artscope magazine: May/June 2013

WELCOME STATEMENT: Brian Goslow, managing editor

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

Welcome to the May/June issue of artscope, traditionally our kick-off encouraging you to take to the roads and explore the region’s many cultural attractions during New England’s unique warm weather season.

This issue has been composed under the shadow of the Boston Marathon bombings, which not only affected the lives of those killed and injured in the blasts, but the millions of people in the surrounding area. One hopes that art can play a role in the healing process, from the “Convergence” sculpture exhibition that opens May 4 in the Christian Science Plaza (which we’ll be reviewing next issue) to the numerous open studio weekends taking place in May.

This issue’s “Cornered” features the organizers of three of those open studio events — Julie Barry (Cambridge), June Krinsky-Rudder (East Boston) and Rachel Mello (Somerville), while Ami Bennitt’s profile of the members of Paint Pens in Purses includes Jennifer Lewis, whose work can be seen during the Fort Point Art Walk, Spring Open Studios Weekend.

Suzanne Volmer saw the work included in the Jamestown Arts Center’s “The Ceramic Spectrum: A Survey of Contemporary Ceramics” right out of the box — literally, as the exhibition wasn’t scheduled to open till after we went to press. J. Fatima Martins reviewed a complete set of images of the work scheduled to be seen in the “Swept Away: Translucence, Transparence, Transcendence in Contemporary Encaustic” show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, part of the Seventh International Encaustic Conference activities that come to a head on Memorial Day Weekend.

Franklin W. Liu previews a spectacular exhibition of paintings by Iranian-born artist Nasser Ovissi at Cambridge’s Touch Gallery, while Don Wilkinson introduces us to New Bedford found materials master Lasse Antonsen, whose work will be at the Dedee Shattuck Gallery; James Dyment checks out “Forces,” the latest work by Gregory Wright that’s headed for Galatea Fine Art, and Barney Levitt’s Whistler House solo show is covered by Lindsey Davis, who has finished her artscope internship and is now headed for San Francisco, where she’ll be writing for The Huffington Post’s Social Impact section as part of a paid internship there.

Connecticut has a number of great museums; Kristin Nord visited three of them to review their current offerings: The Wadsworth Atheneum (“Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy”), Yale Center for British Art (“Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century”) and Florence Griswold Museum (“Arthur Heming: Chronicler of The North”) all have offerings well worth your journey from wherever you are in New England.

Over the past two months, our staff has attended events throughout the region. I was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for a press briefing on details of the July opening of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion at the Colby College Museum of Art, which will make the museum one of the largest holders of American art in the country. Artscope was well-represented at the Montserrat College of Art’s Artrageous!27 Art Auction Party and Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s MassArt Auction 24 (both of which we were proud sponsors), as well as the opening reception for the Copley Society of Art’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” show at Boston’s Symphony Hall and the Fenway Alliance’s “State of the Art” exhibition at Audio Concepts’ Commonwealth Ave. Boston showroom.

Meanwhile, artscope account executive and contributor Christina Huang visited Manchester, New Hampshire to introduce us to galleries and organizations there; she also took in all the festivities of Portland’s First Friday April Art Walk. Simultaneous to getting this issue to press, artscope was preparing to participate in the newly renamed Danforth Art’s artist networking event and take in the “Make Speak: Seven Takes on Craft” by seven not-so-conventional craftspeople, an event that was “choreographed” by the Commonwealth of Craft, a consortium of Massachusetts-based educational and cultural organizations, and sponsored by artscope.

In recent months, the artscope staff has been fine-tuning our social media outlets to synchronize our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, email blast!s and website content to complement each other. This will allow us to best provide integrated value-added features to our readers as well as those who advertise and list with us. The artscope mobile app is available for download on any smartphone, iPad, DROID or tablet at app. artscopemagazine.com or on your App Store. It will give you up-to-date news on New England galleries and artscope-sponsored events, a live feed of our zine posts and current issue excerpts.

Peter Kramer is the winner of this issue’s centerfold contest for his impressionist oil-on-canvas painting, “Pastoral Landscape,” which was selected by Melanie Anderson Bourbeau, curator at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Conn., and Hilda Neily, owner of the Hilda Neily Gallery in Provincetown. For our next centerfold contest, we’re looking for submissions of your smartphone photography. For full details, see our classified section.

I remind you to frequently visit artscopemagazine.com, where our zine feature includes our Capsule Preview section and exhibition and theater reviews not included in the magazine, along with other special features. You can also join in on the conversation that is taking place on our zine through our new comment box feature that allows you to give your remarks and feedback through your Twitter, Facebook or Google accounts.

