artscope magazine: January/February 2008

Welcome Statement: Brian Goslow, managing editor

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

Welcome Statement, January/February 2008

Welcome to the first artscope magazine of 2008! Putting together this issue in the middle of the holiday season really brought to light the wide variety of backgrounds of our writers – from art lovers, professionals and teachers to graduate students and those just beginning to make their mark on the cultural landscape - and how amazing it is that we're able to bring them all together in these pages.

This issue features the first of a series of international profiles by Rena lindstrom, who has relocated to Mexico from Provincetown. She'll introduce you to Mexican artist Edurne Esponda. Along with filing her story on Gallery Kayafas' first exhibition of the year, Catherine laferriere announced she'd be spending the first part of 2008 in Luxemburg. We'll be taking advantage of this opportunity to bring you reports from these parts of the world. Closer to home, Sandy lashin-Curewitz visits the newly opened Museum of Russian Icons in Central Massachusetts.

Susan Schwalb, an artist specializing in silverpoint and metalpoint drawing, gives us a first-hand report on Art Basel Miami and the large number of Boston area galleries who brought New England artists to the attention of some of the world's foremost art buyers. She had way more stories to tell than would fit in these pages; visit artscopemagazine.com for a link to more of Susan's writings from Miami. You can see her work at a two person exhibition with Nan Tull at Boston's Soprafina Gallery, Boston in March.

The states of Maine and New Hampshire get extra attention this issue. Elena Sarni engages the "New Acquisitions" show at the Portland Museum of Art and Amy Stacy Curtis' exhibition at Colby College, linda Chestney gives us the scoop on the Mark di Suvero sculpture that'll be greeting Currier Art Museum visitors when it reopens in the spring and Rick Agran profiles New Hampshire's Women's Rural Entrepreneurial Network. Our Capsule Preview column includes news of an exhibition lovers of fine glassworks will not want to miss that is currently on display at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Theater lovers should enjoy Chris Caggliano's interview with Douglas Carter Beane, whose latest play "The little Dog laughed" will be performed by the SpeakEasy Stage Company this month. Greg Morell looks at another element of the stage – the fine art of puppetry. Meanwhile, in the midst of her final grad school exams at Northeatern, Roanna Forman profiles Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project.

We're happy to announce that Jim Dyment, whose online site vyuMagazine.com has been celebrating the Lowell arts community since 1999, is now writing for artscope. His role of exhibits and gallery manager at the Whistler House Museum of Art made him the perfect choice to tell the story of that institution reaching its 100th anniversary. Recognizing that artscope should remain as fresh as possible, this will be the last issue of our cover contest, which began in March/April 2007. Fear not, artists can still compete for a showcase place in our magazine. Established and emerging artists are encouraged to submit their work for our first centerfold contest, which will showcase an image of installation art in our May/June issue. Full details can be found in our classified section. We appreciate your letters telling us what you like about each of our issues, and, when appropriate, what we missed or got wrong. A few of you pointed out that we had failed to include Susan Post in our review of the MassArt/Fine Arts Work Center MFA Thesis Exhibition in Provincetown and yes, our November/December "Collector's Corner" on Bruce Brown should have noted he brought the first arts education program to Freeport, not the entire state of Maine.

We couldn't be happier with the response you gave to our 96-page expanded yearend issue (artscope November/December 2007). A limited number of copies are still available by calling the artscope office at (617) 639-5771; better yet, why not get yourself a year-round subscription for $36?

Office Space

Sarah E. Fagan

New Art Center
61 Washington Park

Newtonville, Massachusetts

January 14 through February 24

This winter, six artists characterized by their unusual tools of the trade appear in a spectacle of craftsmanship just north of Boston’s city limits. Rubber bands, clear tape, corrugated cardboard and graph paper have been taken out of the context of the cubicle to create tapestries, clothing and performance pieces that make up the body of work that is “Office Space,” the winter show at the New Art Center.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the New Art Center has been housed in an old church building in Newtonville since the late 1970s. “Office Space” stands in the main gallery where vaulted ceilings soar, stained-glass windows line the walls, and the acoustics reverberate. Other portions of the building serve as studio space for over 800 art students aged 2 through 82. But classes are not the only opportunity the New Art Center has offered to the community.

