artscope magazine: July/August 2008

Welcome Statement: Brian Goslow, managing editor

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

Welcome Statement, July/August 2008

As we started to compile this summer trip themed issue of artscope, writer James Foritano mentioned that he had just gone down to New York City via the notorious Fung Wah Bus. Along with whatever quirky tales he might have from the ride, it seemed he could give us the perfect diary of an art lover on a budget’s dream weekend. Thankfully, as he’s been known to do, James given us a humor filled tale of his Big Apple experiences. Thankfully, as he’s been known to do, James given us a humor filled tale of his Big Apple experiences. But he really hits a home run with what I feel is one of his finest pieces yet, a review of the Annual Juried Members Show at the Danforth Museum of Art. Few writers can capture not only the show on view, but also the show getting to that view, as he does. “When I arrived in Framingham it was drizzling cold, but with such a quantity of quality, I felt like I was stepping onto a warm beach shelving towards lapping blue waters,” he writes. “I kept my pen and notebook dry, but barely.”

Following in the travel theme, I had the chance to preview “Luisa rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008,” which will spend the summer at the Gardner Museum in Boston. I found the idea of taking Isabella Stewart Gardner’s journals and updating them for the 21st century was a brilliant way to introduce both Gardner and her museum to a new audience.

I also had the opportunity to preview the “a politic” exhibition that will be at Gallery XIV in Boston’s South End. The show was juried by three first generation Americans: gallery director William Kerr, who is half-Portuguese and half-Scottish; co-curator Juliette Pelletier of Reflect-arts, Inc., who is half-French Canadian and half Italian, and artscope publisher Kaveh Mojtabai, a Persian-American. “There’s a resonance between us that’s passionately American with a world influence,” Kerr said during my visit. Kaveh’s participation is another example of how artscope is getting involved with the community.

Another is our sponsoring of the “Arts Affair on the Boardwalk” on August 2 and 3 in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our office is based. More details can be found in this issue’s Capsule Previews.

We couldn’t fit everything we wanted into this issue, including the Concord (MA) Art Association’s “order Insecta” exhibition, the 11th Annual Invitational outdoor Sculpture Exhibit at the Millbrook Gallery and Sculpture Garden in Concord (NH), the Monadnock Music Festival and “Jimmy Tingle for President” at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, which will be hosting the “Nature and Balance” exhibition that’s to be reviewed in our September/October issue. Please seek out these shows in your journeys this summer.

Our desire to cover as many exhibits and events as possible led to the artscope email blast!, which Sarah E. Fagan compiles on a twice-monthly basis. It has built up its own devoted readership, and that readership keeps growing. Subscribe (for free) at emailblast@artscopemagazine.com.

We’d like to thank our judges of this issue’s centerfold contest: Catherine Green of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, Sara Zela of Studio Potter Magazine, and artscope writer Elena Sarni. For our November/December 2008 issue, we’re looking for submissions in the photographic media. For more details see the back of this issue or write centerfold@artscopemagazine.com.

So dig into the pages ahead and if they encourage you to drop in on Berta Walker in Provincetown, Anni MacKay at the BigTown Gallery in Vermont, the redmond Bennett Gallery in New Hampshire, the Farnsworth Art Museum and Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Yale Museum of Art or the galleries of Newport, Rhode Island, please tell them artscope sent you. Keep your issues dry, readers, but get those feet wet.

Letters to the Editor

Dear artscope magazine,

Just a quick note to tell you how much the Ulman family appreciated Franklin W. Liu’s wonderful article about Mike Ulman in your May/June 2008 issue. He is still getting calls from friends who read the magazine and discovered the story. Thank you for your insightful understanding of how Mike’s art is integral to his passion for motors and speed.

Marty Ulman

Dear artscope magazine

Your magazine is distributed at the Sharon Arts Center/Gallery in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and that’s where I pick up my copy, and have remained a huge fan. I noticed in a recent issue that you featured an article on the Dublin Arts Colony, and thought you may like to mention our Summer Music Festival that runs from July 9 to August 17. This year we have an amazing and innovative repertoire. We rattle the cage of conventional thinking when it comes to chamber music, and more and more Bostonians attend our concerts every year.

Cynthia A. Geary
Development Director
Monadnock Music

Dear artscope magazine

Thank you for the many insightful articles, elegant layout, fine color separations and vitality of the whole magazine. With our triple exhibition of “Hiroshima,” “Tibet and China” and “The Peace Mask Project,” our Central Asian Cinema series, and upcoming Samurai-Kaiju and Mongolian Festivals, the Asian Cultural Center of Vermont and C.X. Silver Gallery of Brattleboro are very pleased to collaborate with your magazine. We are connecting people through the arts and cultures of all Asia and you are connecting people through the incredible creativity and insight of the arts scene. We appreciate your outstanding customer service.

Adam Silver, Co-Director, C.X. Silver Gallery

Executive Director, Asian Cultural Center of Vermont

Dear artscope magazine

Thank you so much for writing about Ron Rosenstock’s “Fire & Ice” show in the artscope e-mail blast. I appreciate the visibility that this placement has provided the show and our gallery.

Isa Leshko, Marketing Director

Panopticon Gallery, Boston

Past, Present, Future: ANISH KAPOOR

James Foritano

Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue
Boston

Through September 7

You have to admire the level of commitment that curator Nicholas Baume and the ICA have brought to their invitation of London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor to the spacious West Gallery for the summer.

Kapoor is not a gracious guest. To be blunt, he takes advantage. And you would think that an “almost” colonial – Kapoor was born in 1954 into an India just liberated from Britain – would know better. That he would be happy to squeeze himself into a corner and live out of his suitcase, with an occasional glimpse of our grand Boston Harbor.

Not at all.

Kapoor has brought with him 15 friends, from the subtly self-effacing, but grandiosely titled “1000 Names” to the behemoth and eponymously named “Past, Present, Future.” In between are an assortment of pranksters and poseurs who clamor for our attention, playing shamelessly for an audience – and getting one!