Here’s wishing you a safe and peaceful May and June; we hope you’ll take in as many of the exhibitions covered in this issue as possible and continue to let us know which ones you especially enjoyed and the new artists you’ve come upon that you feel we should feature in upcoming issues.

Cornered

Somerville Open Studios (May 4-5) coordinator Rachel Mello; East Boston Artists Group Open Studios (May 18-19) organizer June Krinsky-Rudder; and Julie Barry, director of Community Arts for the Cambridge Arts Council, who oversees Cambridge Open Studios (May 11-12 and May 18-19) were cornered by artscope managing editor Brian Goslow to discuss their responsibilities, the uniqueness of their respective events and how to prepare to view hundreds of artists during May’s Open Studio Weekends in the Boston area.

How long have you been overseeing your open studios weekend?

Mello (SOS): I am only serving as coordinator for one year, starting in May after SOS 2012, and finishing my term this May. Before that I served on the Board of Directors for two years.

Barry (COS): The Cambridge Arts Council took over the organization of Cambridge Open Studios in 2009. This is our fifth citywide Open Studios event. I have been working on the event since its inception as I started at the Arts Council in the summer of 2008.

JKR (EBOS): This is my third year doing it primarily myself, but I oversaw it with one other person in 2005, and as a founding member of East Boston Artists Group, I have been one of the organizers since our first Open Studios in 2001.

What does the job entail?

The Ceramic Spectrum: A Survey of Contemporary Ceramics

Suzanne Volmer

Jamestown Arts Center

18 Valley Street

Jamestown, Rhode Island

Through June 7

Curator Seth Rainville brings together 18 invited artists with regional ties and some with national and international reputations in “The Ceramic Spectrum,” a survey of contemporary ceramics at the Jamestown Arts Center.

A recognized ceramicist and curator at New Bedford Art Museum, Rainville also serves on the board of Watershed, a well-known summer ceramics residency/workshop destination in Maine. “The Ceramic Spectrum” is an exhibit that developed rapidly after Rainville was asked to curate, because he was a known entity that could create a quality show in a compressed time frame. He acted with catalytic precision to assemble a compelling talent base, sensitively creating a depth of subject matter by mixing works by ceramicists of renown with those created by emerging talent.

Contouring the originality and commonality shaping New England’s contemporary ceramics identity, the exhibition’s focal point is its largest vessel, made by Chris Gustin. Enrobed in rich, thick, shiny brown glaze, this piece brings attention to undulations of form, suggesting ongoing human-esque movement. Gustin’s work was recently the subject of a retrospective at Fuller Craft Museum. His career is influential in New England ceramics culture, a point reflected in this exhibition. Also apparent in this exhibition is the influence of the late Ken Price.

Rainville, Chris Archer and Jim Lawton spoke casually during the installation process about their artworks. Archer discussed containment in terms of his appreciation of the cup as a form, and nearly in the same breath he talked about admiring the interior ambiguity in certain Anish Kapoor sculptures. These references have inspired him to make a floor installation, which is an organization of uneven cobblestone-like units that the audience may stand on. Standing on the clay pieces, audiences will feel their balance shifting in interaction with Archer’s conceptual take on paving.

Swept Away: Translucence, Transparence, Transcendence in Contemporary Encaustic

J. Fatima Martins

Cape Cod Museum of Art

60 Hope Lane (off Route 6A)

Dennis, Massachusetts

May 18 through June 23

Encaustic, long appreciated for its complex ocular qualities and resilient physical applications, is the subject of “Swept Away,” the first dedicated exhibition, by a museum in our region, to the medium, an ancient process of visual expression utilizing heated and melted pigmented beeswax. Rediscovered and modernized by American painter, printmaker and sculptor Jasper Johns, one of the many artists of his generation who popularized the mixed-media process, encaustic allows artists enormous visual possibilities.

The sacred bee and its by-products — honey, the food of the gods, and wax, a substance both permanent and fluid — are held with great reverence. In Greece, for example, the bee was honored as Melissae (from which the word for honey — Mel — is derived), as teacher and healer.

It’s a great humanitarian medium — a jumping point from which connections to literature, history, music and science are quickly made. For an excellent contextual discussion and study of its development across time, read Kristen Gallagher’s essay, “Discoveries in Encaustic: A Look through History,” in the journal Explorations, 2010, available online.

“Swept Away” is not, however, meant to directly comment on any one ecological concern or historical/cultural theme. Its focus is on art fundamentals — the marriage of material and method — the resultant quality of luminosity produced naturally by the structural properties of embedded translucent wax.

