artscope magazine: March/April 2009

Welcome Statement: Brian Goslow, managing editor

Brian Goslow, managing editor (bgoslow@artscopemagazine.com)

Welcome Statement, March/April 2009

“What is art now and what is going to be seen as art in the future?”

Our publisher, Kaveh Mojtabai, posed this question to me after being introduced to a number of abstract painters whose works seemed to capture the mood of a country trying to get a handle on what’s inarguably a downturn, if not a depression – but still a period where visual art is grabbing the public’s attention.

“What kind of art is going to get us through these difficult times?” Mojtabai asked, before challenging me to address this question with our coverage in this and upcoming issues of artscope. “What will reflect our mood and fears and end up on our walls to help us get through these days emotionally? What forms of art will re-emerge stronger on the other side?”

So where will gallery and art-making trends be when the fall out ends? Shepard Fairey’s “Supply and Demand” exhibition at the ICA Boston has attracted great attention for a number of reasons, not the least being his arrest for plastering his poster art around the city without permission. The show has also attracted a younger crowd, partly drawn by his “Obama Hope” image, partly inspired by seeing someone’s work mirror and interact with their lives – they’ve attached it to their skateboards, cellphones and clothing. The show has reopened the discussion of street art’s place in the business end of the art world and society at large; we’ve used the show as a starting point to discuss how the work of artists like Fairey will fare in the years ahead – and how younger art lovers get their fill.

I asked James Foritano to visit the ICA and offer his reflections on whether Fairey would become an indelible mark on our cultural map and consistently challenge our view of the world in a way similar to Andy Warhol in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Similarly, Jim Dyment, who by day is gallery and exhibits manager at the Whistler House Museum of Art, explores the work of graphic artists Karl LaRocca and Jef Scharf Dugan, AKA Kayrock and Wolfy of Brooklyn, whose “When Art Imitates Life Imitation Art” exhibition arrives at UMass Lowell’s University Gallery in mid-April. Their findings may surprise you.

Meanwhile, Alexandra Tursi calls our attention to William Cordova and Major Jackson’s “More Than Bilingual” exhibition at Burlington, Vermont’s Fleming Museum. The show combines drawing, installation, video and poetry rooted on the streets and on the dance floor - multi media overdrive for our oversensualized times.

While those works could be what Mojtabai called “art of the moment and art of the movement,” modern book making has yet to garner the widespread attention it deserves. Sarah E. Fagan investigates the latest innovations in the field with her review of “Shelter: Unique Visions of a Universal Subject Through Artists’ Books,” one of three bookcentric shows currently on view at the Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross; others can be seen at UMass Lowell (see Capsule Previews for information on Karen E. Roehr’s “An Art of Smallness”) and Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art (“The Book As Art: Artists’ Books From The National Museum of Women in the Arts”).

We also review shows celebrating other time honored crafts: “Sidney Hurwitz: 50 Years of Prints” at the Boston University Art Gallery; “Renewal: Printmakers from the New Northern Ireland” at the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire; ceramic artists Jason Greene and Derek Harding at Rhode Island University; and “Glass Masters” at Portland’s Daniel Kany Gallery.

We’d be errant not to acknowledge the effect recent economic events have had on the business of art. Susan Schwalb, a longtime fixture on the Boston art scene, whose work is on view at Simmons College as this issue hits the street, brings a firsthand perspective on the downturn’s effect on artists’ ability to make a living.

The winner of this issue’s centerfold contest is Tracy Spadafora, with her encaustic paintings exploring the mingling of the organic and the manufactured. Our judges were Joanne Mattera, author of “The Art of Encaustic Painting” and director of the Encaustic Conference at Montserrat College of Art; Barbara O’Brien, former Director of the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College and keynote speaker for the 2009 Encaustic Conference at Montserrat College of Art; and artscope writer Hope Stockman.

For our July/August issue, we’re looking for submissions of fiber and fabric art. Full details can be found in the classified section in the back of this issue or by writing centerfold@artscopemagazine.com.

This issue represents the start of our fourth year. We’ve been blessed with advertisers and readers who have supported us over our first three years and writers whose work we’ve watched improve and grow to the point we’re confident they’ll be contributing to the region’s art discourse for years to come. Thanks to all of you.

Letters to the Editor

Dear artscope magazine,

I received your magazine and was delighted to find that you had written a capsule preview of my show in Brookline. It was a wonderful article and it worked well with the ad and image that accompanied it. Hope you can make it to the show; the opening was a huge success. I will certainly keep artscope in mind for future advertising of my exhibits.

Gillian Frazier
Lowell, MA

Dear artscope magazine

Thanks to Sarah E. Fagan for including my “Kindred” exhibition at the Boston Arts Academy in the Jan. 16 artscope e-mail Blast! I really loved the tone of the writing. I hope that one day your magazine will review me. You all do a wonderful job of covering this region and presenting art in a way that makes it accessible to all.

Ekua Holmes

Dear artscope magazine

artscope is a fabulous magazine. I am completely impressed with the quality of images presented and the fine New England art world coverage! It was very rewarding to see the article about the Attleboro Arts Museum Members’ Show.

Richard Kattman
Hollisten, MA

Dear artscope magazine

We received our January/February 2009 artscope today and we thank James Foritano for his wonderful and lively review of our Annual Members’ Juried Exhibition. We’re so pleased to be in such fine company, and feel a special connection to Jim’s screaming clipboard. How and where can we purchase additional copies? We received a box today - and many artist members have already looted our inventory (this is a good problem).