But, let’s go back to the majestic presumption, which you, as visitors, will be approving if you decide to join the party with Kapoor and his raucous companions. “Past, Present, Future” is an enormous hemisphere. As it turns with glacial speed, passing from inside to outside the West Gallery’s south wall, it decorates the wall with the gelatinous red substance that is slathered over its surface - and hums.

Motion and ambiguity of direction and purpose are themes that run throughout with an almost palpable knocking, as if someone were trying, persistently, to get in or get out. “1000 Names” occupies its small space with a modesty, primness and silence that is a refreshing contrast to the enormousness and enormity of its behemoth cousin.

And yet there is a marked family resemblance.

“1000 Names” looks, to this viewer, like a drill-bit emerging from the floor. And it also appears as if it could be withdrawing into the floor. The upward thrust of its point feels contradicted by its “skin”

ANDREW SAFTEL: How do we get there?

Brian Goslow

Lanoue Fine Art
125 Newbury Street
Boston

July 12 through August 10

I once fell In love wIth a painting of a woman by Georges Seurat, which after a long fruitless search for a print of the work, I learned was a detail From his iconic “A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jette.” You’ll get the same effect looking at these printmaking, painting and found art works by Andrew Saftel.

Each piece deserves its own review. “Little Rain,” which holds a small strand of green painted rope that Saftel collected on Cape Cod, could easily be three separate paintings. It’s topped by a number of ships and boats and simple but well-placed blotches of white, tan and blue to portray ripples in the water, and accompanied by the words, “pleasant, with some thunder but little rain,” which he found in an old shipping log.

WEDDED BLISS: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony

Roanna Forman

Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square
Salem, Massachusetts

Through September 14

With 130 paintings, garments, artifacts and installation pieces from the 18th century to the present, this intercultural exhibit shows the simple joys and complex tensions within that universal rite of passage, marriage.

Beginning with the “Art of Negotiation,” works represent how the bride (or groom) is chosen, the relative role of wealth or love in that choice, how that wealth is transported to the new household, and cultural variations of the wedding procession uniting suitors and their families.

The arranged marriage, so counter to romantic fantasies, is hardly a non-Western concept, as John Clevely’s 1762 panorama of the harbor arrival of George III’s bride attests. Knowing neither her husband nor English, the young Queen Charlotte is a stick figure amid the naval salute, symbol of British power.

Bikash Bhattacharjee’s “Thakur Mathura Das, 1982,” an ambiguous portrait of a graying Indian man and doll-sized bride, conveys the oppressive elements of arranged marriage. The bride, in light-green sari and burnt-orange robe, gold headdress and baubles, is joyless. Sitting alongside the sullen figure at her right (father or husband?), she projects resignation and anger.

Contrast that to the relief of courtship, again not exclusively Western. A photograph by Tiziana and Gianni Baldizzone catches Wodaabee Tribe Nigerian males lining up to impress would-be brides. Wearing elaborate outfits,

A POLITIC, Gallery XIV

Brian Goslow

Gallery XIV
37 Thayer Street
Boston

July 2 through August 16

After spending most of 2008 planning this show with co-curators Juliette Pelletier, director of Reflect-arts in New York City, and artscope magazine publisher Kaveh Mojtabai, Gallery XIV gallery director William Kerr had just learned Ron English would be contributing a billboard version of his “Abraham Obama” painting to this exhibition, which is meant to stir discussion, controversy and action – and hopefully, sell some art.

“He’s one of my favorite living painters,” Kerr said. “I love that he can paint as well as anyone technically but he installs his art in places people generally don’t have art, like the empty lots of inner cities with nothing but billboards for major corporations. It’s so good, so thoughtful and so controversial, it gets people talking.”

Created with the spirit of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen kaleidoscope-style Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy paintings and backed in the colors of the rainbow, the piece will sit on the huge plywood construction wall outside the gallery. “It’s really colossal,” Kerr said. “Finding someone to print the billboard was a huge effort. Who’s going to print a 16 foot by 50 foot wide billboard?” The gallery had to cover the cost of the billboard, which lasts only as long as the show. “It’s a guerilla gift to the people of Boston.”

Pelletier said the 39-artist juried show flows together nicely, and represents 16 states. “I always do thematic shows and group artists that allow me to bring in massive audiences and all kinds of people who wouldn’t otherwise come out to take a look.” Each of the show’s 124 applicants will have one of their works displayed on the show’s website at galleryxiv.com; visitors can select their favorites in voting booths both at the gallery and online.

The pieces run the gamut from commentary on the environment and feminism to politics, the war, government and capitalism. Highlights include:

El Greco To Velázquez: Art during the reign of Philip III

Sarah E. Fagan

Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston

Through July 27

More than that of his predecessor Philip II and his successor Philip IV, the rule of Spain’s Philip III (from 1598-1621) was known for its rambunctious parties, exorbitant spending on church and state, and the creation of an Iberia abound with cultural diversity and openness. The peninsula was a place where the singular genius of El Greco could flourish and a young Diego Velázquez could gain fame even by breaking away from his master and displaying his knack for naturalism on such low-brow subjects as peasants and domestic scenes. Thus is the political and artistic world the creators of El Greco to Velázquez seek to explore, the world of a little-known king and the leaps and bounds of Spain’s artistic contributions under his rule.

Represented in the exhibition (co-created by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University) are dozens of artists, contemporaries of the two title greats. Over 60 works hailing from The Prado, Scotland’s National Gallery, and various other institutions and private collections from across the globe grace the MFA’s second floor. The show is divided by subject matter, such as Portraiture, Religion and Still Lifes, and traces the development of these genres through the years of Philip III’s reign. The flow of paintings is punctuated with surprises, such as drawings, sculptures and one grand collection of natural and manmade treasures, the camarín. A camarín, or “little room,” was a wall-to-wall amassment of fineries collected by the upper class (in this case, the Duke of Lerma) meant to wow visitors in an ostentation of wealth and connoisseurship. In this exhibit, the camarín is represented by a floor to ceiling replica of the sorts of things the Duke had in his own collection, from Chinese pottery to Venetian glass to nautilus shells, informed by written inventory records. Thanks to scavenger hunt-like efforts of royal proportions by the show’s curators, the modern day camarín reflects the one possessed by the king’s favorite advisor. Spot lit in its own space, it no doubt carries the same stunning effect as the original.