North Shore Originals

James Foritano

Cape Ann Museum
27 Pleasant Street

Gloucester, Massachusetts

Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square

Salem, Massachusetts

Through February 24

I usually reach the North Shore by car, vibrating seriously from the mad traffic as I alight at my destination. But, to confirm me in my bad habit, offering relief to one addicted to 20th century personal mobility, are two exhibits (two!) each of which are highly original and offer a sense of history and insight which can be a blessed cocoon to the self-harassed.

The Cape Ann Historical Museum has, over time, blossomed into a house of many mansions, offering not only the serene anchor of that magisterial painter Fitz Henry Lane, but more and more of the highly noteworthy painters who followed Lane to see what was up at this doorstep on the sea and the weather.

I went to see Lane and was immediately calmed and revived. Revived enough to venture up to the special exhibitions space at the top floor to view “Chapters on a Quarry Wall.”

Rania Matar: Lebanon at the crossroads

Catherine Laferriere

Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Avenue

Boston

January 4 through February 9

Local photographers square off this January in Gallery Kayafas. Rania Matar studies the lives of Middle Eastern women and children in black and white, while Lissa Rivera explores private school interiors and fraternity houses in plush color. Both probe notions of class, society and reality in starkly different environments.

In her collection Matar captures every day life in war-torn Lebanon. Women chat, study and nurse infants as their children play among crumbling walls and rubble. Against a backdrop of seeming despair, survivors thrive in defiance. Take one woman, photographed sitting on a plastic chair where an apartment building once stood. Along with her friends, she wanders to lots where apartments once stood and arranges improvised (and outdoor) sitting rooms.

Ad/Agency

Gary Duehr

Photographic Resource Center at Boston University
832 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston

Through January 27

In “Ad/Agency,” nine photographers tear the clothes off the Emperor of Advertising to not only reveal the monarch is butt naked, but that the gorgeous, shimmering garments are the result of mass hypnosis - in which the public happily takes part.

Go into any mall and squint and you’ll feel the hypnotic effect: all the candy-colored bits of vibrating color. This is what Jonathan Lewis expertly captures in his “WalmArt” series, turning mall storefronts into an array of pixels, as if their essential product, more than shoes or handbags, is a mirage of desire. You see what you want to see. Marks and Spencer differs from Lidl only in the nuances of visual patterning.

One is reminded how the best colors for television transmission, orange and blue, infiltrate every sitcom and news broadcast: orange sweater, blue wall, orange desk. Squint and TV turns into the same dancing kaleidoscope of pixels. It’s a strangely entrancing, Mr. Magoo kind of world that Lewis unveils.

Sticky Bun City

William Henderson

Firehouse No. 13
41 Central Street

Providence, Rhode Island

Through January 25

The number of people who associate sex with the word “indulgence” is what surprises artist Erin Murphy the most about the pieces comprising the exhibit “Sticky Bun City.” Food? Yes. People indulge in food all of the time and, in fact, it is food and the many ways in which we take advantage of its availability that Murphy chose to represent in her multimedia contribution to the exhibit. But sex? It’s a far cry from the conversation that started her thinking about what has become “Sticky Bun City.”

That conversation took place earlier this year at a pool party. Murphy, 27, was asked to remember the name of the “shop in the mall that sells those sticky cinnamon buns,” said Murphy during a mid-December telephone interview. The exhibit hadn’t yet opened and was far from finished. At the time, she was trying to figure out where to buy a commode and how best to erect a bathroom stall in the center of the gallery in which guests could scrawl their secrets and contribute. A giving in, so to speak, to the desire to share their souls. “They thought the name was Sticky Buns,” she said. [Of course, the “store” is really Cinnabon.] “And I thought, hmm, that would be a fun theme for an art show.”

The Museum of Russian Icons

Gary Duehr

203 Main Street

Clinton, Massachusetts

Gordon Lankton’s introduction to icons began when he lifted the visage of St. Nicholas, a $20 souvenir, from the dust of a Russian flea market. “Enchanted,” on successive business trips, he added to his personal collection until the depictions of Christ, Mary and saints of the Orthodox Church took over the walls of his home. These days, he travels to auction houses to add to the icons on exhibit at his Museum of Russian Icons.