Mim Brooks Fawcett, Executive Director, Attleboro Arts Museum
Attleboro, MA

(If you don’t already receive our twice-monthly artscope’s e-mail Blast!s, subscribe by sending your email address to emailblast@artscopemagazine.com)

Master of Reality: Kanishka Raja, Angela Dufresne, Chie Fueki, Francesca DiMattio and Matthew Day Jackson

James Foritano

Rose Art Museum
Brandeis University

415 South Street

Waltham, Massachusetts

Through April 51

SNUGGLED AS IT IS BETWEEN THE BLOCKBUSTERS "HANS HOFMANN: CIRCA 1950" AND "SAINTS AND SINNERS," THIS EXHIBITION CAN BE FORGIVEN FOR ITS SOMEWHAT PORTENTOUS TITLE. FOR ONE, IF IT DIDN'T ASSUME SOME CLAIM TO OUR ATTENTIONS, WOULD IT BE HEARD AT ALL OVER THE BOOMING SALUTES ISSUING FROM ITS NEIGHBORING WARHOLS, LICHTENSTEINS AND RAUSCHENBERS - NOT TO MENTION THOSE MAGISTERIAL HOFMANNS?

Additionally, the “Master of Reality” title is addressed as much to the students in guest curator Joseph Wardwell’s fine art classes as it is to us. The five young, or youngish, New York artists whose six works make up this intimate exhibit have each mastered his or her reality so far as to climb at least to emerging heights on the ladder of success. Such mastery is a beacon to students whose travels have just begun on obscure, tremulous first steps.

Matthew Day Jackson ascends to his pinnacle in two works of careful, if comically precarious, balance. “Endless Column” stacks up a series of vividly reproduced oils and etchings by masters of different eras of that icon of confusion, the Tower of Babel. Jackson sets his gorgeously detailed, art-historical towers head-to-tail, but slightly off-center, as if daring each viewer to nudge them into some serendipitous confusion of his own.

“Weight and Measure,” Jackson’s second column, stands on a totemlike base of dark, geometric form that swells upward and splits into two stubby branches: a saguaro cactus and the crown of a leafy tree balance what looks to be a spinning starmap of the galaxy. There is a sense of challenging forces precariously linked; at the same time, homely details seduce us to believe that what we are seeing is as stable and familiar as the items on top of our own dresser. Perhaps both views, judiciously assimilated, are true.

The exhibition is broken into four sections. In “Theater of Heroism,” the concept of polar space is shown as fertile ground for landscape painters, who presented cultural heroes against the backdrop of daunting environments. The “U.S.S. Vincennes in Disappointment Bay,” an 1840 oil on canvas painting attributed to Captain Charles Wilke, depicts the flagship off the coast of Antarctica at the farthest point south that any vessel on that expedition had ever reached. There is no real drama here. The work is a kind of staged heroism done up in portraiture.

Chie Fueki’s “The Nature of How We See” is a vision of a floral world pieced together as delicately as brocade. It is as if a classic kimono were opened up deliciously to our connoisseur’s eye, demanding nothing more nor less from us than to judge each flower’s exquisitely crafted symmetry, pastel perfection. But, wait a minute! This mesmerizing pastorale clothes the naked torso of an athlete — a symbol of power from Greek and Roman times right up to our modern gridiron gladiators. And, sure enough, those two oval zeros on that swelling chest conjure up some apocalyptic end-run, thundering towards our placid connoisseur’s gaze with intentions impossible, and yet, imperative, to read!

Kanishka Raja’s “The Dissolution of the Prepublic” is Raja’s personal roller coaster — as replete with seduction as it is with irony. On the one hand, each view in this five-panel panorama presents an impersonal and somberly colored space — an airport, or some anonymously “international” building — down which the eye plunge

BEBE BEARD: WITH OR WITHOUT YOU

Hope M. Stockman

HallSpace
950 Dorchester Avenue
Dorchester, Massachusetts

April 18 through May 23

"IT ALL STARTED WITH A JAR OF STUFF AND A VIDEO CAMERA," BEBE BEARD SAID OF THIS MULT-MEDIA VIDEO, DRAWING AND SCULPTURE INSTALLATION, PART OF THE 2009 BOSTON CYBERARTS FESTICAL.

I visited Beard’s studio in industrial South Boston on a snowy Saturday morning, and she greeted me with a hug, a block of Gruyere, farmer’s market raspberries and popovers from the district’s beloved Flour bakery. Were Tim Burton to make a film about the colorful career of a window-dresser turned video artist starring Helena Bonham Carter, it would be Bebe Beard’s biopic. She produced the jar of stuff that started it all, a tall jar full of iron oxide powder resembling charcoal. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked.

For “With or Without You,” Beard coats ball bearings in the iron oxide pigmentand pulls them across sheets of paper using magnets. These experiments inmovement and line are captured in short films made by Beard and set to audioby sound artist Lou Cohen. The 10 videos and 100 accompanying drawings willbe projected and hung on HallSpace’s walls and floor.

“Through the process of capturing the video material, the drawings become the artifacts of making the video,” said Beard, who’s interested in the physical aspect of the process, and the tension

LAURA SCHIFF BEAN: JOURNEY

Sarah E. Fagan

Lanoue Fine Art

125 Newbury Street
Boston

March 7 through April 5

IT IS TEMPTING TO DESCRIBE LAURA SCHIFF BEAN AS "A PAINTER OF DRESSES." IN FACT, IT TAKES A CERTAIN POETIC CREATIVITY TO EXPRESS THE ARTISTS AND HER WORK OTHERWISE: "SHE IS A FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTER - BUT WITHOUT BODIES, AND WITHOUT FACES." YET THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT BEAN IS.