The last room of the exhibit is the flan at the end of the banquet; fanciful still lifes greet the visitor, featuring pheasant carcasses, ripe melons and cabbages hanging from strings. Sans religion, sans state, sans patron, works like Juan Sánchez Cotán’s “Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber” were made for little reason but their painters’ desire to explore light, shadow, composition and trompe l’oeil effects. Amongst the still lifes are early works by Velázquez, including the painfully realistic “An Old Woman Cooking Eggs,” completed before

Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008

Brian Goslow

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway
Boston

Through September 28

“IT’S VERY BEAUTIFUL. IT’S VERY HAUNTING. IT’S VERY MOVING.” GARDNER MUSEUM CURATOR PIERANNA CAVALACHINI IS TALKING ABOUT THE END RESULT OF LUISA RABBIA’S YEAR-LONG ARTISTIC JOURNEY TO COMBINE IMAGES AND ARTIFACTS FROM ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER’S SCRAPBOOK FROM AN 1883 VISIT TO CHINA WITH HER OWN DRAWINGS INTO THIS 25-MINUTE VIDEO. “IT TAKES YOU THROUGH TIME AND SPACE, MERGING HER STORY WITH ISABELLA’S,” CAVALACHINI SAID.

Rabbia became interested in Isabella during a 2007 artist-in-residence stay at the museum. “What was particularly interesting for me was to see all the artworks and objects mixed together, without any hierarchy, which made me think that each one of them was dear to her for a specific reason,” she said. “I am fascinated by this extension of self through objects we choose or make, because it tells us something about the way we are/were in relation to the time we live in.”

Gardner’s scrapbooks, which will be on view at the museum next spring, provided an extraordinary view into Isabella’s world.

Collector's Choice: Late 19th Century Vibrations

James Dyment

New England Quilt Museum
18 Shattuck Street
Lowell, Massachusetts

Through August 24

One of the most prominent venues of the Lowell Quilt Festival this summer is curated with the touch of a man, Gerald roy. He and Paul Pilgrim began collecting quilts in 1969. Both were quilt makers and had backgrounds in fine art. Although Pilgrim passed away in 1996, roy has continued the collection, which has grown to contain approximately 1,500 items including quilts and related materials.

“During the Victorian era, there were basically two schools of quilting: traditional and non-traditional, which parallels the comparison today between traditional quilts and art quilts,” Roy said. Non-traditionals, known as Crazy Quilts, were brought into fashion with the help of women’s magazines and often composed by embroiderers, not quilters. They were technically not quilts because they were not constructed with quilted triple layers and were tied, not quilted. Because of the industrial revolution, cities had established a broader wealthy class and its residents followed the latest fashion trends. Fabrics during this period were often dark and drab, influenced by the fashions of Queen Victoria.

OFF THE WALL: 2008 Annual members’ Juried exhibition

James Foritano

Danforth Museum of Art
123 Union Avenue
Framingham, Massachusetts

Through August 3

BEHIND A PLAIN FAçADE, THE MEMBERS’ SHOW AT THE DANFORTH MUSEUM IS A CORNUCOPIA OF ART FILLED WITH SURPRISES TO ATTRACT THE STEADY GAzE. WHEN I ARRIVED IN FRAMINGHAM IT WAS DRIZZLING COLD, BUT WITH SUCH A QUANTITY OF QUALITY, I FELT LIKE I WAS STEPPING ONTO A WARM BEACH SHELVING TOWARDS LAPPING BLUE WATERS. I KEPT MY PEN AND NOTEBOOK DRY, BUT BARELY.

Director Katherine French showed me around while explaining the genesis of this landfall. She and her staff have been diligently stirring the waters of New England to bring artists of talent and ambition into the fold of membership, welcoming them with annual group shows of juried paintings.

Add a strong selective intelligence to this mix, such as Institute of Contemporary Art curator Carole Anne Meehan, and voila, you have roomfuls of art to be proud of, for art lovers to feast upon and for artists themselves to spy out the competition and expose their creativity to vital cross-fertilization. Perfect? Not quite.

Membership and submissions to member shows have been growing vigorously. Enough so that when guest curator Meehan had filled her allotted space there was still too much evidence of quality to permit to slip away. So, French and her staff hauled their permanent collection into temporary storage and filled two more galleries with additionally selected works. And it works!

On the principle of “last shall be first” I plunged to the end of the two galleries of additionally selected works to a tiny room where I came upon Eleonora Lecei’s apocalyptic chickens, “# 1 and #2.” They reminded me of nothing else I’d seen before, except perhaps Medardo Rosso’s poignantly modeled wax busts. They evoked both strutting, clucking barnyard chickens, and also two ghostly avian individuals with an uncanny aura of apocalypse. Who knew?

I left the two chickens and a small oil painting of a donkey spreading its front legs fetchingly to drink in a pool just beyond the picture’s foreground, and stepped into a world of wings.

Just a word about organization is perhaps due. French and her staff have grouped paintings not rigidly but just tightly enough so that there is often a family resemblance of

Featured Artist Laurence Young

Taylor M. Polites

Laurence Young visited a friend’s studio about a year ago. “She was working with wax and torches. It bubbled. It bled. It burned.” The printmaker-turned-painter was captivated. “In printmaking, I loved the things that were beyond my control,” Young said. “There’s an excitement in that process, of utilizing a process that is in fact out of control.” He began experimenting with wax and pigment, stressing it with heat and then applying it in thick smears with a palette knife. “It is a way of entering into the painting for me. A way of beginning the process.”

He now pairs his vivid coloring with a texture that adds depth and contour to the landscapes and structures that he paints. “I am revisiting them with this new surface, making them so much more,” Young said. A salt marsh of the Outer Cape entitled “Seasonal Change” seems to vibrate with slashes of blue and green, red and pink. The scene holds the viewer with its intensity. The wax darkens the colors, adding a depth to the shading as the eye is drawn further into the canvas along the rivulets of blue. In “Low Tide,” cuts of purple and aquamarine shimmer across the canvas and recede into the distance, leaving a lone boat half in shadow anchored on a sand flat. The boat, brightly lit in red and white

An Artful Touch: An Artful Touch Gallery

Chet Williamson

An Artful Touch Gallery
5 Main Street
Rockport, Massachusetts

May 28 through June 29

When Margret “Peggy” Chick left the healthcare profession after a long career in nursing and opened An Artful Touch Gallery in Rockport, a dream was realized.

