artscope magazine: May/June 2008

Welcome Statement: Brian Goslow, managing editor

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

Welcome Statement, May/June 2008

The state of the economy is on everyone’s mind these days as a relentless barrage of bad news reminds us of unstable financial markets in these uncertain times. Fear surrounding people’s jobs and their family’s futures and an unsettled feeling stemming from the unknown consequences of global competition and war has numbed our senses.

Despite this, combined with what seemed an endless New England winter, we at artscope have managed to stay positive, thanks in part to the artists and exhibitions we explored and covered for this issue. Their work reminds us that the arts give us an emotional grounding to create opportunity and to transition through these days towards brighter times that are to come.

If you need proof, check out Jim Foritano’s “Senior Stars” crystal-ball glimpse into the future of the region’s art scene. He reviews the best of the graduating classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard University and the studios of the inaugural class of the Mass College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Works Center of Provincetown.

We intentionally planned this issue to include a substantial number of shows taking place during the Memorial Day Weekend. There’s little doubt people will cut back on travel this summer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t plan day trips throughout New England. You owe it to yourself to pick out at least one or two shows being held “beyond the borders” and take them in. Whether it’s coupled with a relaxing lunch in a museum café or sampling some small town cuisine, our region is filled with more art adventures than you can imagine.

Of course, most of us will still find a way to make it down to the Cape this summer. We start our Provincetown coverage with help from two new additions to the artscope masthead – Michael Persson, who updates us on Johniene Papandreas and the Voyeur Gallery, and Taylor M. Polites, who previews the Edna Bois Hopkins exhibition at Provincetown Art Association and Museum. They’re complimented by Rena Lindstrom’s passionate piece on George Hirose, whose show at the Ernden Gallery and book of breathtaking Provincetown scenes, “Blue Nights,” should be high on your “must experience” list for the months ahead.

Equally special is the public art project currently assembled on the roof of the Tufts University library. Hope Stockman, who we welcome to our pages in this issue, was able to visit the “Harmony in the Age of Noise” project in its final stages of construction. Another new addition to our roster, Sam Nejame, experiences metal works by the artist known as Skunk, which will be on view in late June at Space 242. Staying in Boston’s South End, George Gerard looks at the May and June offerings at Soprafina Gallery and introduces us to Malcolm Montague-Davis. The South End’s artists will be opening their studios on the weekend of May 17 and 18 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. for the “SoWa Art Walk.” Plan to spend the day and fuel up in the area’s many restaurants, bistros, bars and bakeries. Full details can be found at sowaartwalk.com.

This is the first issue in which our coveted centerfold (perfect for hanging in your office or studio) features the work of one of our readers. A special thanks to our judges: Katherine Attanasio, director/co-curator at The Firehouse Gallery of Burlington City Arts; Janie Cohen, director of the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont; and artscope writer Alexandra Tursi. Details on how you may submit your work for consideration for an upcoming issue can be found in the back of this issue.

As much as we try to fit into each issue of artscope, there are many more exhibitions and performing arts events worthy of your attention. Please sign up for our artscope email blast! at info@artscopemagazine.com for late breaking announcements.

Metal Scultpture By Skunk

Sam Nejame

Gallery 242
242 East Berkeley Street, Second Floor;/br>
Boston

June 27 through July 18

Many Bostonians know Skunk by sight. He is a man hard to forget. You may see him on his way to work perched on a tall bicycle constructed from two frames ingeniously welded together. And at night if you hear disembodied soul music floating through your window, Skunk’s bicycle mounted stereo is likely passing through your neighborhood on its way home.

Despite his somewhat intimidating appearance, when I meet the man with the raffish grin and Dickens-ian stovepipe hat, he is friendly and makes me a cup of coffee. He glances around the sun-dappled room full of his elaborate robots and ray guns and says he believes everyone should be their own super hero. Skunk dresses accordingly.