Originating in Greece, and spreading throughout Russia, these religious pictures were at the heart of ancient disagreement over worship and veneration. Icons were allowed to flourish in homes and churches because of the distinction between venerating (honoring) and worshiping, an act reserved for God.

Icon images are replicated many times over, but the iconography of each piece is unique, and searching for differences between regions and eras can become a thrilling quest.

One Hundred Years of Art: The Whistler House Museum

James Dyment

Whistler House
Museum of Art;/br>
243 Worthen Street

Lowell

In Lowell, Massachusetts, during the industrial revolution, the structure known now as the Whistler House Museum of Art was first built to house Paul Moody from Newbury. The structure was a combination of Federal and Greek Revival architecture. Moody was hired by the Proprietors of Locks and Canals to improve the power looms, which made the cotton mills more productive. In 1834, the house was inhabited by Major George Washington Whistler, also hired by the Proprietors, to head the Lowell Machine Shop and develop a better locomotive. Shortly after moving, his wife Anna Matilda gave birth to their son, James Abbot Whistler (later changed to James McNeill Whistler). Major Whistler, a very talented engineer, supervised the construction of the first rail line between Boston and Lowell. Only a few years later, the family moved from the house so Whistler could further his career, eventually leading to Russia where he helped build the rail system for Czar Nicholas I. The house was inhabited by other important figures that held positions at the Proprietors of Locks and Canals in Lowell.

The artist, Thomas B. Lawson, along with several others, incorporated the Lowell Art Association (LAA) in 1878. Their mission was “…for the purpose of developing, nurturing and increasing a love of, and a taste for, art in all its forms among the citizens of Lowell, and in that view eventually to own paintings, statuary and objects of general artistic value and merit, a library for reference, an art gallery, to give public periodical exhibitions of art, and in general to do and possess all things that it lawfully can to advance the study and progress of art in the city where it is formed…”

The Owbow Gallery

Greg Morell

275 Pleasant Street

Northampton, Massachusetts

Carved out of a modest brick storefront in one of Northampton’s older southside neighborhoods, the Oxbow Gallery is an artist run and artist managed co-operative that has been home to a cohesive collective of artists since opening in December 2004.

Western Massachusetts has seen the emergence and quick demise of many spirited gallery co-ops as groups with the best of intentions have seen their efforts of running a gallery fall victim to organizational pitfalls, financial woes and petty squabbles.

A successful co-operative gallery is a difficult chemistry to distill. Orchestrating an eclectic collection of independent creative egos struggling with the realities confronting the modern artist is a difficult undertaking. It requires democratic idealism, luck, sagacious leadership, tactful diplomacy and determined effort.

artSPACE@16

Roanna Forman

16 Princeton Road
Malden, Massachusetts

“Running the gallery,” artSPACE@16 owner Sand T said, “I feel like I’m the richest person in the world.” Her eyes sparkle as she reflects on her last seven years as owner of the Malden gallery that became one of Raphaela Platow’s favorite galleries in 2006 and won the 2007 “Best Art Gallery” by WBZ-TV and CityVoter. Her fan club includes all of Malden’s artists, much of the Boston arts press, and the local community.

What’s she been doing right?

Currents4: Amy Stacey Curtis

Elena Sarni

Colby College Museum of Art
5600 Mayflower Hill

Waterville, Maines

Through April 13

Leaving a pristinely white, snow-caked campus behind, the burst of color you see when you enter the Colby College Museum of Art is refreshing. Through the glass doors, what looks like a rectangular swimming pool is filled with floating, colored lily pads, lit softly by the sun filtering through the snow-topped skylight. Artist Amy Stacey Curtis was compelled to make use of the elongated lines of the Davis Gallery in her design of a rectangular grid, filled with painted circles inspired by nine colors found on the Colby campus. “currents4” is the fourth annual exhibition hosted by the museum and originated by Director and Chief Curator Sharon Corwin to promote emerging Maine artists and expose the public to boundary pushing art. Curtis is a Maine-based interactive installation artist well known throughout the state for her work at industrial sites. In the artist’s own words, her work represents how she “came to see the balance or sum of chaos, order and repetition as a sort of equation for everything, an archetype for the interconnectedness of all.”