You might say Chick had a head start in the business and is naturally suited to be a gallery owner and director. In addition to being the daughter of noted watercolorist Martin Ahearn, brother-in-law John C. Terelak is recognized as one of our country’s finest living Impressionists.

“To start a venture like this, having two very talented artists in the family certainly helped,” Chick said. “John is represented in many galleries throughout the country. I am lucky enough to have him right here in town. My father is 90 and is still painting. He had a gallery in Rockport for a good many years and gave it up in his retirement.”

Since opening An Artful Touch 13 years ago, Chick has represented over 200 American craftsmen in a variety of media from art glass and stylish lamps to ceramic ware and original jewelry.

Everday Monuments: the Photographs of Jerome Liebling:

Taryn Plumb

Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
New Haven, Connecticut;/br>

Through September 7

THE PLASTIC HEAD - BALD AND IMPECCABLY DOMED, SHOULDERS BARE AND EYES SMOLDERING - FILLS UP THE FRAME. THE CHEEKBONES ARE PERFECT, AND THE LIPS, THE NOSE; THE SKIN SEEMS TO GLISTEN. IT – SHE, RATHER – IS BEAUTIFUL.

Or at least, she once was.

Marring such magnificence now is her left eye, which is just about gone; the bridge of her perfectly proportioned nose looks like it’ll be next. In those areas, the mannequin’s plastic skin is flaked and fragmented, revealing large patches of what looks like white Styrofoam. There are gaping white chasms where a hazel eye and painted strip of an eyebrow used to be. Cracks, divots and smaller holes scatter away from those like debris.

Still, this faded beauty’s ravaged face is entrancing. Therein lies the raw theme of photographer Jerome Liebling’s work: Often, flaws and blemishes provide more fascination than impeccable beauty.

“His photographic vision finds importance and meaning in seemingly mundane aspects of life,” noted Pamela Franks, deputy director for collections and education at Yale University, which is presenting a medley of Liebling’s pictures. “He has always been committed to photographing real, everyday people doing everyday things.”

In a career beginning in the 1940s and spanning six decades – the photographer and documentary filmmaker still shoots today - Liebling has had ample time to expand and contract this idea. The octogenarian, who resides in Amherst, Massachusetts, has explored it in portraits, landscapes, textured close-ups of inanimate objects and artifacts; in black and whites,

SAM FEINSTEIN (1915-2003): A retrospective

Michael Persson

Cape Cod Museum of Art
Rt 6A
Dennis, Massachusetts

Through July 27

Art is evolution. And for most, evolution means the forward passage of change, from cave painting to pointillism, John Singer-Sargent to Chuck Close, or so you’d think. For abstract expressionist painter Sam Feinstein, evolution moved in the opposite direction. His was a visual devolution, where content became visceral abstractions that took his painterly vision and philosophy towards the realms of faith and nature.

Feinstein’s retrospective on the grounds of the Cape Cod Center for the Arts is this “opposite evolution” succinctly put. Its 28 pieces attempt to plot the creative course of an artist with over 1,200 works to his name. A daunting task, to say the least, and yet by the time you finish, you come away with a distinct sense of upliftedness, something Feinstein spent a lifetime attempting to coax.

Samuel Lawrence Feinstein arrived in New York from a small town outside Kiev, Ukraine in 1922. As with most emigrating families, the Feinsteins’ life savings was to be their “startup” capital in the New World. By the time they set out for Philadelphia their money was gone, exchanged for forged currency in a deal gone bad that would doom their early years to poverty. By the time Feinstein was set for higher education, his choosing art over medicine or law created tremendous uproar.

His allegiance to self-expression through art and not his family’s financial security presented the young man with his first critique when his mother called him a “blackhearted murderer.” In the show, there is what is thought to be a portrait of his mother: an example of one of the many stylistic avenues the young artist took through the 1930s.

DORA ATWATER MILLIKIN: Geometry of Place

Meredith Cutler

Newport Art Museum
76 Bellevue Avenue
Newport, Rhode Island

Through August 10

Aptly titled, Rhode Island painter Dora Atwater Millikin’s “Geometry of Place” is now on view at the historic campus of the Newport Art Museum. While the manicured surroundings echo a sentimentality of time and place ubiquitous to this oasis of beachside mansions, Millikin’s unconventional landscape oil paintings provide a neutral view, absent of the clichés you might expect to encounter there.

Scattered between the coastal cities of New Bedford and Newport, the artist notes objectively of her subject matter: “It’s southern New England; it’s my world. I’ve lived by this stuff all of my life.”

Nancy Craig: New Paintings and Works on Paper, and Romolo Del Deo: New Sculpture and Bronze Furniture

Taylor M. Polites

Berta Walker Gallery
208 Bradford Street
Provincetown, Massachusetts

Nancy Craig: New Paintings and Works on Paper
July 11 through 27

Romolo Del Deo: New Sculpture and Bronze Furniture
August 22 through September 7

THE ART WORLD OF THE NEW CENTURY IS IDENTIFIABLE MORE BY ITS FRACTURED INDIVIDUALITY THAN FOR A SENSE OF GENRE OR SCHOOL. ARTISTS DRAW ON AN ALPHABET SOUP OF DIVERGENT AND REACTIONARY ISMS RANGING FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO NEO-EXPRESSIONISM AND BEYOND. FINDING ARTISTS, THEN, WHO EMBED THEIR WORK IN A CLASSICAL VOCABULARY WITHOUT LOSING A MODERN VIEWPOINT OR ACCESSIBILITY CAN COME AS A SURPRISE. BUT BERTA WALKER, THE GRANDE DAME OF PROVINCETOWN ART FOR ALMOST 20 YEARS, HAS FOUND TWO UNIQUE ARTISTS WHO DO JUST THAT. NANCY CRAIG AND ROMOLO DEL DEO, WHO WILL BE FEATURED AT WALKER’S GALLERY THIS AUGUST, EXPRESSLY EMPLOY A CLASSICAL VOCABULARY.