Kitted out with size 14 boots sprouting what look like porcupine quills, a copper belt buckle the size of a JRR Tolkien paperback and an errant oil dab on his nose, Skunk reflected. “Life should be well lived.” Then he sips his coffee and pulls out a large pair of scissors, spins them on his finger and reinserts them like a six-gun into his modified Black overalls. He is a man unafraid to admit his skill with a sewing machine matches his skill with a torch.

Senior Stars: artscope writer James Foritano survives "an embarrassment of riches"

James Foritano

If April is “the cruelest month,” as T.S. Eliot asserted in the opening of his epochal poem “The Wasteland,” then it is so only to mediocrity and habit. This happy revelation is abundantly illustrated in three spring shows featuring senior and post-graduate artists in various studios around the Boston area.

Inside/Out
Harvard University;/br>
Carpenter Center of Visual Arts

24 Quincy Street

Cambridge

Through June 5

Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is presenting “Inside/Out,” the immediate fruition of five independent senior thesis projects.

Kelly Bowse’s “West End Rooftops” is one of a number of her paintings that resurrect in rich oils the vibrant and ethnically diverse life of Boston’s West End before it fell victim to a mid-century lust for urban renewal. Before this effort, Kelly was used to painting her immediate visual environment, but extensive research brought her to archival black and white photographs, to the West End Museum and mentors who shared her love for this bygone neighborhood. And the past became immediate. She summons its bricks and mortar and densely peopled locales with a Hopperesque pungency and subdued tonal harmonies glimpsed through the peephole of memory...

Eight in ‘08
Massachusetts College of Art & Design;/br>
Patricia Doran Graduate Gallery

Kennedy Building

600 Huntington Avenue

Boston

Through June 5 through 22

Another fellowship of endeavor can be observed at the Mass College of Art & Design. “Eight in ’08” will feature all new post-graduate works created by the first class to graduate from the new MassArt at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown’s Fine Arts Master of Fine Arts program. If there is one common thread in this clutch of mature sensibilities curated by Helen Miranda Wilson, it is an ardent and deeply informed commitment to exploration and to excellence.

When Michael Mazur dropped into Cathleen Daley’s studio in Provincetown and offered the advice that her painting needed to “find an edge,” she resisted fiercely. Individuals, as well as institutions, have, after all, their cherished, hard-won traditions. In her latest paintings, Cathleen is stretching her art towards new ground by tipping the horizontal edges that enliven her present abstractions to a medley of both horizontal and vertical edges. In the spaces between, the “edgeless” expanses of her earlier vision are finding a new and more structurally provocative home between the edges that her mentor suggested - and Ms. Daley embraced and upended.

Home, it seems, is not only where you come from, but also where you’re going...

Fifth Year Exhibition 2008
School of the Museum of Fine Arts;/br>
Grossman Gallery

230 The Fenway

Boston

Through May 3

As if this were not an embarrassment of riches, if you read this early enough, you can still catch the School of the Museum of Fine Arts show featuring its Fifth Year Program participants that continues through May 3. Again, one meets an intensity of striving joined with consummate craft and daring vision.

Louri Schouela scoops a labyrinthine installation from discarded industrial Styrofoam-pink. Here are the sweets that mom warned you would spoil your dinner. But Ms. Schouela, in this enveloping and compelling installation, posits a higher threat: these “sweets” will spoil the “dinner” of our whole civilization unless we learn to name and tame their meretricious seductions. I consumed this multi-sensory lesson...

Robert C. Jackson: Stories

Brian Goslow

Arden Gallery
129 Newbury Street;/br>
Boston

May 1 through 28

Pocahontas Beverages, Falls Mills, Virginia; Big Red, Louisville, Kentucky; Squirt Vernors, Buffalo, New York; and Jefferson Bottling Co., New Orleans. Names that hark back to the days when a summer afternoon wasn’t a summer afternoon till you walked down to the corner store and grabbed a cold bottle of pop, tonic or soda. Their magic wooden containers provide the backdrop for this exhibition that sparks both nostalgia and pleasure from the careful dedication Robert C. Jackson gives to bringing them to life through their eye-catching logos, oddly nailed bottoms and the damage from years of weather and two-wheelers.