“I don’t think of myself as ‘doing dresses’” the artist told me during a visit to her Framingham, Mass. studio. “I think I do figures.” Bean’s garments are nontraditional portraits of women, focusing on draping, twirling, shaping clothing: simple, slightly worn, in shades of white, black and red. They are carved out of the environment like portraits, even the whites alive with myriad textures and colors. The titles of Bean’s paintings are emotionally descriptive without being literally so: “On the Edge of It All,” “Putting Herself Out There,” “Day of Resolve” and “Day of the Full Moon.” Presented is a pivotal moment in the life of the figure, and lack of context coupled with the invisibility of the body makes each painting all the more soulful, sensuous, ominous and something beyond pretty.

The garments purposefully lack embellishment and decoration, a move made by Bean to emphasize the figure, the brushstrokes and the paint. The viewer has no little detail in which to hide, and has no choice but to confront the painting full-on. Looming slightly larger-than-life, and nearly always frontfacing, the garments are confrontational. You are watching something important happen, perhaps even being addressed. Do you feel underdressed, overdressed? Nostalgic? Uncomfortable? Into what intimate moment have you stumbled that you are encountering a woman in the dark wearing nothing but

ARTIST BIO: KATHY HALAMAKA AND GARY DUEHR

Franklin W. Liu

Bromfield Gallery

450 Harrison Avenue
Boston

April 1 through 25

IT'S AS IF ONE WERE GAZING DOWN TWO DIVERGENT ROADS CITED IN A 1916 ROBERT FROST POEM: "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN." TWO ARTISTS WALK THE OVERGROWN PATH OF THEIR OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES; ONE UTILIZES A COMPOSITE OF IMAGES, WHILE THE OTHER DEPLOYS A TROMPE L'OEIL MONTAGE. THUS TWO PERSONAL TRAILS TRACK POETICALLY INTO THE PAST, CONVERGING BACK TO A SINGLE POINT OF ORIGIN IN A SHOW TITLED "ARTIST BIO" AT THE BROMFIELD GALLERY.

Two distinct interpretations are typically given to the Robert Frost poem, one treating it as literal and the other as irony. Likewise, artist Kathy A. Halamka’s journey “Postmemory Quilts” is an ironic composite of real images from her childhood, concocted with evocative,

She studied with Rodin in Paris at the turn of the last century and Fuller carries forward her teacher’s strength and tenderness in such bravura works as the group sculpture “Danse Macabre” and in the deeply felt portrait bust “Woman Glancing to Her Right.” There is an intimately observed quality to the art in this studio-cumgallery which creates a hush in which one can almost hear the scrape of Ms. Warrick’s chisel and the tap of her mallet, both silent now, on her original work table. borrowed icons of her Korean cultural heritage; artist Gary Duehr’s trompe l’oeil images are framed as literal “Fractures,” albeit tendered as retro-fiction, superimposed over his childhood family photographs retrieved from a trip home when his father died a few years ago.

In her South End and in his Somerville studio, I sat down respectively with Halamka and Duehr for a leisurely discourse to view their works and hear them delineate the impetus of their art..

Halamka said her work is mostly about energy and transition — and memories. Her art is expressed as a floor-installation: a selection of 150 equilateral triangles of birch wood, each piece

SIDNEY HURWITZ: FIVE DECADES

Catherine Laferriere

Boston University Art Gallery
855 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston

Through March 29

WITH THIS EXHIBITION, THE BOSTON UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY AND THE BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS PAY HOMAGE TO ONE OF THEIR OWN BY CELEBRATING THE WORK OF THIS BOSTON BASED ARTIST IN HIS FIRST CAREER RETROSPECTIVE. "SIDNEY HURWITZ: FIFTY YEARS" IS A TOUR THROUGH TIME AND SPACE AS THE ARTIST NARRATES DECADES OF EVOLVING STYLE AND SUBJECTS. IT'S ALSO A PARTICULAR TESTAMENT TO THE BOSTON UNIVERSITY ART PROGRAMS THAT CONTINUE TO REFINE, CULTIVATE AND KEEP TALENT.

Hurwitz, a native of Worcester, Mass., earned his Mastervin Fine Arts Degree at Boston University in 1959. “The program was very much based on a conservatory ideal,” he said. Students maintained an intensely classical focus on drawing and painting with an emphasis on the figure. Hurwitz specifically pursued figure painting but was left unsatisfied and refrained from public showings. In 1965, he returned to BU as a faculty member, and several years later, while on sabbatical in London, shifted his focus onto the urban landscape. The city’s industrial forms — the railways, bridges, and docks along the river Thames — replaced the classical human figure as Hurwitz’s primary subject.

He traveled extensively and captured industrial architectural forms across America and Europe in etchings and aquatint. With pointed detailing and watercolor washes, Hurwitz renders his urban and manufacturing structures with a serenity often reserved for more natural subjects. His ventilators seem to hum quietly along the Thames. His storage tanks rest peacefully abandoned. His subway lines are eerily absent of motion. Even his street scenes conspicuously lack people and action. That empty nuance combined with the warm water colors in Hurwitz’s later works echo the emptiness of Hopper’s deserted streets.