Craig is already a recognized master portraitist, receiving commissions from American as well as European royalty, including the Rockefeller, Forbes, Guinness, Windsor and Hohenzollern families. But that, according to Craig, is only her day job. She works on commissions to enable her to focus on her own painting and drawing when she returns home. Her personal works range from monumental canvases reminiscent of the scale and scope of Rubens (in Spain, she was known as “la mujer de Rubens”) to the drawings she loves. Those drawings in both ink and oil pastel on paper will be the feature of her show. “Like Degas,” Craig said, “I was born to draw.”

Craig’s fancy has led her to create what she refers to as “Renaissance Dream Drawings.” They are reminiscent of the Metaphysical and pre-Surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico’s work. Perspectives are based on Renaissance principles with geometrically patterned floorscapes, often in gold or red and white, peopled with mysterious and dissonant figures: horses, riders, acrobats, a cheetah. They are strange and quiet spaces filled with structures that recede into the horizon. Craig’s dreams are pulled in part from the sketchbooks she has maintained for decades. She begins with the geometric planes and populates them through search and inspiration. The horses swirl against the page in active arabesques while acrobats pose, waiting for a breath of life against the rigid and formal background. They are immediately recognizable and yet compel the viewer to descend deeper into the scene, to walk among these strange and wonderful creatures.

Del Deo also employs a classical vocabulary in his work, but with a focus on bronze sculpture. “I don’t like art that is sacrosanct. I love bronze for its durability. Bronze only looks better with time.”

As a young man, Del Deo studied at the Accademia in Florence and wandered freely through their archives. His work is infused with that Classical and pre-Classical education. His new show is called “Sirocco” after the fierce winds that blow from North Africa into Southern Italy, shaded red with Saharan sand. He compares the winds to whimsical beasts, personas in their

ALEX KATZ AND FRIENDS / THE GLEANERS

Elena Sarni

ALEX KATZ AND FRIENDS

Farnsworth Museum of Art
16 Museum Street
Rockland, Maine

Through October 26

THE GLEANERS

Center for Maine Contemporary Art;/br>
162 Russell Avenue

Rockport, Maine

Through July 19

I WAS THANKFUL TO LEAVE THE 90-DEGREE WEATHER BEHIND AS WE DROVE FURTHER NORTH INTO MAINE. WISCASSET’S “RED’S EATS” WAS CLOSED AT THIS EARLY HOUR, WHICH MEANT WE COULD AVOID TRAFFIC DELAYS CAUSED BY TOURISTS CROSSING THE STREET TO REACH THE FAMOUS SEAFOOD ESTABLISHMENT.

Beyond Wiscasset it is an antique lover’s delight, with vendors on both sides of the road the whole way into Rockland and our destination: The Farnsworth Museum of Art, celebrating its 60th anniversary. As a result, it will be launching 11 new exhibitions throughout the year, the first five having opened in March.

“Alex Katz and Friends” pays tribute to the artist and his contributions to the Farnsworth’s contemporary collection, not only of his own work, but that of other artists he has gifted to the Museum. “Friends” is used liberally - most of the pieces are not literally works by close personal friends, but that of Katz’s acquaintances or contemporaries. And while portraits by Katz of filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt and other friends from the New York School, such as poet Robert Creeley, are included in the show, the text-light exhibit doesn’t expand upon their personal relationships. Labels for Katz’s work list only title, artist, date and donor, encouraging viewers to focus on the work itself. Handouts explain that he is “best known for his emotionally ambiguous and psychologically complex portraits of cosmopolitan friends and colleagues from the New York art world,” adding, “he is also admired for his bold transcendent landscape paintings and his coolly intimate portraits of friends and family.”

Many of the artists included studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which was the impetus for Katz’s first visit to Maine in 1949. Yet, for the most part the artists and works assembled are widely divergent. Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s “Floor with Light at Noon” is an almost photo-realistic oil painting featuring the bare wood floor of the corner of a room lit by sunlight from a nearby window. The detail of the boards, and the gradations of light in the painting make you feel the warm sunlight on your face and the rough boards under your bare feet. On the other end of the spectrum you have Julian Opie’s “Ruth with Cigarette 3,” with its bold, Warholesque style. The Lambda print, mounted on Dibond, features a woman smoking a cigarette. The subtle indent of her waist, the delicate way that she holds the cigarette and the bra-like top she wears let us know that she is female, while her head is completely gender neutral - suspended above her body, a flesh colored circle, more cartoon than human.

BLACK WOMANHOOD: Images, Icons, And Ideologies of the African Body

Rick Agran

Hood Museum of Art
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire

Through August 10

YOU ENCOUNTER A LARGER THAN LIFESIZE SCULPTURE OF A BLACK-HAIRED, BROWN WOMAN. SHE HAS A LULLING QUALITY, IN REPOSE, ASLEEP ON HER SIDE UPON THE GALLERY FLOOR. HER HAIR TRAVELS, RAVELS AND GATHERS AS IF A GIANT, TIGHTLY WOUND BALL OF WOOL FROM WHICH TO WEAVE A WORLD. FULLY ARMORED, HER SLEEPY SOFTNESS IS FORMED OF RUST-PATINAED METAL; THE WOOL, WIRE, CREATING AMAzING TENSION BETWEEN MATERIAL AND GESTURAL AFFECT. IT IS ALLISON SAAR’S “CACHé.”

In the next gallery, an indigo-pigmented wooden sculpture of a Yoruba fertility goddess, wreathed in children, wields her breasts as if to feed the world. In a third room, colonial postcards juxtapose young “savage” girls with those “civilized” by western clothes. Or they advertise a sexualized brand of colonial tourism. Yet another gallery offers female shapes wrought of black and white cowhide, formed on the body of South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, a defacto self portrait in multiples, called “Balandzeli.”