While your eyes first lock on the familiar and not so familiar logos, their open handles beg you to pull them out, Jackson’s shadows making them look so real it’s easy to forget you’re looking at a painting. Or perhaps it’s the apples and Oreo cookies he interjects in his work that melt your heart.

Two Chinas: Chen Quilin and Yun-Fei Ji

Sandy Lashin-Curewitz

Worcester Art Museum
55 Salisbury Street;/br>
Worcester, Massachusetts

Through September 21

Duality: love and hate, good and evil; most of us accept that one cannot exist without the other. Worcester Art Museum’s recent acquisition, “Two Chinas,” draws attention to the paradox of China, bastion of ancient culture, and one of today’s fastest growing economies. The exhibit may serve as an introduction to the monumental project China undertook more than a decade ago to harness the immense power of Chang Jiang (Long River), what we know as the Yangtze River.

When you take a deep breath and let your eyes wander the modern take on classical Chinese landscape painting of Yun-Fei Ji, or sit through a second or third viewing of Chen Quilin’s nine-minute video, “Bie Fu (Farewell Poem),” of 2003, you might suspect that the duality label is oversimplification.

Corporate Art Partnerships: The Providence Art Club and Garden in the Woods

Brian Goslow

The Providence Art Club

There were lots of winners at the opening of the 10th annual Fidelity Investments all media juried exhibition at the Providence Art Club earlier this year.

There was the club, which received 860 submissions from over 300 artists and had 200 guests at its private reception and 100 more for the public opening. There was Fidelity, which was able to display its support for the arts as part of its ongoing community outreach. And then there was the East Greenwich artist Victoria Lockard Morton, whose "Soviet Supper" took home the first place award, part of $1,700 in cash prizes which partially went towards the purchase of two works for Fidelity's private collection.

Garden In The Woods

If it seems as if you've been hearing and reading about Garden in the Woods at a growing rate over the past few years, that's not by accident. It's part of a well-thought out plan by the New England Wildflower Society (NEWFS) to turn its 45-acre botanic garden, headquarters and

Featured Artist: Malcolm Montague Davis

George Gerard

The interpretation of color is an integral and personal experience for most people, one that can often be overlooked on a day-to-day basis. For Malcolm Montague Davis (www.malcolmmontaguedavis.com), the colors of his subject matter are the defining factors for his abstract paintings. He is drawn to studies of color, shadow, and the freedom of three-dimensional analysis that a place, building, or structure can provide.

Davis makes his passions clear with an immediate sense of abstraction driven by an intense process. Every line, every color choice, everything about each of his paintings is exact and executed with intention. His process is as artful and methodical as I’ve ever seen, with full books of analysis filled just to cover one set of paintings.

Featured artist: Michael Ulman

Franklin W. Liu

Nestled on a gentle hill in Roslindale, Massachusetts is an artist-paradise, a studio brimming with found objects, neatly sorted in bins stacked on shelves. These large and small discarded metal parts, in whole or in fragments, are cleaned, polished, synthesized, then transformed with patience - sometimes taking years - by artist Michael Ulman into sculptures celebrating mankind’s fascination with speed and power expressed as symbolic extensions of the human anatomy.

To Ulman, mankind’s courtship with machines ever since the invention of wheels has exploded, and it remains a passion from his childhood days fostered by his parents. Ulman’s father Marty is an architect and still an avid found-objects sculptor, and his mother Judy is a nature photographer whose keen eye and close-up shots reveal hidden poetic abstractions. To this entire family immersed in producing art, things are never just things as they appear.

Wally Gilbert: Leeks and Chains

Roanna Forman

Khaki Gallery
9 Crest Road;/br>
Wellesley, Massachusetts

April 22 through May 30

This self-taught digital photographer, co-founder of Biogen, and recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry, is never without his 2” x 3” x 1” Canon Elph SD850. He enlarges his images to a scale in which the viewer gets lost in their associative possibilities. Developing a childhood hobby into a fine art form, he’s constantly seeking new themes, and perfecting his technique.