In Sidney Hurwitz’s alleyways, it always seems to be

BÉATRICE DAUGE KAUFMANN

Linda K. Pilgrim

Consulate of Switzerland/ Swissnex Boston

420 Broadway
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Through May 31

When I first saw the work of Béatrice Dauge Kaufmann at the Swiss Consulate in 2006, I was immediately and viscerally taken in by her luscious abstract paintings and challenged myself to articulate her visual work in words. Her palette — and my reaction to it — struck me: I almost wanted to eat it. I felt like a kid staring at cartons of creamy colors at an ice cream stand, trying to decide which delicious ones to taste.

Subsequently, I learned that she perceives the colors of her adopted home of New England through gorgeously tinted lenses. Maybe it’s a Swiss thing — like their ability to make chocolate — but she doesn’t see the gray that dominates my view and that of painters of the New England seascapes and landscapes throughout history.

This new body of work is equally tantalizing to the eye as that 2006 show, but her development as a painter and as a special “perceiver of color” stands out, quite literally, in space. Dauge Kaufmann, I’ve discovered, has pushed through the boundaries of her previously abstracted landscapes and captured the planes of space itself — in colorful compositions that articulate a “slice” of space. Like receivers of invisible radio waves, I can imagine her canvases as “receivers” and illuminators of the particles that make up the space they inhabit.

This new body of work is equally tantalizing to the eye as that 2006 show, but her development as a painter and as a special “perceiver of color” stands out, quite literally, in space. Dauge Kaufmann, I’ve discovered, has pushed through the boundaries of her previously abstracted landscapes and captured the planes of space itself — in colorful compositions that articulate a “slice” of space. Like receivers of invisible radio waves, I can imagine her canvases as “receivers” and illuminators of the particles that make up the space they inhabit.

They examine what we would normally ignore as the “space between” us and the wall it hangs on; Kaufmann has translated the air into lusciously visible planes articulated by color. Her compositions capture the place where conversations, reverberations and sensations take place, always with the possibility of a connection being made. It is as if, when picking up her palette knife covered with pigmented oil medium, she begins a non-verbal conversation

SHELTER: UNIQUE VISIONS OF A UNIVERSAL SUBJECT THROUGH ARTIST'S BOOKS

Sarah E. Fagan

Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery
College of the Holly Cross
1 College Street
Worcester, Massachusetts

Through March 31

LOOKING INTO THE GLASS CASES AT THIS COLLECTION OF ARTIST'S BOOKS WAS NOT UNLIKE VIEWING RARE INSECTS PINNED UP ON THE WALL. SOME WERE BEAUTIFUL AND EPHEMERAL: THE BUTTERFLIES; SOME STRONG AND ARMORED: THE RHINOCEROS BEETLES.

But far from all of the artist’s books included in this exhibition are encased in glass. Gloved, viewers are able to handle half of the show. Some tiny like dolls’ books, or closable like boxes, others unfolding like accordions, the books beckon to be explored. The interaction required by the medium was one viewing aspect Cantor wanted to keep, whenever possible, when it became the fifth host of the exhibition.

Veronica Morgan, one of the show’s creators, put out a call to artists over a year ago asking for books that dealt with a take on the word “shelter.” From shield and protection to house and home and everything in between, artists from around the world interpreted, and an exhibit of around 60 works was created. The interpretation

MASKS: THE MAGIC OF TRANSFORMATION

Roanna Forman

Belmont Gallery of Art
19 Moore Street
Belmont, Massachusetts

Through March 20

WHEN I FIRST ENTERED THE GALLERY, I THOUGHT, 'LET ME OUT OF HERE!' TWO ROOMS FULL OF HEADS, SOME ATTACHED TO BODIES, MOST NOT, STARED AT ME LIKE SOME AMUSEMENT PART PROP ROOM AFTER HOURS.

Masks, creating characters, hiding the humdrum, or turning it inside out to create alter egos, are the subjects of this exhibit. What makes these masks special is that their creators wear them; performance artists all, they design for and act out the total fantasy, whether it’s someone else’s story or their own. In fact, they’ve turned up in theater productions, Boston First Night Parades and New York’s Halloween revelries. To invest oneself so totally in character creation is a rare luxury for an artist.

The majority of the pieces are curator Eric Bornstein’s. He has filled the rest of the exhibit with those of his colleagues at Behind the Mask Theatre, of which he is founder and artistic director. Bornstein’s masks show off his versatility and superior craftsmanship. The in-your-face, red and gold Asian Dragon head with orange and yellow tinted raffia beard gloats over multicolored, partly iridescent fabric. Originally used in an Emerson theater production and later in Boston’s First Night, it couldn’t be farther aesthetically from the chiseled “Cat-Eyed Maiden” commissioned for Behind the Mask Theatre’s “Sho,” with its authentically rendered red- slit lips and powder-white face surrounding almond glass eyes.

For “Owl Shaman,” Bornstein used earth tones in a stylized face of crescents, ring shapes and oversized beak with a natural raffia beard. And three farcical, bearded hobgoblins created for King Richard’s Faire, a replica

KAYROCK & WOLFY: WHEN ART IMITATES LIFE IMITATION ART

Jim Dyment

University Gallery at UMass Lowell
McGauvran Student Union, First Floor
71 Wilder Street
Lowell, Massachusetts

April 13 through May 13

Brooklyn comes to Lowell when this dynamic duo from Monster Island exhibits at UMass Lowell’s University Gallery. Celebrity artists Kayrock and Wolfy are creative screen printers with a sense of humor. What’s it like being part of the artist community at Monster Island? “It’s a pretty rad community,” say the pair. “It’s one step up from a clubhouse and one step down from a cult. It’s like free childcare for adults.”