Pausing to read the instructions on the wall, I immediately wished that I hadn’t researched the exhibit and read that Amy’s original installation was based on a random pattern of 10,080 colored circles generated by a computerized “shuffled algorithm.” Algorithm! Math! I try to squash my panic and return to the instructions.

“Please do not step on circles or tape. Carefully remove circles from floor. Place circles into receptacles sorting them by color. When circles are completely sorted use color keys provided to reassemble circles on floor. If unsure whether circles are being sorted or reassembled, choose. Without your participation, my work is incomplete.”

New Acquisitions 2007

Elena Sarni

Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square

Portland, Maine

Through February 10

Describing her curatorial approach to “New Acquisitions 2007,” Portland Museum of Art Associate Curator Jessica Routhier credits photography and landscape painting as the major themes of the exhibit. She added that within this framework, smaller groups of three to four pieces “that resonate with each other on a visual basis” were arranged. As a trained curator, I appreciate the challenges of arranging a new acquisitions show. You have to make a selection of work reflecting only a fraction of the year’s acquisitions, while honoring certain donors, and creating a cohesive show.

In this instance, although I logically understand the choice to delineate the photography by hanging it in the lobby, I instinctively don’t want people walking by Christopher Churchill’s “Lunch on Maximum-Security Unit from the Series The Augusta Mental Health Institute, 1988.” I am haunted by the unexpected clarity in the mental patient’s eyes as he gazes unwaveringly at the camera, eyes framed above equally surprising neatly trimmed facial hair. His naked torso dominates the end of the table, his back turned towards the stark bay windows. With the exception of the patient’s dark hair, the black and white photograph is mostly gray in scale, given the drab backdrop of the unit. The elevator is my escape from this complex man and the myriad thoughts he inspires. I ride resolutely to the fourth floor to see the rest of the exhibit, almost ashamed to be leaving him.

As I exit the elevator, the simple beauty of the round window strikes me to my left. It frames the late afternoon Portland cityscape as I stand next to it and admire the genius placement of Robert Solotaire’s “View from the 11th Floor of the Holiday Inn, April 10, 1979” next to the very window that offers a view of the Holiday Inn.

Dennis Lucas: Provincetown artist migrates inland for the season

Jim Dyment

The journey of a successful artist requires a bit of stamina. Dennis Lucas finds that a change in scenery supplies him with inspiration. Many times before painting a “studio” painting he will do a quick sketch, but honestly, he doesn’t enjoy it as much. “Nothing is more exciting than going outside and painting,” he said, ”not even close.” Lucas painted academically through college, but adopted the impressionist style at the Cape School in Provincetown. He explains, “I knew my first day in the historic yard at the Cape School that this was ‘it’ for me. I am invigorated and cannot wait to get out and paint in the open air. I enjoy all four seasons as a plein-air painter but when the first signs of spring come I absolutely must jump in.”

Although Lucas generally works with brighter colors, his recent show glimpses an emerging transition in style to darker colors. His response, “I don’t always have a chance to paint at night but when I do, I grab my headband with the night light attachment and head out to what I hope is a well lit or moonlit spot. Night paintings are not common with plein-air painters like myself but they are often exciting to capture on canvas.”

Lean back. Consider it for a moment.

Taryn Plumb

The sculpture before you could be an alien. Maybe some kind of bug. Or perhaps a peculiar creature from a Dr. Seuss book. Green and gangly with spindly legs, its body resembles a slightly flattened light bulb – rounded back-end traced with circular trails of painted hairs; narrow, ribbed front-end leading to an uneven snout with a pinkish mouth zigzagged like ribbon candy. Legs, long and thin as bamboo shafts, leave the indiscernible critter towering and slightly askance. If it were alive, you might try to pet it. Or you might run away.

It’s called “Snouted Arachnoid,” but its creator Donna Namnoum doesn’t say exactly what it is – only that it morphed out of a series of flower and bug sculptures. The Canton, Connecticut-based ceramist, like many contemporary artists, doesn’t like to give viewers preconceived notions of her work. She prefers they decide.