Why does he work large? “There’s an emotional impact from these very simple but big images, and a lot of the imagery is about finding what are abstract moments in the world,” Gilbert said. “I react to them, I think, because of the elements of color and form.” He also wanted to test the notion that enlarging images from small digital cameras, 12 mega pixels maximum these days, would compromise their quality. He’s managed to disprove that dictum, creating images as large as 8 x 12 feet from his pocket camera.

New England Impressions II: Exploring the Woodcut

Roanna Forman

Concord Art Association
37 Lexington Road;/br>
Concord, Massachusetts

March 27 through May 3

One may first think of a woodcut image as a graphic illustration in an old book. But don’t mention that to Dorothy Thompson, who has been preparing “New England Impressions II” using her vast knowledge of area printmakers.

Thompson has put together a collection of artists that use various techniques in combination with woodcut. Highly developed skill, aesthetic freedom and spontaneity come together to make successful works of art resulting in a series of “variable edition” prints. When the artist pairs the woodcut with other media, the subtle tones and layered shapes produce remarkable results.

There is a powerful evocative element in works so big, say, of a blow-up of a paint chip into which one will read maps of Eurasia, or the aerial view of other planets. “I probably should call the pieces ‘Untitled,’” Gilbert said, to free up viewers’ imaginations entirely. His images are ultrasharp, “not as the eye sees them,” Gilbert said, although he noted, “the camera always lies,” despite people’s conception that it nakedly records the truth. Processing and manipulation are always used to create the final image, whether in conventional 35 mm darkrooms or via computer.

Gilbert sees many underlying similarities between art and science. “Part of the striking element of science is you can look at a piece of data, and see something that no one else has seen – that’s the creative side of science,” he said. “And science is dominated by an element of individual creativity and strong individual style,” precisely as art is.

Yet different limitations govern art and science.

Brooklyn – Boston: Inside Out: Christopher Chippendale and Jeffrey Fichera

George Gerard

May 2 through May 31

Abstract works by Liz Leggett;/br>

June 6 through June 28

Soprafina Gallery

450 Harrison Gallery
Suite 73;/br>
Boston;/br>

Soprafina will host two very different genres of painting this May and June. First up is the show titled Brooklyn - Boston: Inside Out, which will feature two representational landscape artists, Christopher Chippendale and Jeffrey Fichera.

The representational artwork of Chippendale and Fichera are both oil paintings on canvas. Both artists aim to capture their subject matter as it appears in reality. Fichera says, in his artist statement, “The world and everything in it is objectively neutral: neither good nor bad, right nor wrong...The observational painter is forced to look actively and analyze these features of the optical world and to communicate his subjective experience through paint. In doing so, he unavoidably fuses his feelings with what he sees.”

The Keys to Katahdin: Oil Paintings by John Cascio and watercolor works by Don Sullivan

Jim Dyment

The Loading Dock Gallery
122 Western Avenue;/br>
Lowell

May 28 through June 29

Just what does it take to sell art? For starters, you must stand out from the crowd. Some say traditional art sells to home owners and contemporary art sells to commercial buyers. Does a successful artist create what the market wants or does he convince the buyer to fall in love with his work? John Cascio has steadily increased in popularity in the Lowell art community and is one artist that has connected with the buyers.

Since high school, Cascio has known he would be a professional artist. He received his BFA in Design with a concentration in Illustration at Massachusetts College of Art. After college, he freelanced until he was accepted as an artist-in-residence in the city of Medford, Massachusetts. Funded by a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training) grant, he worked with the public in 10 communities north of Boston producing, promoting and teaching art. Later, he was commissioned to paint a series of portraits called “City Fathers” for Medford.

