Welcome to our September/October 2015 issue, compiled during the dog days of summer, which are always a challenging time to put together a fall issue due to some Boston galleries taking time off in late August before their regular clientele returns from their summer getaways, many college campus galleries being on break till their school year commences, and artists being away on well-earned vacations and even more well-earned residencies.
But, thanks to our dedicated writers and museum, commercial and campus gallery owners, curators and publicists and exhibiting artists accommodating our timely deadline date, we’re confident we’ve put together a collection of stories that’ll make you want to hop in your car to see more than just the New England foliage.
Lissa Cramer, the exhibitions coordinator at the Tufts University Gallery, arranged for Franklin W. Liu to meet with Shahzia Sikander as soon as she arrived here from New York to help with the installation of her “Parallax” exhibition which he calls “a riveting phantasmagoria” of transcendent looped animation.
Simultaneously, Vera Grant, the gallery director for the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery for African & African-American Art in Harvard Square, which had assembled the work from its “Black Chronicles II” photography exhibition more than two weeks prior to its opening so that we could preview it in person, was giving Artscope’s James Foritano a guided tour of the show one in which he suggests, if you’re in the Boston area, you try to see more than once.
Marguerite Serkin passionately campaigned to preview the arrival of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests at the Peabody Essex Museum, while Linda Chestney was equally enthusiastic about the “Winslow Homer’s Civil War” exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art enough to make a return trip to review her earlier observations.
Meredith Cutler balanced preparing to move her family to a new home with previewing the work that’ll be featured in Paul Rousso’s “Flat Depth” September exhibition at Lanoue Fine Art in Boston’s SoWa District, in which he appropriates paper of all kinds and reinvents it into cultural statements.
Suzanne Volmer battled severe aches and pains from a recent fall to contribute three stories including one that features the ArtProv Gallery, which serves as a central point for the monthly Gallery Night Providence tours that take place from March through November; another previews the Art League of Rhode Island’s “Tangible Thinking” exhibition that is timely for its exploration of how art can play a key role in the STEM and STEAM academic programs intended to educate the next generation of creative and scientific professionals, opening at the new gallery at Providence’s Veteran’s Auditorium (rebranded as “The Vet”) on September 12.
There are some new additions to our masthead in this issue. Rebecca DelMonico previews “Visions of the Uncanny” (which includes cover artist Kriev) at the Blue Wave Art Gallery in Amesbury, Mass., giving us a look at sci-fi artwork that’s become highly collectible among devotees of the genre. John Paul Stapleton, whose contributions to the Artscope zine (zine.artscopemagazine. com) you’ve hopefully read this summer, made a trip to Northern Vermont to put together a wanderlust travelogue of St. Johnsbury, Stowe and Glover just after finishing his summer internship with us. That journal is complemented by Arlene Distler’s preview of Brattleboro-based exhibitions you should try to catch in the months ahead.
We’re also happy to have a contribution from Sarah Fritchey, the gallery director for artSPACE in New Haven, Conn., who provides us with a guide to this October’s month-long City Wide Open Studios, an event that encompasses over 350 artists over four weekends, and does so by breaking the highlights of each weekend into five categories so that art lovers on all levels “The Collector,” “The Kid at Heart,” “The Traditionalist,” “The Conceptualist” and “The Veteran” can attend those activities and venues that most appeal to them.
In future issues, we’d like to feature a collectors’ corner in which private collectors and patrons of the arts would like to discuss their collection or to share what they look for in purchasing work by regional artists. If you’d be willing to participate, please send me an email.
This issue’s centerfold contest winner, with a costume design theme, is Elena Wikstrom. For our next contest, we’re looking for your original metal work; full details can be found in our Classifieds section.
Our next issue will be put together in conjunction with our preparation for our first visit to Art Basel Miami Beach, taking place from December 3 through 6, where we’ve been selected as an exhibitor to be displayed in its collective booth among art publications from around the world; this follows up on our visit to Art Basel Switzerland.
We’re proud once again be asked to represent New England artists to national and international audiences through our reporting, and in the process hope to create an exchange of dialogue and activity where not just contemporary art but also the evolution of contemporary art is brought to our readers in an informative way that also creates a wider recognition of the artists from our region by buyers and collectors worldwide.
If you’re interested in advertising your exhibitions in our November/December 2015 issue, to put them in front of this expanded audience, please call our office at (617) 639-5771.
As always, I encourage you to write me with your take on exhibitions that you travel to after reading about them in the pages of Artscope. We’re always interested in learning about your experiences visiting New England’s galleries, museums and special arts events and how we could enhance future undertakings through our coverage. And if there’s a location in the region where a community of new galleries and visual and performing arts organizations has blossomed that we haven’t covered in these pages, please do share it with us so we can correct that as soon as possible.
Brian Goslow, Managing Editor
bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com