“Some people are just like ‘what is that?’” said a slightly exasperated Namnoum, whose work has appeared at galleries in Connecticut, New Jersey and Vermont and will be on display at Artworks Gallery in Hartford this spring. “I want people to be intrigued. I want to make something that compels them to look.”

Women's Rural Entrepreneurial Network(WREN)

Rick Agran

A wren is a busy, deliberate, cheerful bird full of song and flit with boundless energy. It embodies the perfect energy and analogy for the Women’s Rural Entrepreneurial Network of Bethlehem, New Hampshire and forms its acronym. WREN started in 1994 with a USDA Rural Enterprise and Business Grant to serve 15 women entrepreneurs and has helped grow and mentor countless others. It’s evolved into a women-led network of 600 members in 13 states. They cherish and celebrate their diversity as “artist and techies, visionaries and actionaries, entrepreneurs and business supporters, the highly-educated and the self-taught, the wealthy and the resourceful, the near and far.”

WREN has a little downtown compound that houses the non-profit organization’s office and classroom space to fulfill parts of its educational mission. Recent renovation includes a retail store from which 150 members sell handmade goods, wares and consumables. With 50 artist members, the Gallery at WREN provides professionally lit and curated gallery space to a small community of 2,500. “Inspire. Create. Connect” is their mantra.

Oil painter and collage artist Kristine Lingle works in the store and is

ART, art, ART, and more Art: Sixteen Boston art dealers go to Art Basel Miami 2007

Susan Schwalb

Art, sunshine, beaches - how could one resist the lure of Art Basel Miami?

Beginning with one large fair at the Miami Convention Center and a couple of allied fairs and events in 2002, this “fair” has ballooned into a major destination for art lovers world-wide. From December 5 to 9, more than two-dozen art fairs and a host of exhibitions and private collections were open to the public. Boston area artists and their dealers made a surprisingly significant presence. Sixteen dealers participated in nine different fairs with paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and installations.

The fairs were roughly divided into two locations: hotels that were mainly on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, several blocks from the Miami Convention Center (home to Art Basel), and huge tents or commercial buildings in the Wynwood Art and Design District in Miami proper, a little over a half hour from the convention center. In the hotels, each dealer had his or her own room with different limits on the changes allowed; sometimes all the furniture was removed, but elsewhere gaudy chandeliers had to remain in place along with decorative and overpowering wall paper. Often the dealers also slept in their rooms, removing the artwork from the beds each night. In Wynwood on the other hand, the spaces were generally large, clean and well lit and more closely resembled the traditional fair experience.

Art Basel was the largest fair with over 200 dealers

Edurne Esponda: Codico propio (personal code)

Rena Lindstrom

There was the feel of ceremony in the room where the large abstract paintings of Mexican painter Edurne Esponda hung before me. I had seen Esponda’s work before at Ernden Fine Art Gallery in Provincetown, a splendid, small contemporary gallery where she was introduced in the 2006 season, but not on such a scale. I had come a long way to see them again, navigating across Mexico City, from the metro stop at Constitution Square, the grand plaza at the heart of the city, to the lovely, treed, urban neighborhood of Pelanco. Each wall of the viewing room held an enormous, dynamic painting. Mexico is an extroverted country and Esponda’s paintings embody that spirit.

Esponda spent her early days in Oaxaca in the bright southern light, the spectacular, rugged mountains, and perhaps, most importantly, among the large indigenous population who carry a history of color and craft and courage unrivaled among pre-Hispanic people. There were 27 tribes established in the valley long before the Aztec empire. Oaxaca has nurtured many of Mexico’s modern artists, including Rufino Tamayo, Rudolpho Morelos, and Francisco Toledo.

This legacy lies at the heart of Esponda’s work - the dramatic landscape, the visual language of color and texture

Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project

Roanna Forman

With time on his hands in a Genoa jail, prisoner of war Marco Polo dictated the chronicle of his travels across that stretch of Eurasia from Venice to China later named the “Silk Road.” His record of that trip through inhospitable deserts and treacherous mountain passes may have been embellished, but it definitely opened a huge, exotic window onto other cultures, religions and art forms.