Then, while looking for a change, he followed the rumor that there was a growing art community in Lowell. This led to his involvement with several area groups, including the Western Avenue Studios, the Arts League of Lowell, the Lowell Art Association and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Cascio considers his style to be eclectic; the bulk of his work is either landscape or figurative in nature.

Andy Warhol, Early Work: Selections from the Collection of Richard F. Holmes

Roanna Forman

Robert Lehman Art Center
Brooks School;/br>
1160 Great Pond Avenue;/br>
North Andover, Massachusetts

Through June 15

Whatever your take on Andy Warhol –groundbreaker or mega-opportunist riding the crest of the Pop Art wave - you’ll see his transition from commercial artist to cultural icon in this comprehensive exhibit of his early works. A collaboration between the Robert Lehman Art Center and Williams College Museum of Art, this show is dedicated to Warhol collector Richard Holmes, a Brooks faculty member who died in March.

The drawings and hand-colored lithographs from Warhol’s pre-Pop Art period are delicate and whimsical. Warhol assembles rows of tony beetles, butterflies and cockroaches in ochre, orange and gray in “Happy Bug Day.” “Shoe in Iced Tea Glass with Butterfly” camps up Warhol’s commercial shoe illustrations: an elongated pump perches on a still life of fruit, its heel dipped into a glass of iced tea. Another black-and-white striped shoe does time in an ornate Victorian birdcage. Several lithographs from “A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu,” with titles by Ralph Pomeroy (“My Shoe is Your Shoe,” “Uncle Sam Wants Shoe”) show off the uneven saturations of offbeat watercolors and kicky designs of these famous footwear fantasies.

Edna Boies Hopkins: Strong in Character, Colorful in Expression

Taylor M. Polites

Provincetown Art Association and Museum
300 Commercial Street;/br>
Provincetown, Massachusetts

June 13 through August 3

Edna Boies Hopkins (1872-1937) was a widely traveled and highly skilled printmaker. Her body of work reflects the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow and the American Arts and Crafts movement as well as European and American modernism around the time of World War I. She has been little known, however, partly due to the shortness of her career, limited by crippling arthritis, and her small body of work. But the works that do exist reveal a virtuoso of the woodcut who pushed the limits of her craft. These works have been organized into a new show overseen by Dominique H. Vasseur, curator of European art at the Columbus Museum of Art.

“She was not a traditional printmaker,” curator Vasseur explained. “She was almost more painterly in her experimentation. She did a lot of [color] overlays. She would combine watercolors and oils.” Unlike most printmakers, Hopkins often varied colors when pulling multiple prints. “She was very modern in her willingness to change colors, to experiment.”

“Datura,” a work from around 1909-1913, while Hopkins and her husband were living in Paris, is a fine example. In one version, Hopkins first printed the color field with a soft yellow. Over that, she printed pale violet to background the delicate handwork of the flower and leaves. Like original stamps from Japan, where Hopkins studied during her lengthy honeymoon in 1904, the composition is asymmetrical. The horn shaped flower descends across the page. Green leaves shroud a corner, the void used to detail their delicate capillaries. Green tendrils vein delicately into the flower’s petals. The tonal softness is soothing, the result of hand pressure; Hopkins did not use the traditional Japanese barren or a mechanical press. The graceful lines are more astounding considering Hopkins worked in blocks of cherry, a hard wood that rendered the act of precisely cutting and chiseling that much more difficult.

George Hirose: Blue Nights

Rena Lindstrom

Ernden Fine Art Gallery
397 Commercial Street;/br>
Provincetown, Massachusetts

Opens June 27

The night is expansive.

These are the words Norman Mailer uttered on first seeing George Hirose's transporting series of photographs taken over several years of late night wanderings through the streets of Provincetown.

There is something mythological about Provincetown; all of us who have spent time there know it. It forces us to go beyond our everyday experience, to enter the unknown. In these deeply affecting and beautiful photographs, Hirose has surrendered to this expansive, transporting realm of place and time, Provincetown at night, and he has touched the timeless.