Exhale_Draw

Elizabeth Michelman

HallSpace

950 Dorchester Avenue

Boston

Through June 15

Bill Flynn, who has taught drawing since 1968 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, encourages his students to draw for long stretches of time. His annual “Drawing Marathon” runs 18 hours, from noon to the next morning, and his own studio group draws for seven hours every Thursday.

On your feet with others, the anxiety of starting is no longer personal; it’s everybody’s problem. Nor is determining when to stop a mystery; you drop happily of exhaustion. This scenario may not evoke the solitary painter struggling heroically in the studio, but it eases a very real concern for artists. No anxiety, no creative spark; too much anxiety, and you can’t settle down to work. Flynn makes it challenging and fun — if you can keep up with him.

Drawings by Flynn and his current drawing group companions comprise the show “Exhale_Draw” at HallSpace. In addition to Rick Zonghi, Peter Thibeault and John Tracey, two former associates are included: the late Walter Pashko, and the younger Evan Crankshaw, now living in St. Louis.

The group, which for the past 10 years has met in Flynn’s Dorchester drawing studio, began in 1972 with Flynn, painter/print-maker Walter Pashko and two other Museum School faculty. Pashko and Flynn kept it up and added new members over the years.

Sophia Narrett: I Was Dreaming This

Jamie Thompson

SPACE Gallery

538 Congress Street

Portland, Maine

May 3 through June 21

“At the core of my work is a question about the sublime, and what it means for the human experience,” said Rhode Island-based Sophia Narrett, a 2014 MFA Painting candidate at Rhode Island School of Design. She explores “relationships, love, eroticism and unchecked emotion” through her art, searching for the sublime.

Several of Narrett’s embroidery works and recent paintings will be on view at Maine’s SPACE Gallery in a solo show called “I Was Dreaming This.” The exhibition takes its title from a line in Willa Cather’s 1913 novel “O Pioneers,” a tale of love, temptation and isolation on the prairie. The line occurs in an evocative passage in which the character Emil and the married woman whom he loves, Marie, meet in an orchard. They are later shot in the same orchard by Marie’s husband in a jealous rage.

“There is something undeniably meaningful about the transcendent experiences of love, sadness and ecstasy, and great potentiality in locating these experiences in, or depicting them with, nature,” Narrett said.

The way humans exist within and manipulate nature is a major theme of Narrett’s art. She sees the garden as “choreographed to be a space of fantasy, opulence and possible transcendence,” as noted in her artist statement. This dovetails nicely with the inspiration she finds in contemporary music videos. The glossy, heightened reality of pop and hip-hop videos is similarly choreographed. Narrett listens to music while she works “and that often has a huge impact on the form the image takes,” she said.

Nasser Ovissi: Modern Day Iranian Art

Franklin W. Liu

Touch Gallery

281 Concord Avenue

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Through May 17

Art in music, painting and architecture define the history of mankind; thus, antiquity traditions can cast a long, influential shadow on current-day art. It is with the utmost respect that Nasser Ovissi’s secular artwork pays tribute to the Persian Empire, dating back to about 500 B.C., while featuring three significant iconic images that permeate modern-day Iranian art: the stallion, the woman and the pomegranate.

It is rare that an artist’s personal background is so uniquely interesting that it begs for mention, as one can readily see the direct rootinfluence of his current body of work. Ovissi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1934 and studied law and political science at the University of Tehran, leading to his first career, serving as a diplomat and cultural attaché in the Iranian embassies in Rome and Madrid. Part of his job as a career-diplomat was to promote Iranian cultural heritage worldwide. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ovissi came to reside in the United States where now, at a vibrant 79 years of age, he’s still prolific and producing his art full-time while living with his family in Virginia.

Ovissi features the pomegranate in his work for many reasons: “The fruit is a symbol of fertility and passion,” he said, adding, “when the pomegranate is presented closed, the woman is not married; when it is opened, she’s married.” This fruit is a recognized universal symbol of the womb. That the multi-seeded pomegranate originally yields from Persia has a historical connection to Persian culture and art as well. It is because of this symbolism that a bowl of this fruit is often placed nearby the figure of a woman wearing traditional Persian attire.

Gregory Wright: Forces

James Dyment

Galatea Fine Art

460B Harrison Avenue #B-6

Boaton

May 1 through 31

This is the third time I’ve written about the work of Gregory Wright. The first was in Nov./Dec. 2008 when he was the third place winner in The Brush Gallery and Studios “Member’s Juried Exhibition” in Lowell. He had already begun working with encaustic paints. The second time, he had been invited to curate “Pollination: Beyond the Garden,” an encaustic group exhibition, also at The Brush.