The seven patterns resembling 19th century adorned chairs of PIXNIT’S “Parlous” wall installation look splendid in their cocktail dress shapes, the swirls and shapes of their majestically carved “wooden” bases “sanded” to perfection. Its top pattern, as spectacular as you’d find in any mansion, looks as if it was roller painted on, though you can’t figure out how. It’s a spectacular first impression of the show.

They consider themselves happy to be working artists, first and foremost, and embrace all forms of art rather than create a single recognizable form. “I consider myself a person who is lucky to have a creative task to address daily,” said Wolfy, AKA Jef Scharf. The pair met years ago and formed a band called Roxy Pain. Since then, they’ve channeled their creativity into a successful company, Kayrock Screenprinting, Inc. By designing and printing music posters, books and album cover art, they’ve become well known in the Brooklyn area.

Album cover art is another specialty. They’ve recently designed a box set for Nada Surf. Most smaller bands don’t have the money for posters, so they’ve been designing posters for bigger bands on tour and special events. Kayrock Screenprinting also produces artist editions and books involving artists that work closely with them

SHEPARD FAIREY: SUPPLY AND DEMAND

James Foritano

Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston
100 Northern Avenue
Boston

Through August 15

ALTHOUGH THE WORDS STREET ARTIST AND OEUVRE DON'T SEEM TO FIT TOGETHER, EXCEPT SATIRICALLY, THE ICA HAS DIGNIFIED 39-YEAR-OLD SHEPARD FAIREY'S 20-YEAR CAREER WITH A 250 PIECE RETROSPECTIVE IN A SEVEN GALLERY, SEVEN THEMED EXHIBITION. AND FOR THIS VIEWER IT NEVER WORE THIN. IN PARTICULAR, IT WAS FAIREY'S ALERT SHOWMANSHIP THAT KEPT ON DELIVERING RICH PAYLOADS OF NOSTALGIA, IRONY AND INTRIGUE.

The technique of stenciling and its more sophisticated modern counterpart, screen printing, has a pedigree going back to the cave walls where artists would lay their hands down on a rough rock surface and, perhaps with a hollow bone to focus its stream, blow pigment from their mouths to create a “signature” outline where the spray was blocked by their unique hand. Thus, was the human desire to signify and to be “read” by others born in days when the human enterprise was a hazardous and lonely venture.

Since then, our “cave walls” have become, to say the least, much more crowded with signs and symbols, but even in their oppressive numbers they retain that power of the original splay-fingered hand to fascinate us with their open-ended meanings — with what we can’t see as well as what we can.

Even the simplest of Fairey’s stencils contains realms of open space, sometimes black and white, sometimes subtly shaded, sometimes printed or collaged with newsprint or wallpaper patterns and/or a potpourri of evocative and multi-valent symbols.

In the first gallery, Andre the Giant’s brooding features are carved broadly from white space. This bold and simple contrast fits well with the single, block-typed message “Obey” underneath his commanding features. Nevertheless, something of the ambiguity of that original hand complicates our interpretation of this simple-seeming injunction. Are these brooding features communicating a demand or a suggestion? Are these features broodingly applied and is very much open to interpretation. For example,

AZ FINE ARTS

Brian Goslow

339 Washington Street
Wellesley, Massachusetts

By the sound of his laughter that seems to follow each visitor entering AZ Fine Arts gallery, you can tell Peter Ziegelman truly loves his work. That passion comes through even louder when you see the quality of the work he’s put together for his customers.

“It’s constantly changing,” said Ziegelman, who opened the gallery in 2005 in the former Wellesley Hills train station designed by H.H. Richardson. The architect also designed the landmark Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston. “I liked that he was an artist and it would be a place we’d sell art.”

Around the corner, classically (and Montserrat) taught Scott Holloway’s “Dreaming of the Original Sin” features a jawless skull underlined with two crossed bones surrounded by sparkling gold paint that melts into a glossed palate holding eerie, barely decipherable writing. It’s a format that’s made for much desired t-shirt designs that have introduced him to new audiences.

Prior to AZ’s opening, Ziegelman spent six-to-eight months selecting original artists to work with. He’s never stopped searching. “I’m always looking at artist galleries online and going to a lot of shows throughout New England,” he said. “And I’ve been able to attract new artists

PULL OF GRAVITY: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELIJAH GOWIN AND EMMET GOWIN

Roanna Forman

Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road
Winchester, Massachusetts

Through March 29

Like father, unlike son, could be the subtext of this exhibition. First, you see Elijah’s grainy, digital, color “Waiting 1,” where a group of white Christians, their hands lifted hallelujah-like skyward, stand in thigh-deep water around a black believer, a misty smoggy horizon in the distance. Next to that is Emmet’s smaller print — an aerial black and white of craters at a nuclear test site in Nevada, looking eastward from a dark foreground, the distant mountain range dunelike in comparative scale. The giant, uniform holes in the sand are like imprints from a game of bowling by space aliens.

Contrast is the major constant in this show.