Known for its radical politics, from my chair, Northampton is far too conservative in its arts. However, when Consentino shows in this Western Massachusetts town, she rattles the dust off the pretty pictures of the Valley Realists and offers us a breath of fresh air.

Founded in 1998, the non-profit has an ensemble of

The Little Dog Laughed

Christopher Caggiano

The funniest play on Broadway last season was, hands down, Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Little Dog Laughed.” The story of a fictional Hollywood heartthrob and his numerous dalliances with a gay-for-pay call boy, the play garnered a Tony nomination for best play, and earned a Best Actress Tony Award for Julie White, who ran away with the show with her rapid-fire delivery and surefire comic timing. In anticipation of its Boston premier at the SpeakEasy Stage Company, artscope correspondent Christopher Caggiano spoke with Beane about why the subject matter was so appealing.

Puppetry in New England: Bread and Puppet Theater, The Tanglewood Marionettes and Dan Butterworth

Britt Beedenbender

Puppetry is often dismissed as sideshow theatrical gimmickry or a minor diversion for children. However, in its full bloom, the art of Puppetry is a very demanding discipline. It calls for a diversity of talents that include painting, sculpture, engineering, writing and the creative zeal of a theatrical showman with a relentless imagination.

The puppet artist is a Renaissance man with the soul of an actor and the dexterity of a magician. Puppetry is not academic. The sole path to becoming a proficient puppet artist is through a long and diligent internship. Under the tutelage of a seasoned practitioner, the skills of a puppet artist evolve slowly. Mastery of the composite of skills employed by the puppet artist mature through years of practice, experimentation, creative problem-solving and earnest persistence.

Upper Vermont is home to the miraculous

artscope Capsule Previews

Brian Goslow

Still holding onto some of that Christmas gift money? Throughout the month of January, A Z Fine Arts is offering “Small Wonders,” local scenes by gallery-represented artists including Carol Summers, Celia Judge, Anthony Petchkis, Karen Baker and Sharon Price that range from 5” x 7” to 16” x 20.” Alex Khomsky channels the sparkle of the Art Nouveau age for February’s gallery exhibit. Featuring an array of “beautiful ladies,” his latest works are enhanced by his recent addition of copper leaf which join his mastery of oil, gold and silver paints in his creating of stunning yet tranquil paintings; they can be seen in the month of February at A Z, 339 Washington Street (Route 16), Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.

Another late shopping option is the “Decorative Art Sale” which continues through January 26 at Gallery Z, 259 Atwells Avenue in Providence. It’s your chance to get a unique jewelry piece by artist and goldsmith Steven Tegu, who’s done design work for Revlon, Warner Brothers and Christian Dior after serving an apprenticeship with the Bulova Watch Company. His commercial success has allowed him to follow his own creative path, which he explained in his artistic statement for the show: “I am intrigued by the transformational power of heightened consciousness and the universal language of the Expressive Arts as a redemptive force for positive change in this chaotic and uncertain age.”

The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine and the Pilchck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington have made some of the most major and adventurous contributions to the craft of glassmaking. “A Gathering of Contemporary Glass” follows the craft’s lineage from the 1951 opening of Haystack, which employed the groundbreaking Harvey Littleton (who had moved glassmaking from the huge factories to the studio in the previous decade) in 1964, his teaching of Dale Chihuly, who would go on to change the way the world looked at glass and, after a stint of teaching at Haystack, established Pilchck in 1971, to the creations of their students and fellow instructors in the years that followed. This remarkable and memorable exhibition continues through February 17 at the Farnsworth Art Museum, 18 Museum Street in Rockland, Maine.

Show curator Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer set out to showcase some of the latest contemporary innovations for the “Improvisations in 2D and 3D” exhibition that opens on January 2 and continues through February 3 at the Depot Square Gallery, 1937 Massachusetts Avenue in Lexington. Walzer joins Goergette Benisty, Jodi Collela, Jean Proulx Dibner, Melanie Zibit, Gracia Dayton, Dora Hsiung, Emily Passman and Siri Smedvig in this collection of bronze and marble sculptures, fiber art, paintings, prints, mixed media and objects d'art that mix past influences (half the fun is guessing which) with the implementation of new ideas and experiments.