Now, the venue is Galatea Fine Art, a gallery on Harrison Ave in Boston’s South End. Galatea is a co-op run by director Marjorie Kaye. “Marjorie celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of the artists,” Wright said. “She brought us together and is making it work. It’s amazing.”

This solo exhibition is a continuation of his body of work called “Forces.” His recent additions to this series are a bit more monochromatic — silver metallic grey with undertones of violet, indigo and pale green, the focus being the subject of information transfer as it relates to modern technology.

Using a metaphor of social media and networking as his inspiration is an interesting concept. Endless bits of data are transported from one node to the next, similar to our nerve endings within our brains. The impulses are shared as Wright creates one painting after another, each with its own part of the process.

Barney Levitt: As I See It

Lindsey Davis

Whistler House Museum of Art

243 Worthen Street

Lowell, Massachusetts

May 1 through June 8

Simple still life scenes that overflow with intricate detail have become Barney Levitt’s signature style. He creates collages of interesting items and interprets them in paint, always remaining faithful to the reality before him. The Whistler House Museum of Art is featuring 45 of his incredible contemporary realist oil paintings in their newest exhibition, “As I See It.”

The Whistler House Museum first contacted Levitt three years ago about the exhibit, which will showcase a mix of still lifes and landscapes, with the occasional figurative piece as well. “I wanted to reach as broad an audience as possible,” Levitt said.

Vermeer and other Dutch Masters inspire his work, along with Pieter Claesz and contemporary realist painters like Jeffrey Larson and Scott Prior. His style involves a realism that’s somehow heightened and perfected, bringing out the beauty in everyday items by giving them both meaning and aesthetic. “It is always really fun for me, when I have a solo show,” he said, “when you see an entire body of work that’s yours in one place, it’s pretty powerful.”

Levitt is playing a role in the show’s curation as well; he intends to group similar paintings together to form clusters of different types for different audiences. Landscapes are placed together, and still lifes with dark backgrounds will also form a group, as will the bright and sunny still lifes. Levitt also paints conceptually driven works that will be hung side by side. These paintings typically use the title to create metaphor — works with a hidden meaning that’s often lighthearted, intended for a thoughtful laugh.

Lasse Antonsen: Nocturama

Don Wilkinson

Dedee Shattuck Gallery

1 Partners Lane

Westport, Massachusetts

June 1 through 28

For many years, Lasse Antonsen had immersed himself in the ethereal soft edges of the art world as a Picasso scholar, writer, art historian and gallerist. He has worked as a researcher for the Institute of Contemporary Art, a curator at the Danforth Museum of Art, and for a quarter-of-a-century, he was the gallery director of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (including its previous incarnation as Southeastern Massachusetts University).

About six years ago, Antonsen took the plunge into the center of the pool and became a maker of art, but did so without abandoning the hard-held sensibilities of a curator: connoisseurship, inquisitiveness, wit and a love of objects and artifacts.

Antonsen works (primarily) with found materials, and by pairing the disparate objects in carefully considered proximity, new meanings are manifested in subdued and surprising ways. “The Lucid Moment” is a prime example. By arranging over a hundred disposable transparent plastic cups — those cheap, easily cracked vessels so often used to serve wine at art openings everywhere — on a series of clear acrylic shelves supported by Lucite rods, Antonsen has shifted our eyes from the cups themselves to the shadows they cast, the sheen they harbor, and the light they reflect. His work transcends the inherent trashiness of the material and approaches something akin to preciousness.

Transparency and the interplay between light and shadows are also the significant elements in “Koenigsberg /Kaliningrad,” a reference to the former Prussian capital that at various historical points was under the control of the Russian Empire, Poland, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In this work, Antonsen has mounted a series of old windowpanes on rods extruding from the walls. Many have caulking along the edges, and the glass panels shimmer with subtle hues — mostly shades of green, but also brown and lavender, depending on the light of day. Do those variations in color refer to the differing, lasting cultural impacts that an occupied city endures and absorbs? While one normally looks through windowpanes, Antonsen asks the viewer to look “at” the windowpanes and discover a hidden meaning, even if he is his unwilling — or unable — to divulge that meaning himself.

Carol Pelletier: Local Ground

James Foritano

Endicott College Center for the Arts

376 Hale Street

Beverly, Massachusetts

Through May 24

I’m looking at “Ledge,” one of the 16 paintings by Carol Pelletier currently on display in her exhibition “Local Ground” at the Spencer Presentation Gallery of the Walter J. Manninen Center for the Arts at Beverly’s Endicott College.