Nevertheless, there are some similarities. Gravity, which pulls all things, is a backdrop tension behind Emmet’s celebrated aerial landscapes of test sites and contaminated land: he could only have photographed them from a plane battling that physical force. In Elijah’s series “Of Falling and Floating” all the subjects interact with gravity — defying it momentarily, succumbing to it midair, buoyed up and cushioned from it in water. Both photographers

JUDITH SOWA: VERMEER REVISITED

Rick Agran

Three Graces Gallery
105 Market Street
Portsmouth, Massachusetts;/br>

March 6 through 30

JUDITH SOWA'S ARTISTIC COMING OF AGE IN THE 1970S WAS TRICKY. WHILE STUDYING PAINTING IN CHAMPAIGN-URBANA AND PEORIA, ILLINOIS, SHE FOUND THE "IDEA" REALM INTERESTING. AND SO SHE FOUND THE PROCESS OF PAINTING, INVESTIGATIONS OF COLOR AND SELF-EXPLORATION, BUT THERE WERE TIMES SHE FELT A BIT AT SEA. "IT WAS EXPECTED." SHE SAID, "TO BE ABSTRACT." ABSTRACTION HELD SWAY IN HER CLASSES AND HER PAINTING EDUCATION, BUT WHEN SHE LEFT THE MIDWEST, THE REAL - OR REPRESENTATIONAL - WORLD BEGAN CALLING.

Sowa, now based in Ogunquit, Maine, found herself in her first studio in Boston. Her ideological homecoming began in the National Gallery in 1995 when she saw the largest collection of Vermeers assembled since 1696. The light, color, faces and history transfixed her. It was a relief and a surprise to become fascinated by the Vermeers. “I liked the serenity of them,” she said. After the mental exercise of abstract painting, she felt relieved to be painting things of the world.

The Dutch master reintroduced her to realism through “The Milkmaid.” She began painting 4’ x 4’ and 5’ x 5’ Vermeer studies, like a jazz improviser, doing the “standards” with variations. Sowa loved exploring what called to her in the women’s work Vermeer portrayed. “He painted women… working, loafing on the job, sleeping,” she said, and her feeling of location was tangible. She enjoyed “being able to identify with that person in the kitchen” as compared to other historical paintings that glorified the woman “on the throne with a crown on her head.”

Sowa began isolating Vermeer’s women on canvas, pulling them out of their scenarios and putting them on fields of color, adding text, crackled textures, words

DEREK HARDING AND JASON GREEN

Meredith Cutler

Bannister Gallery
Rhode Island College
600 Mount Pleasant Avenue
Providence, Rhode Island;/br>
April 2 through 28

Ceramic artists Derek Harding and Jason Green share a friendship, a medium and a common vocation; they are both Massachusetts high school art instructors. This exhibition, curated by RIC Associate Professor of Art Bryan Steinberg, positions these two artists, working in such parallel realms, at the fork of a seemingly common path diverging in the results of their labor.

Both artists employ creative moldmaking techniques derived from historical industrial practices. Harding’s modular “Saddle” was created while in residency at Kohler Co., the nation’s leading manufacturer of plumbingware. Green discovered an affinity for brickmaking while in residence at Maine’s Watershed Ceramics Center, the site of a former brick factory.

While the word “clay” evokes images of messy handprints and the warm mud of wheelwork, Harding prefers things smooth — his medium of choice is slip cast porcelain. The casting process enables Harding to create pristine forms devoid of fingerprints, in a fine balance of precious vs. industrial. To achieve this finish, however, he employs many hand intensive

NEW/NOW THE AMALGAMATE: NICOLE DUENNEBIER

Tayrn Plumb

New Britain Museum of American Art
56 Lexington Street
New Britain, Connecticut;/br>
Through April 26

Woods of dusk and smoky brown shadows. A felled tree, ribbon of encircling red attracting moths, butterflies, caterpillars, dragonflies. Willowy and near transparent in the nighttime wilderness, they are greedy, festering, chewing. At the edge of the swirling feast, lizards — tongues lolling, bellies fat, gulping larvae.

Entitled “Tumult,” this is a scene of life and death; growth and decay; beauty and revulsion. Its creator, young artist Nicole Duennebier, who graduated from the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts and the Maine College of Art and now lives in Somerville, Mass., explores such contradictions of the natural world in this exhibition. Her 21 canvases share a muted and dank color scheme: rust-charred reds, rotting browns, murky greens. The few bursts of vibrancy act as highlighters — flamboyant coral or crimson — and represent the rarity and fleeting quality of beauty.

“Caviar Snare,” for instance, draws eyes with a formless, floating elegance of luminescent red caviar. Beneath it, in a rot of brown, shadows of antennaed bugs and slugs crawl and creep. Upon closer inspection, more can be seen in the haze — amoebas,

RENEWAL: PRINTMAKERS FROM THE NEW NORTHERN IRELAND

Rick Agran

University of New Hampshire Museum of Art
Paul Creative Arts Center
30 College Road
Durham, New Hampshire;/br>
Through April 8

EIGHTEEN IRISH ARTISTS ARE REPRESENTED IN THIS COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITION BETWEEN WASHINGTON, D.C.'S INTERNATIONAL ARTS & ARTISTS, THE BELFAST PRING WORKSHOP, SEACOURT PRINT WORKSHOP AND THE ARTS COUNCIL OF NORTHERN IRELAND, WITH THE NEW ECONOMIC OPENNESS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE RESOLUTION OF POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS STRIFE IN IRELAND, THE STAGE HAS BEEN SET FOR CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC RENAISSANCE. THUS UNH ENJOYS THE "RENEWAL." BELFAST AND BANGOR, COUNTY DOWN, NORTHERN IRELAND, HAVE LONG LEF THE WAY AS CULTURAL CENTERS AND MUCH EMPHASIS HAS BEEN PLACED ON THE CREATIVE ECONOMY AS A DRIVER OF BOTH SPIRITUAL AND URBAN RENEWAL IN NORTHERN IRELAND.