The exhibition was created entirely by people of African descent: the majority are black women. The show's curator, Barbara Thompson,

215 College Street Artists' Cooperative Gallery

Alexandra Tursi

215 College Street
Burlington, Vermont

Linda E. Jones and Riki Moss, Encaustic Paintings, Mixed Media and Abaca Sculpture

Through July 13

Elise Whittemore-hill and Ethel Whittemore, Mixed Media, Painting and Drawing and Fibre Arts

July 18 through August 10

Those who visit the 215 College Street Artists’ Cooperative Gallery this summer will find works by artists disparate in style and medium, but with one basic commonality in mind – a desire to explore the associations the mind makes in reference to the environment. Founded nearly three years ago, this small but open space nestled into Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace continues to offer compelling works by 12 very different artists.

Up first, is a show by Linda E. Jones and Riki Moss.

Jones offers a series of encaustic works. Underneath the waxy conglomeration of beeswax, resin and pigments, the viewer will find, layered atop digital prints, archaeological finds, medical detritus and natural objects, such as seaweed and kelp, gathered either impulsively or with great thought over the past 20 years.

As made evident in “Limbs,” Jones uses the artistic process to determine the myriad meanings of words and objects as they relate to emotion. “Limbs” was inspired by an encounter the artist had with a young man with a tattoo of a tree painted onto his lower arm. Over the life of the work, that word and its referential objects were assiduously studied and contemplated.

Kevin Gilmore: Recent Paintings

Meredith Cutler

Jessica Hagen Fine Art + Design
226 Bellevue Ave #8
Newport, Rhode Island

August 2 through September 7

In his fourth solo show at Newport’s Jessica Hagen Fine Art + Design, emerging artist Kevin Gilmore returns to his former locale with a body of mixed-media paintings redolent of journeys, destinations and new digs in Brooklyn.

Originally from Rhode Island, Gilmore received his BFA from Rhode Island College in 1999, with a concentration in collage and painting. Looking west, he explored Jackson, Wyoming and Portland, Oregon, embedding himself in their art communities.

Eventually returning to his native state via Newport, he was discovered by gallery owner Jessica Hagen when he wandered as a cold call into Station 29 Gallery, for which she served as director prior to opening her own gallery in 2005. Hagen responded immediately to Gilmore’s work, agreeing to represent him exclusively to her well-heeled regional clientele, who gravitated to the unpretentious work of the young painter.

Paintings: Stephen Courbois, Sculpture: Pat Musick

Greg Morell

redmondbennettgallery
1283 Main Street
Dublin, NH

June 30 through August 24

IMAGINE THE CHALLENGE OF RUNNING A COMMERCIAL ART GALLERY FEATURING THE WORK OF DIFFICULT AND ABSTRUSE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS IN A MINISCULE TOWN IN A QUIET CORNER OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. TWO SISTERS, LAURA REDMOND AND BONNIE BENNETT, HAVE UNDERTAKEN SUCH A TASK IN THE SHADOW OF MOUNT MONADNOCK, IN THE TINY HAMLET OF DUBLIN.

Their gem of an enterprise, the Redmond/Bennett Gallery, is a clean, meticulously renovated midsize industrial space with pristine white walls, precision crystal lighting and ample space for the showing of muscular contemporary works. They are resolute in their passion to bring new and exciting artists to their corner of New Hampshire.

This show focuses on two artists, painter Stephen Courbois and sculptress Pat Musick. Courbois has been admired and collected by the sisters for decades. They were introduced to his work while he was the featured artist-in-residence at the nearby Sharon Arts Center.

Penelope Jencks: Sculpture in Bronze, Terracotta and Plaster

Hope Stockman

BigTown Gallery
99 North Main Street
Rochester, Vermont

Through July 30

PENELOPE JENCKS’ SHOW AT THE BIGTOWN GALLERY IN ROCHESTER, WHICH IS LOCATED IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS OF VERMONT ALONGSIDE THE WHITE RIVER, IS AN INTRIGUING JUXTAPOSITION OF HUMANITY AND NATURE, OR THE MINUSCULE AND THE MONUMENTAL. JENCKS’ SCULPTURES ON DISPLAY ARE FOCUSED ON SHAPE AND SCALE, AND INCLUDE MORE RECENT DUNE LANDSCAPES, AS WELL AS BEACH-GOING FIGURES DATING BACK TO THE 1970s.

The theme in both series is attached to her childhood memories from summers spent on the coastal town of Wellfleet, Mass. Jencks still finds her inspiration from the Wellfleet seaside, where she keeps a studio. “The landscapes out here are the way things should be,” she said. As a child, Jencks’ parents and their bohemian friends would spend their summer days nude on the beach of this small Cape Cod town, engaging in intellectual banter about art and beauty. As such, the height and proportions of many of Jencks’ beach figures provide a child’s perspective of these towering, naked grown-ups.

The figures channel universal childhood nostalgia for the seaside, as do the sweeping, almost maternal curves in her dune landscapes. “There are bodies in the dunes,” Jencks observed. “As a child, I thought that looking at the dunes was like looking at bodies.” Indeed, her dunescapes mimic the curves of reclining feminine forms, sometimes even literally, with an identifiable belly button here or there.

However, Jencks is inspired as much by her memories as she is by the honesty of figures in a natural state of undress. “When a model takes a pose, it has

Theater: Counter Productions

Michael Persson

The Full Monty
August 12 through September 3

Copenhagen
August 21 through September 6

Provincetown Theater
238 Bradford Street
Provicetown, Massachusetts

Last summer, another chapter in Provincetown’s theater history was enacted as community theater returned to its humble origins in the birthplace of America’s modern version of this dramatic form. Until artistic director Susan Grilli and her “Counter Productions” wrote themselves into this new epoch, summer-theater in Provincetown had lurched towards a bagatelle of sing-a-longs directed towards the day-tripper. In short, the upshot of fusing Provincetown’s two old theater companies, Provincetown Theater Company and the Provincetown Repertory Theater, creating The New Provincetown Players (NPP), a provocative homage to “Town’s” first company that included the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell and Neith Boyce, was to see this great hope fall upon its sword.