Unfortunately, my “Ledge” is a paper printout propped on an easel, which I’m sitting in front of while I tap at my keyboard. While I appreciate the miracles of technology, I’m also vividly aware of the degrees of separation between myself and the quiet combustion of sea, land and air that is Pelletier’s subject.

For one, I should be standing and moving around, prompted, at intervals, by the feel of moisture against my skin, or a reflection of light or beckoning modulations of color. My posture should be flexible and I should probably also have a pencil in my hand in order to draw the shifting planes of sea and sky, or to make notes in words.

Then I should continue my interrogation in the studio by pushing around, still standing, layers of oil paint and wax on paper, or Bristol, or board that lies flat on a work-table. I should do this with interruptions enough to tempt memory to move my hand, and happy accidents to wave me to a stop when I’ve said just enough.

Colo Colo Gallery

Don Wilkinson

Colo Colo Gallery

29 Cetre Street

New Bedford, Massachusetts

Occultation is the astronomical term that refers to the passage of one celestial body in front of another, thus hiding the other from view, as when the moon passes between a terrestrial observer and a distant planet. It is also the name of a trippy and beautiful print collage by Patricia Daughton. Her “Occultation” features diminishing lines that converge at a distant horizon, suggesting motion in the same way that light beams on the 1960s television series “Star Trek” indicated the acceleration of the Starship Enterprise to warp speed. It is anchored by a tiny ecru doily, which suggests a delicate planet and a crumbling yellow orb, perhaps a distant sun.

“Jovian Series #1” brings to mind “The Blue Marble,” the famous photograph of the earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 in December 1972, but the title references Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. The giant sphere sits in a field of indigo, cradled by the mysterious black limbs of a celestial Madonna. The formal elements and decisive color breaks keep the viewer from drifting into a space odyssey, as a gash of muted magenta rips through the cosmos, separating the planet from a field of pink stars that stud a lovely purple nothingness.

Daughton, a self-confessed science geek who married a scientist, grew up in Saskatchewan, far from the light-leak pollution of a nearby city of size. The aurora borealis and the phenomenon of ball lightning were among the visual stimuli she experienced as a girl. Her exhibition, “Celestial and Sublime,” at the Colo Colo Gallery, is a mature realization of art derived from the most heavenly of inspirations.

But… by the time this review sees print, the show will be down. It was on display from April 13-April 27. As readers of this publication know, reviewers such as myself often visit the studios of exhibiting artists prior to installation at galleries, museums or other venues to ensure timeliness. Artscope is a bimonthly; the Colo Colo Gallery switches up exhibitions on a biweekly schedule. This compounds the difficulty of reviewing some interesting shows at an innovative New Bedford gallery.

Four Fiery Females: Allison Bamcat, Veronica Fish, Jennifer Lewis, and Elizabeth Siegel

Ami Bennitt

Boston may not be best known for its Low Brow art scene, nor the women that encompass it, but these four artists create fun, fiery — and sometimes freakish — illustrative work that may cause viewers to double take, stare or even turn away. Members of the Paint Pens in Purses (PPP) female artist collective, their work is exhibited throughout the United States.

Allison Bamcat has been with the collective since 2009. “I was convinced that the Boston illustration world was strictly male-centric. The women involved in PPP helped change my mind,” she said. “I’ve actually created more work for the collective’s exhibitions than any other projects.”

Bamcat calls her aesthetic “My Little Pony on downers,” she said. “I’m progressing in concepts and incorporating more aesthetic into my emotional work.” She favors acrylics and acryla gouache, “a more fluid and mattefinish acrylic. I love candy colors, and the matte finish really makes them pop.”

She’s a footwear designer for Converse, and her art extends to CD artwork and clothing design. Bamcat earned her illustration degree from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Connecticut's Crusade

Kristin Nord

Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Yale Center for British Art

1080 Chapel Street

New Haven, Connecticut

Through June 2

1080 Chapel Street

Arthur Heming: Chronicler of the North

Florence Griswold Museum

96 Lyme Street

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Through June 2

Ah, the Edwardians — with their sumptuous clothes and candelight dinners, their bone china, their silks, their gleaming silver. Merchant and Ivory and the BBC have made fortunes selling fanciful pastiches of this era to the viewing public, all the while touching lightly on a less seemly back story.

“Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” at the Yale Center for British Art through June 2, digs a little deeper to hint at this underside in a stimulating exhibition more than 10 years in the making. The paintings, photographs and artifacts presented date roughly from the reign of King Edward VII (1901-1910) through the start of the First World War in August 1914. The exhibit begins with a remarkable gown embellished with traditional Indian embroidery and beadwork and moves through a series of galleries that explore the ways in which Edwardians were on the cusp of change.

In this world, an aristocracy clung to habits and shrinking holdings while the leading tastemaker, the wife of the Viceroy of India, was, in fact, a wealthy American. Suddenly aristocratic women were posing for photographers beside their first automobiles instead of sitting for oil portraits with their whippets.

Opulence for this group seemed rather often synonymous with excess. Men rang for port on a Faberge bell push; women wore tiaras and brooches made of blood diamonds from South Africa. Up close, these people could have served as character studies for the very wealthy a century later, safely hidden behind closed gates. It was during this time that Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in “The Theory of the Leisure Class” — and no wonder.

Burst of Light: Caravagio and His Legacy

Kristin Nord

The Wadsworth Antheneum

600 Maine Street

Hartford, Connecticut

Through June 16

It has been 25 years since the Wadsworth Atheneum last looked at Caravaggio’s revolutionary work, and “Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy” continues the conversation. The artist is perhaps the art world’s most famous and revered bad boy, someone who has attracted a cult following that only keeps on growing.

Rome had become the artistic capital of Europe by the late 1500s when the young artist arrived on the scene and joined an estimated 20,000 artists from Italy, France, Spain, Flanders and Holland vying for papal commissions.

Caravaggio proposed “a sophisticated poetry of naturalism through an act of cultural subversion rather than outright rejection,” Keith Christiansen, the John-Pope Hennessy Chairman of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written. Despite a violent and deeply troubled personal life, he would create a succession of masterpieces that shook the art world to its foundations.

His paintings often functioned as staged dramas, in which the miraculous is revealed in the common. Repeatedly he challenged his viewers to contemplate what, in effect, was a radical message: that salvation and moments of grace are to be bestowed, not in dwellings of opulence but on filthy streets, in the world’s darkened corners. And he did this, literally plucking people from the street to paint while eschewing preparatory drawings.

Hot Pot: A Taste of Contemporary Chinese Art

Arlene Distler

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

10 Vernon Street

Brattleboro, Vermont

Through June 23

Walking into the spacious main hall at Brattleboro Museum and Art Center where “Hot Pot” is being shown throughout the spring, I was struck by the perfect match of artwork and venue. The many large works, making even larger statements, are allowed full breathing room.

“Hot Pot” refers to a traditional Chinese dish made up of many ingredients, each of which keeps its distinctive qualities. It serves as a perfect metaphor, said curator Mara Williams, for “the art of China today in all its complexity and variety.” Williams has provided thoughtful and instructive comments alongside the artwork, adding depth to a delectable show at BMAC that is both sensual and cerebral.

If you are looking for the ideals that have been a part of Chinese art for many centuries — beauty and harmony — you will be hardpressed to find them here … at least not as the primary point. Nor will you find the stock, bland art of China’s recent past. “Hot Pot” evinces a true “cultural revolution” by offering artist-centered work liberated from a top-down set of rules.

In fact, several pieces in the show aim their slings and arrows at the Central Committee, if not Chairman Mao himself — in the case of “Chairman’s Chair” by Liao Yibai, literally so, with its sleek stainless steel arrows piercing a stainless steel chair whence ruled the power elite.

Word and Image: If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, What Happens When You Add Words to Pictures?

Marcia Santore

Hood Museum of Art

Dartmouth College

Hanover, New Hampshire

Through August 4

A group of senior studio art majors at Dartmouth College set out to explore exactly that under the guidance of Hood Museum director Michael Taylor. I visited “Word and Image in Contemporary Art,” on view at the Hood Museum of Art through August 4, on a weekday morning when students were in class and the light museum traffic was mostly focused on the Hood’s larger exhibition, “The Women of Shin Hanga” (up through July 28). It was a rare opportunity to see an exhibit as almost the only visitor.

Later, I was able to speak with Taylor and learn something about the students’ curatorial process. The 24 participating students considered artworks in Dartmouth’s Bernstein Study-Storage Center. They each chose a piece, researched it and wrote text for the wall panels. Taylor encouraged them to write from their own perspective as artists and students. “The labels are astonishing in the way they talk about the works, and in so doing, talk about themselves,” Taylor said. From his perspective, the exhibition is as much about the students’ writing as the works of art. The show was filled out with additional works chosen by museum staff members, who added If a picture is worth a thousand words, what happens when you add words to pictures? their own words. Deciding how to hang so many disparate pieces was another challenge. “There’s a mentoring moment that occurs when you talk to students about why one piece is next to another,” Taylor explained.