Unusual to Americans is the idea of art centers like the Belfast Print Workshop in Belfast and the Seacourt Print Workshop in Bangor, established in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s rare in the US that rookies and established artists work in one place, share tools and presses, work in multiple print disciplines, and show together. These unique arrangements offer members and communities of artists (of all abilities) traditional and experimental art and print media opportunities. This includes gallery and exhibit space, access to international shows, working studios, Renewal : Printmakers from the New Northern Ireland and classes in lithography, etching, screen and relief printing, book making, and digital printmaking. For established artists, the workshops provide technical and professional development and residencies too.

For those who love textual works, art books and evocative ephemera, the multimedia work of Belfast’s Jill McKeown stands ready to intrigue. As a member of Seacourt, her work’s been seen on three continents: Vancouver, British Columbia and Washington D.C.

MORE THAN BILINGUAL: WILLIAM CORDOVA AND MAJOR JACKSON

Alexandra Tursi

Robert Hull Fleming Museum
University of Vermont
61 Colchester Avenue
Burlington, Vermont;/br>
Through May 10

UPON ENTERING THE MUSEUM I IMMEDIATELY REALIZED THAT MY VISIT HAD COINCIDED WITH A BOOK SIGNING BY A POPULAR MAINE ARTIST AND CHILDREN'S BOOK ILLUSTRATOR, WHICH MEANT THAT THE MUSEUM HAD BECOME A STIMULATING, ART FILLED PLAYGROUND. I CRINGED, SEEING A SMALL CHILD RUNNING DIRECTLY TOWARDS A CANVAS WITH OUTSTRETCHED HANDS SHOUTING, "MOM IS THIS WET? IT LOOKS WET..." LUCKILY, THE YOUNG CONNOISSEUR WAS SNATCHED AWAY BEFORE TOUCHING THE CANVAS.

“More Than Bilingual” invites interactivity, from the iPods lining the walls on which viewers can listen to Jackson recite his poems to video screens with films by and about both men. It’s unique in that it revives another form of interactivity: the poet-painter relationship.

In 20th century Paris, artists often collaborated with writers: Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Chagall teamed up with poets, including Apollinaire and Éluard. The practice flourished in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s; it died out with the advent of Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Earth Art.

“The Fleming is pleased to participate in the resurgence of this practice,” said Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, its curator of collections and exhibitions. “The

GLASS MASTERS

Elena Sarni

Daniel Kany Gallery
89 Exchange Street
Portland, Maine;/br>
April 2 through May 2

After working as the director of major glass galleries in Seattle and California’s Sun Valley, Maine native Daniel Kany returned to his home state to open his eponymous gallery. This show, which features Richard Remsen and other emerging names in the world of studio glass art, “best defines” Kany’s gallery, he said.

Although his gallery also shows painting, photography, clay and sculpture, Kany explained, “The thing that sets us apart is that this is an international caliber glass gallery.” Its artists come from as close as a few neighborhoods down the street to as far away as villages across the ocean, including the Venetian island of Murano, Italy. This historical center of the international glass market trade is home to family trained glassmaker Massimiliano Schiavon; Kany was the first to represent him in America.

“This exhibition is a group of gallery artists, but it could be in a museum as a ‘what’s new in studio glass’ exhibition,” Kany said. “The thing that pulls the work together, oddly, is precisely what spreads the work out: these are all artists pushing the

LUX PERPETUA: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSEPHINE SACABO

Paula Melton

Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography
56 Avenue A
Turners Falls, Massachusetts;/br>
Through March 29

The title of this astonishing show — Lux Perpetua, or “light forever” — is a surprisingly optimistic take, considering the tone of the work.

Three distinct series of images fathom the darkest elements of human memory and imagination. And yet, though these photographs by Josephine Sacabo unflinchingly face the worst — loss, madness, decay, nightmare and even death itself — their darkness does not exist for its own sake, but instead serves to draw out a luminous beauty that is defined, but never dominated, by shadow.

In the series “El Mundo Inalcanzable de Susana San Juan,” for instance, a resplendent face, hand, archway or other detail emerges from multiple, hazily layered sepia shades. Despite the subject matter — a woman’s descent into madness and ultimate embrace of death — the work portrays the beauty of the heroine, Susana. And yet it does so with neither glorification nor melodrama — indeed,

PEARLS OF COTUIT: A COMMUNITY CELEBRATES ITS ARTISTS

Taylor M. Polites

Cahoon Museum of American Art
4676 Falmouth Road
Cotuit, Massachusetts;/br>
March 10 through April 26

To help celebrate the Cahoon’s 25th year, Dr. Robert L. Gambone, the museum’s director, has organized a different sort of oyster festival. Gambone put on his waders, but rather than search the seedbeds of Cotuit Bay for pearls, he scoured the local arts community — and pulled up some real treasures.

“In this tiny, out-of-the-way little village,” Gambone explained, “there is an interesting community of artists, each one accomplished in their own way.” These artists are an important part of the museum’s success. “Because we are a small, stand-alone museum, we have a particular responsibility to reach out to the local artists here. And they are very supportive of our institution.” This show, he stressed, was a way to both thank those artists for their support and to highlight the gathering of talented artists in the Barnstable area of Cape Cod.