In 2008, Susan Grilli hopes to build on what Provincetown locals and visitors stood up and applauded last summer, when “I Am My Own Wife” and “Bingo” diverted them from the professional surroundings of the Provincetown Theater and productions like “Forever Plaid” for the quaint setting of the Provincetown Inn in the town’s far West End — a difference similar to that of London’s elite Swan Theatre, of the 17th century, and the commoners’ Globe.

This past winter, NPP’s board invited Grilli to their very fine theater, giving her the opportunity to do all that she said she wanted to do after returning to Provincetown from her five-year professional sojourn in New York’s theater land. “I wanted to drench the town in theater energy,” she said, watching actors gather in the theater lobby for a staging of a winning play from the annual Spring Playwrights’ Festival. “Like a city arts center where there’s always something happening, I wanted this space to become a destination for art.”

Theater: Ko FEST

Greg Morell

Amherst College
Route 9 and Route 116
Amherst, Massachusetts

July 7 through August 10

Returning to the Amherst college campus for its 17th season, the Ko Festival has established itself as the summer theater experience of choice for those with a taste for the provocative and challenging. this is not your Aunt martha’s summer theater – what you will not see is anything resembling “Our Town,” “South Pacific,” “Charlie’s Aunt” or “The Odd Couple.” It is an enterprise of workshops and formal presentations.

The word “Ko” is taken from the I Ching and can be translated as “revolution,” “molting” or “transformation.” An evening of Ko can either be deeply rewarding or just plain deep.

Festival Director Sabrina Hamilton has enjoyed a long tenure, having been with the festival since its inception. Each season she establishes a festival focus; the theme examined this season is “Food.” As the world grapples with the food crisis, we are given food for thought. At the Ko Fest we can indulge our theatrical craving for something beyond the norm, something nouvelle, something enriched with exotic spice that can either sting or delight the palate.

Although the Ko Festival eschews tradition, one tradition that is heartily embraced by all is the appearance each year of Ralph Lee and his Mettawee River Theater Company. The venerable Lee is a theatrical wizard of the first order. Each year he creates a richly imaginative program of myth or fable, usually with an Eastern sensibility.

Lee is a master of theatrical craft as playwright, director, puppet and mask maker, musician, composer, designer and producer. He and his dedicated ensemble of devoted actors function as orators, musicians, puppeteers and sceneshifters. They are a fully integrated team of thespians trouping about the New England summer performing on village greens, museum lawns and college campuses. With the exception of electric light for their early evening performances, the group performs in much the same manner as traveling troupes from the days of horse and wagon. Lee knows how to wield the wand of enchantment. He does not have fans; he has devotees.

Music: Marblehead Summer Jazz Concerts and Festival of Arts

Roanna Forman

Marblehead Summer Jazz Concerts

Through August 23

Marblehead Festival of Arts

July 3 through 6

“Summer begins at those concerts for us,” said Oliver Loewen, long-time subscriber of Marblehead Summer Jazz. “It’s probably the best put together jazz series in the Boston area.” Since 1985, when Marblehead jazz aficionados started the concert series, they’ve worked hard to keep it that way.

It began with a “wouldn’t-it-benice” conversation between the late Richard Conte, JoAnne King and Gene Arnould, about bringing then young, newly graduated from Berklee jazz pianist Makoto Ozone to Marblehead. Their arts-friendly Unitarian Universalist Church liked the idea and its pews became the concert venue. After succeeding beyond their wildest dreams - they sold 400 tickets for the 275-seat hall with listeners encircling the piano and filling the stairs - the producers set other dates and started the series.

Dance: Bates Summer Dance Festival

Greg Morell

Bates College
163 Wood Street
Lewiston, Maine

July 15 through August 9

OVER 300 DANCERS FROM DIVERSE POINTS AROUND THE GLOBE WILL CONVENE IN LEWISTON FOR THE 26TH SEASON OF THE BATES SUMMER DANCE FESTIVAL. DURING THE MONTHS OF JULY AND AUGUST, THE BATES COLLEGE DANCE FESTIVAL TRANSFORMS THE MAINE CAMPUS INTO AN EPICENTER OF INSTRUCTIONAL DANCE, PERFORMANCE AND SPECIAL EVENTS.

Located two and a half hours north of Boston, the Bates Dance Festival affords opportunities for the professional and pre-professional dancer to refine their technique, explore new concepts and liberally experiment. It offers audiences the chance to enjoy the work of emerging dance companies and to witness new works in the making.

Contemporary dance and dance theater provide great latitude for imaginative expression. A medium of artistic fusion that welcomes innovation with ever expanding parameters, dance theater is fertile ground for novelty and creative variation. The modern dance world feeds on new theatrical technologies, and artistic directors and choreographers are in the forefront of radical departures from tradition.

Last season, Bates audiences were treated to an out-of-doors environmental extravaganza that featured over 100 dancers. As audiences moved about the campus they were entranced by simultaneous movement ensembles tethered to trees, cavorting in thigh deep waters, dancing behind the windows of nearby edifices and even dancing on floating stages powered by oarsmen over the campus pond.

Musings: FUNG WAH ADVENTURE

James Foritano

Before I knew it was a bus line, I wouldn’t have known how to parse this exotic dual syllable. After last week, it seems obvious even to this non-Chinese speaker that “to fung wah” is a transitive verb ending in Manhattan.

It took some chutzpah to envision myself riding the Fung Wah bus from its South Station terminal; but once seated inside that image, I saw the Museum Mile of Fifth Avenue unroll before my windshield. The Metropolitan and The Jewish Museum sparkled with exhibits I’d read about and coveted: Jeff Koons on the roof garden of the Met and “Action/Abstraction,” showcasing de Kooning and Pollock, at The Jewish Museum.

I alighted in Chinatown just where The Manhattan Bridge enters the tip of downtown. Having emptied my wallet of a mere 15 bucks for the trip down, I was more than ready for my pas-de-deux with The Big Apple.

Here it is perhaps suitable to caution my less sophisticated readership not to mistake the Buddhist Temple that stands cheek-by-jowl with the Fung Wah ticket booth as a restaurant. It is true that the jovial figure seated just inside the glass doors carries a pyramid of fruit on his lap, but that doesn’t make him an advertisement for the delights of good eating – no matter how hungry you are.