The result is a fascinating collection of contemporary artwork incorporating words in different ways for different reasons. Depending on the piece, words can be almost incidental to the overall image. In “McLean, Virginia (Pumpkins),” a firefighter buys pumpkins from a farm stand as a house blazes in the background. Does the piece need the signs proclaiming “Farm Market” and “Sweet Cider,” or would it be just as evocative without them? Davilyn Barnwell concluded that, “The photograph is both a quaint and brilliantly colored image of farming America and a subversive play on the viewer’s expectations, casting a rather sinister shadow on an otherwise picturesque rural scene.”

In some pieces, the words are essentially captions, as in Vito Acconci’s piece “Trademarks,” a group of photographs documenting a performance piece in which Acconci bit various places on his body. In others, the writing is an indispensable part of the piece itself, even for those who do not know the language. “The Women of Morocco #23 (Femmes du Maroc #23)” is Lalla Essaydi’s 2006 large scale color photograph of a female figure completely covered by a white cloth closely inscribed with flowing Arabic script in brown ink, as are the wall and floor behind her — is she part of her environment or subsumed by it? Rebekah Riley wrote, “When the viewer steps back to reexamine the work and reflect upon their train of thought, they are forced to address stereotypes and prejudices to which they may have thought themselves immune.”

Richard Erdman, A Life in Stone

Alexandra Tursi

Vermont:

University of Vermont, Davis Center, Burlington

University of Vermont, Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington

Marriott Courtyard, sculpture garden, Burlington

West Branch gallery and Sculpture Park, Stowe

Massachusetts:

Boston, Galerie d'Orsay, 33 Newbury, in June and July

part of Luc Leestemaker tribute exhibition in June

Connecticut:

Cavalier Galleries, 405 Greenwich Ave., Greenwich

Even before entering Richard Erdman’s Vermont studio, I am struck by the beauty of the setting: rolling verdant hills, a horse farm, leaves quaking in a slight breeze, sun glistening through drifting low clouds. There are five barns on the property, and in one is Erdman’s studio. The doors rise on one entire side of the barn and suddenly the studio is flooded with light that dances around and through the two-dozen, large-scale bronze and stone sculptures that are at home here.

At first glance, I immediately think of a corps de ballet in various states of stretch and repose. The sculptures — in Carrara marble, Pakistani green onyx, Persian rose travertine and the rich burnished blue-green of bronze — look as if they have been caught in a moment of motion, a fluidity of motion that is so quick and ephemeral that it passes before it can be realized. Erdman captures that movement. He captures the feel of that moment more than the memory of it. If you were to see the conjoined movement of air during a dancer’s pirouette, or a skier’s downhill slalom, if you were able to see that mingling of space and a body alive cutting through it, you would see an Erdman sculpture. When he says, “For me stone is alive,” I know exactly what he means.

Erdman is a happy person, evident in his sprightly steps, his ebullient speech and his love for the works in the studio. We pass a rose travertine swirling sculpture, and Erdman runs his hands along the smooth undulating form. The tenderness of that moment catches me off guard. Here is an artist whose creative impulses are borne in the joy of life, its continuity and connectivity. We move over to another sculpture, one that earlier made me think of a dancer stretching one arm high into the air. Erdman said it is a study for “Primavera.” For him it is a vision of renewal and an emergence from dormancy, much like a tulip bulb that rises in early spring from a winter of silence and sleep.

He grew up a hundred or so miles south of his present studio, in Dorset, Vermont, a part of the state is known for marble. As a boy, Erdman often played in or near that marble. “I used to come home from school and before homework came exploration of the stones. If they weren’t too big, I would cart them home,” he said. “There’s a lot to see in these stones — the veins, the amalgamation of historical sediments, the patterns of compression. Some of what was washed into the stream of ooze as this formation was created was alive. When I create my work, some aspect of that life is revealed again.”

Just Chairs: A Survey of Side Chairs

Linda Chestney

New Hmpshire Furniture Masters Gallery

49 South Main Street

Concord, New Hampshire

Through June 11

They’re not Barcelona, Eames, or Le Corbusier chairs — but chairs that are classics in their own right — perhaps even more masterful in that they are all unique, in the true definition of unique: one-of-a-kind. All handmade, even though a number of the same design and wood composition may exist, they carry the individual characteristics of wood variations and subtle distinctions created by the makers’ hands.