The International Association of Art Critics gave its 2007 “Best Emerging Artist in New England” award to “artscope” contributor Gary Duehr, who has been busy with the publication of his book “What Happens” (available for $19 from garyduehr.com) and preparing works from his “Soft Cities” (ghostly images from Paris, Venice, Amsterdam and Mexico City) and “Liminalities” (that moment between things happening when anything is possible) series, which you can see in their full- scaled glory from January 7 through February 22 at the Khaki Gallery, 9 Crest Road, Wellesley.

Printmaking is one of the oldest art forms but until recently, most of the works ended on paper and suitable framed. In the course of history, its expansion into new forms of display – on leather, carpet, plaster, copper, steel and even wax – not to mention fabrics like silk and cotton (remember learning how to silkscreen your own patterns into t-shirts?) are relatively new. These new innovations are celebrated in the Center for Contemporary Printmaking’s “Not Printed on Paper” which opens on January 17 and continues through March 15 at Matthews Park, 299 West Avenue in Norwalk, Connecticut. The show includes prints by Phyllis Peckar Clamage and Allison Roberts, a rare plaster print work by Stanley William Hayter and Gabor Peterdi, copper prints by Suzanne Benton and silk printworks by Margaret Turner. Several classes are being held in conjunction with the exhibition; call 203-899-7999 for more details.

Dina Brodsky calls her latest 16-painting collection, “In a Different Light II,” a curio cabinet of life capturing her perceptions and reactions to everyday objects. The works, which will be on view throughout the month of February at ARTANA, 1378 Beacon Street, Suite B in Brookline, Massachusetts, promise to stand as a lasting view of what our lives were like as we moved from the 20th to 21st centuries. The New York-based artist, who blends her mastery of the style of the 17th century Dutch Masters with contemporary realism, will be on hand for the opening on February 2 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Barbara Hitchcock “crawled” through the Polaroid Collection archives of over 16,000 museum-quality images in curating “Fins, Wings and Other Such Things,” a nature-oriented collection that gives you the opportunity to “Meet the Beetles” through Andrea Woolf’s sepia-toned images, William Wegmen’s beloved dogs, glamorous barnyard pigs and imagine the sounds that were made in the making one of the show-stoppers, Bettina Rheims’ studio portrait of a rooster. The exhibition can be seen through February 10 at the National Heritage Museum, 33 Marrett Road, Lexington, Massachusetts. The show’s last two days will feature concerts by the Lexington Symphony Orchestra; call (781)861-6559.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen cities and towns realizing the role art can play in developing a fresh new image. Over the past year, the long-running Hudson Arts Alliance in the Central Massachusetts town of Hudson has tripled its efforts to promote both the visual and performing arts in the town. Longtime resident, photographer and 2001 Mass College of Art graduate Jordan Kessler has documented its Water and Loring Streets neighborhood in a series of selenium-toned silver gelatin prints that can be seen through mid-March at the Hudson Town Hall, 78 Main Street weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Since it’s a winter road trip, you’ll want to stock up on warm coffee, tea and soup from the nearby Harvest Café at 40 Washington in Wood Square, which showcases local artists.

Boston’s SoWa (South of Washington) district gets a new gallery on January 25. Space 242, 242 East Berkeley Street (second floor) debuts with photographer Liz Linder’s “Records and Refuse,” a mixture of images of iconic products in unlikely places and musicians. In “Product Placement,” Linder manages to make a discarded squished Budweiser can on an otherwise idealistic beach scene look entrancing while she captures the beams of the sun perfectly on “Blaze Hazard” in a way that hasn’t been seen since Robert Mapplethorpe did the same for Patti Smith’s iconic “Horses” album shoot. The show runs through February 22.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Chet Williamson

With a roster of notable alumni that includes Thomas Hart Benton, Red Grooms, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg and Grant Wood, among so many others, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is an indisputable breeding ground for success in the world of art.

Since establishing itself in 1866, the Midwest institution has earned this continuing reputation for providing premiere art and design education while maintaining an environment for such achievement. Located in the heart of Chicago, SAIC is part of a thriving art community with access to unending resources.

While students draw inspiration from all the resources of the school including