The second establishment I walked into, just a few steps up Canal Street, recognized my need more readily and served two delicious helpings of Dim Sum. Practice makes perfect.

I had reserved four nights at the Central Park Hostel at 19 West 103rd Street, just a block from Central Park. Forty dollars per night sounded, at just $10 more than round trip fare on the Fung Wah bus, just right. I was into thrift.

To a Bostonian, directions in Manhattan are laughably direct. The lownumbered streets of downtown climb into the high-numbered streets of uptown, east or west of Central Park.

And didn’t I have everything I needed in my simple backpack?

Another note here to my less sophisticated readership. An extra pair of shoes, while admirable, is not a personal bar of soap, and extra underwear is not a fluffy towel and does lousy double duty as such. So, unless you are in a luxurious hostel, do please bring these personal items.

Capsule Previews: May/June 2008

Brian Goslow

Artscope publisher Kaveh Mojtabai has been raving about the “Therefore & Because: Decoding Norman Laliberté” exhibition at Montserrat College of Art’s Main Gallery, 23 Essex Street in Beverly on Massachusetts’ North Shore. The previously undisplayed collection, which is presented in six sections, includes traditional paintings and sculptures and less traditional painted burlap bags and books that utilize flowers, animals and “timeless figures” to present “universal themes” of life, beauty and love. “The theme behind the show tells a story of relationships and, at the same time, decodes the fundamental connections behind those relationships by referencing biblical tales, pagan games and ritual sacrifice, sexual communication, and the interplay between infinite dynamics and time,” Mojtabai said. With over 150 shows and design projects to Laliberté’s credit, including being design consultant for the memorable Vatican Pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair (the sight of which is forever ingrained in this author’s memory), it’s well worth scheduling a weekday trip to catch this show that runs through July 26.

Few of our Cape Cod-based reviews don’t credit a Provincetown masters as being a guiding light for the artist profiled. While we’re spotlighting the current Sam Feinstein retrospective at the Cape Cod Museum of Art on Route 6A in Dennis elsewhere in this issue, we’d also like to direct your attention to a show featuring disciples of Paul Resika at New York’s Parsons School of Design. “Four Painters: one Common Ground” features passionate works by Donald Beal, Robert DuToit, David Paulson and Thaddeus Radell that can be seen through August 10 at the CCMA. Following Resika in taking artistic cues from Hans Hofmann, the four schooled, lived and studied together and, it would seem, influenced each other’s work. “Our work differs as our natures differ, but there is a like spirit and feeling that runs through all the work and unites us,” Provincetown resident Beal noted in the show statement.

The scenic locale of Newport, with its high life mansions, music festivals, scenic views and art museum is an unlikely place for a landmark show devoted to inner city creativity. However, the Deblois Gallery at 136 Bellevue Avenue hopes to leave a lasting impression with “Street Art: In and out,” which will feature 23 artists. “Most are regional from Boston and Providence, but two are from Connecticut, five from New York as well as one from Baltimore,” said gallery owner Ron Caplain. “All paint in the street tradition - some doing stickers, some spray can art, some stencils and some drawing and painting. Street art encompasses a great deal - and not just what we think of as graffiti and defacing property. These people are good artists - many of them are in the graphic arts business or are gallery artists.” The show runs from August 2 through September 2. Opening night, which coincides with the Newport Folk Festival, and will run from 5 to 7 p.m., promises to be memorable. “Some of the artists (including the DBM Crew headed by Tips, D Dock and 5003) will be creating artwork in and on our gallery windows during the opening,” said gallery chair Kathy Armor. “Live, appropriate entertainment is also planned for the evening.”

Some other events to put on your summer calendars:

The Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy cutting edge contemporary dance festival will be present nothing but Boston area premiers from July 12 to 26 at 166 Main Street in Concord, Mass.; affiliated performances will be given at the ICA Boston, Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline and a series of Tuesday night all-inclusive dinner and performance of “Showdown” by David Parker and the Bang Group at the Rialto in Cambridge. Full details at summerstagesdance.org.

The 16th rock river Studio Tour on the weekend of July 19 and 20 runs through the Southern Vermont towns of Williamsville, Newfane and South Newfane, where 21 artists in a 12-mile radius will open their studios to visitors. Of the world class participating artists, Paula Melton said, “A museum visit resembles Rock River the way a stuffed lion resembles a safari.” There’s no better way of saying how memorable your visit to this beautiful New England natural paradise will be. Download a tour map at rockriverartists.com.

That same weekend, Western Mass. painter Lorna ritz will be holding a studio art sale she’s calling “Breath of Summer” that’ll be held in her “Garden, Barn & Beyond” at 1245 South East Street in Amherst. She’s designating 10 percent of her sales to help the Myanmar cyclone victims through the Save the Children Fund. See her intense splashes of hot spicy color – originating from her visits to the warm climate of Columbia as well as our own unpredictable four seasons at lornaritz.com.

Ron Rosenstock’s “Fire and Ice” photographs of the landscapes of Death Valley and Iceland – which aren’t as different as you’d think – can be experienced through July 28 at the Panoptican Gallery at the Hotel Commonwealth in Boston’s Kenmore Square.

artscope Magazine is proud to be a sponsor of the “Arts Affair on the Boardwalk” which will be held on August 2 and 3 at Marina Bay in Quincy, Mass. near our office and is expected to draw 7,000 art lovers. It’ll feature representation from many artists from art associations from throughout Massachusetts, including Dan MacCole, whose renderings of Jimmy’s Harborside and Red Sox slugger Big Papi David Ortiz should prove especially popular with buyers. Saturday’s hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. With Boston Harbor as the backdrop and free admission and parking, how can you go wrong?

Sculptor Andrew DeVries works have been displayed in the Chesterwood and Norman Rockwell museums; a dozen of them are currently on view through September 30 in downtown Northampton. You can get a unique insight to the 2100 degree Fahrenheit process in which he creates his bronze sculptures when DeVries opens his studio on August 16 and 17 in the western Mass. town of Huntington at 36 East River Road. You can also see his work at DeVries Fine Art International, Inc. at 62 Church Street in Lenox. Directions for this wonderful summer roadtrip to the Berkshires can be found at andrewdevries.com.