre glass casting techniques, proficient educator in local and national weaving guilds, and ESL teacher and activist. Eyring has always loved to make things with her hands — weaving, sewing and working with clay were her earliest creative outlets. She got her start in life as a high school math teacher but successfully transitioned out of ...