“Just Chairs: A Survey of Side Chairs,” an exhibition presented by the New Hampshire Furniture Masters, features over 20 chairs created by current and former members, a number of invited chair makers, as well as a small collection of historic chairs by renowned designers George Nakashima, Duncan Phyfe and Hans Wegner. The beauty, artistry, craftsmanship and care that went into the design and creation of these works by different craftspeople, and curated by New Hampshire furniture master and gallery director Ted Blachly, is nearly overwhelming.

Have you ever been to the M&M flagship store in New York City? All those colorful M&M chutes of Plexiglas towering 20 feet in the air with riotous colors that would give Crayola pause? Well, if you have visited there, you will relate to the sense of “What do I do with all these choices?” I chose the chairs I did based on diversity — younger and older furniture makers, variations and creativity in design, wood choices, male and female … but I really wanted to mention every one of them, as they all made me salivate.

Varying in price from $800 to $7,500 a chair (but most NFS), the exhibition runs the gamut of design — a circa 1850 Duncan Phyfe chair with deep carving, a simple Shaker chair by husband and wife team Brian Braskie and Lenore Howe, a whimsical Dr. Seuss-esque ladder back chair by Jon Brooks, Danish simplicity and elegance by Jere Osgood, arts and crafts design by Howard Hatch, and more. Indeed, a show of rich diversity.

Art Nights

J. Fatima Martins

Art Night 2013

Bristol and Warren, Rhode Island

May 30 and June 27

The towns of Bristol and Warren started their Art Night series in April with repeat performances scheduled for the last Thursday of every month through October 31. Organizers present this art focused community happening as a traditional gallery stroll with a twist: each monthly event features four to five resident star artists, from different artistic realms, who provide an open studio opportunity. Art production diversity is the theme of Art Night, and artists have been carefully selected and assembled for each event to purposefully create a dynamic night of complementary variety.

The May 30 happening will spotlight a cross-section of genres. In the category of experimental painting is Don Primiano of Don’s Art Shop on Warren’s Main Street. Described as a “bohemian,” Primiano is well admired for his independent approach to art-making, producing expressive pure works in a wide range of styles. Next, in the fine art realm, is Deborah Baronas, a Cutler Mills resident and Rhode Island School of Design graduate in textile design, recognized for her sophisticated, nuanced, painterly textiles. Representing the enormously popular and dynamic world of jewelry design is Kathleen Prindiville, who produces wearables informed by a metal sculpture perspective, making her pieces one-of-a-kind, small-scale, portable works of art.

Bridging alternative media with domestic, decorative and commercial art design is Susan O’Donnell, owner of SueCasa, a home decor/interior design shop in Bristol, where she exhibits and sells her custom, handprinted Gyotaku paintings. In her production space and warehouse behind the main store, O’Donnell brushes acrylic paint on real fish, places cotton canvas on top and, using a traditional block printing method, pulls out ghostly images that appear much like rubbings. O’Donnell has been creating Gyotaku for seven years, producing designs that reflect her own minimalistic design sensibilities — a simple, contemporary, fashionable aesthetic.

Ken Gross: Lost Maps of Norumbega

Taryn Plumb

Monkitree

263 Water Street

Gardiner, Maine

Through May 25

A red line makes straight but shaky progress across a backdrop of solid green. Tendrils and ribbons of sand, shaped and shifted by the sea, resemble the roaming roots of a tree. A river, streams branching off in curious coils, embraces a forest before tumbling into the ocean.

This is Maine as Ken Gross experiences it, in a series of works that meld cartography and art. On display in the show “Lost Maps of Norumbega” at Monkitree gallery in Gardiner through May 25, the pieces represent his various physical and emotional explorations of the state, while also hinting at the gaps in the terrain of our minds.

In a statement, Old Orchard Beach resident Gross said, “Maps are pieces of art because each one is loaded with meaning. Usually they answer the question, ‘Where is?’ But art asks a different question, ‘How does it make you feel?’”

CreateHereNow: A New Creative Placemaking Project Builds Up Bridgeport

Christopher Arnott

When most folks window-shop, they’re looking at what’s on display in there.

When Margaret Bodell passes a storefront and her eyes light up with excitement, it’s usually because the space is empty and abandoned. She’s imagining what community art projects she can spearhead that might fill the blank space. Her preferred art form is providing opportunities and exposures for the countless artists she knows, and also affecting business districts that care about things like beautification.

“When I see an empty storefront,” Bodell giggled, “I feel like I’ve found a diamond.”