“When I began to look around, I found artists who are incredibly accomplished, incredibly diverse, some with New England wide reputations, some on the cusp of having arrived.” To narrow the selection process, Gambone spoke with each artist, visited them in their studios, and looked at their body of work, finally choosing seven artists. “It was pretty hard to narrow the show to about five works per artist. I wanted to give a fair;/p>

WHAT CAN A WOMAN DO? WOMEN, WORK, AND WARDROBE 1865 - 1940

Greg Morell

Mount Holoyke College Art Museum
Lower Lake Road
South Hadley, Massachusetts

Through May 316

There was something intriguing about this show’s title that piqued my curiosity, especially since “What Can A Woman Do?” was being presented at one of two all-women colleges in the Five College Consortium of Western Massachusetts.

Guest curator Lynn Zacek Bassett, a 1983 graduate of Mount Holyoke, has insightfully put together an assemblage of objects that illustrates the changing dress of woman as she gradually freed herself from the fetters of corsets, stays and figure-altering buttresses that constrained and confined her body.

This examination of feminine contours begins with the Civil War, ends with World War II, and equates the change in dress to changes in temperament and psyche, and changes in the nature of women’s work. The ante-bellum feminine figure was one of voluminous hooped skirts, layers of petticoats, wasp-waisted bodices and tightly laced corsets resulting in a virtual tug-of-war of feminine flesh accentuating the extremes of silhouette curvature. The progress of

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

Christopher Caggiano

Lyric Stage Company of Boston
140 Clarendon Street
Boston;/br>

Through March 14

It might have raised some eyebrows around the Boston theater scene to hear that Spiro Veloudos, producing artistic director of the Lyric Stage, had cast himself for one of the best male roles in the American theater canon: Big Daddy in the Lyric’s current production of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

But, Veloudos insists, that’s not the way it happened at all. “Right off the bat, I want to dispel any myths,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea. That came from Scott Edmiston, the director.”

In 2004, Veloudos and Edmiston met to talk about potential future projects. “One of those projects was ‘Cat,’ and I told him that of all the Tennessee Williams plays, that one is my favorite. The characters are so well drawn, the language is poetic, and it follows the unities of time, place and action. It’s very infinite and compact play.” Edmiston insisted that if he were going to direct it, he wanted Veloudos to play Big Daddy. “At that time I hadn’t acted in five or six years,” said Veloudos. “And I said ‘No, that’s over, thanks anyway.’” So, Veloudos put the idea on hold, although every once in a while Edmiston would revisit the idea. “And I would say, ‘Scott, stop, I’m not going to do it.’”

Why the hesitation? “It’s such an iconic role,” he said. “It’s like Lady Macbeth: everybody has an idea of how the part should be played, and it doesn’t matter how good you are, you’re going to

CASA DE LA CULTURA/CENTER FOR LATINO ARTS

Ceci Méndez

85 WESTON NEWTON STREET
BOSTON;/br>
The first time I experienced the Center for Latino Arts was for a birthday celebration just over 10 years ago. We danced — and I mean danced — to Mango Blue in the main ballroom of the Jorge Hernandez Cultural Center. This was indeed a contemporary and dynamic congregation: the world-renowned Boston-based rhythms of Mango Blue, the inspiring and beautiful company of both people I knew and so many I didn’t, the pure positive energy. It was a festive gathering, in a dance hall so magical and stunning it felt like a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. And this didn’t happen just once. This place actually exists, and it is here for us all.

Casa de la Cultura/Center for Latino Arts (CLA) in the Villa Victoria neighborhood of Boston’s South End is a cutting-edge, multi-functional community arts complex with the mission of promoting and sustaining contemporary and traditional Latino

REDISCOVERING ART WITH KRISTINA BIRD

Taylor M. Polities

Cape Cod artists have been churning out everything from masterpieces to tourist kitsch for over 100 years. The art scene here is a part of the area’s tourist appeal, but the climate is punishing for paintings. And no one knows that better than art restoration expert Kristina Bird.

For the past 15 years, Bird has been undoing all the damage that man and nature can contrive from her studio in North Truro. “I used to drive to Boston and Newport. I’d do one painting at a time,” she remembered. Now, Bird works with two artists, Eve Aspinwall and Rosa Plummer, and her pine-sheltered studio is lined with paintings in various stages of desperation and recovery. “She’s getting a reputation now,” Plummer noted. “We get calls from Montgomery, Alabama,” among other surprising places. Bird’s client list is growing — and reflects the trust that is required when you handle a work of art.

“What broke me in here was getting to know Julie Heller,” Bird said. “I did work for her when she was chair of the (Provincetown) Art Commission.” Soon other clients were calling. The Provincetown Art Association and

SURVIVING IN A DOWNTURN

Susan Schwalb

The Stock Market crashes, galleries go out of business, universities cancel job searches, and museums are in crisis. What is an artist to do?

During the past eight months, the economy has taken a big hit and most Americans are suffering. As artists, we often lead lives very close to the edge and any major downturn can cause havoc; art is often the first to go from the budgets of schools and many corporations, and private collectors stop buying art all together.

In May 2008, I was halfway through a solo show in New York City when sales began to evaporate. My dealer was in a financial melt down and I began to panic. Fortunately, in early September, a few museums in London purchased my drawings, but from September to January nothing sold. After some stressful weeks I realized I was not