This exhibition is selected from this body of work, which is also featured in “Blue Nights,” a newly published book by Provincetown Arts Press that opens with an insightful essay by Mailer. Its release will be celebrated on Friday, July 11 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the annual publishing party at Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Johniene Papandreas: Fixation

Michael Persson

Gallery Voyeur
444 Commercial Street;/br>
Provincetown, Massachusetts

May 25 through July 5

Within Johniene Papandreas’ large scale paintings exist a set of human qualities experienced by the viewer as though engaged by someone present, someone living. And for the collector who isn’t shy of having this much presence placed within their home, Papandreas’ paintings are fast becoming the new definition of interactive art. “Because of their scale,” she noted, “people assume they must be difficult to live with, but because they own such an intimate perspective they are really easy to live with…it’s just a matter of finding the one that speaks to you.”

The scale and presence of her works draw comparisons to the great tapestries of the Middle Ages. Alternatively, Howard Tullman, collector and head of the Flashpoint Academy of Media, Arts and Sciences in Chicago, sees a link to the most dynamic of our contemporary art forms - The Silver-Screen. “One of the things that attracted me immediately to the work was the highly cinematic and narrative nature of the paintings,” he said. “They are striking pieces regardless of scale, which is a rare and special quality.”

More and more, Papandreas’ pieces are finding their way into large homes where, having being placed on the wall, they become the fire burning in the hearth, such is their visual draw. Interior designer Dennis Duffy of Boston’s Duffy Design Group was one of the first people in the business to pick up on these works’ mood-altering potential. “We commissioned two pieces for a private residence in Florida with very high ceilings,” Duffy said. “They were 9.5 feet tall by 7.5 feet wide and in another space would have been overpowering. But here, due in large part to the orientation that Johniene gave to the two figures, they were like guests at the party.”

In an Internet age where people live more disconnectedly and in a time filled with the noise of 21st century life, introspection in all art is making a comeback.

Elusive Truths: Envisioning Information for a Data-Deluged World

Alexandra Tursi

Firehouse Gallery
135 Church Street;/br>
Burlington, Vermont

May 2 through June 14

“Our apprehension of the world always fails. This is because we need not only witness the world, but understand it as well, and understanding always requires a radical simplification of what really is to what can be held-in-mind, and used.”

- Ward Shelley

Visual data permeates our everyday existence. Sometimes we choose to examine it; more often than not, in an age of information overload we glance quickly, then make a haphazard assessment without critical engagement. This exhibition hopes to jolt viewers out of this state of easy, naïve dismissal.

A Work in Progress: Fifty Years of Collecting Contemporary Art at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum

Taryn Plumb

Lyman Allyn Art Museum
625 Williams Street;/br>
New London, Connecticut

Through August 17

The blazing chaotic sunset sprawls over the ocean in blurred watercolors and sharp scribbles. Orange, aqua and pink streaks and squiggles dance frenetically across the painting. Below, froth-covered waves curl out of the sea like muscled arms.

One canvas over, a more classic rendition of the daily death of the sun unfolds. Crisply rendered clouds of dark lavender and pink hang over twilit houses on a hill. Perfectly executed in oils, the clouds’ bottoms are tinged with just the slightest touch of yellow-and-white dwindling sunlight.

Mildred Johnson and Others

Elena Sarni

The June Fitzpatrick Gallery at MECA
522 Congress Street;/br>
Portland, Maine

June 5 through July 5

“To say I was not disappointed would be to grossly understate the case,” explains June Fitzpatrick of her initial impression of Mildred Johnson’s work. Fitzpatrick, owner of two successful galleries in Portland, had heard rumors of a talented found object artist working, “very quietly,” in nearby Brunswick. After having an intern seek her out, Fitzpatrick visited Johnson’s studio where she fell in love with the simplicity, subtle color and “wonderful sense of design” in Johnson’s work. Fitzpatrick categorizes Johnson as one of those found object artists who “bring a certain magic to that rusting metal.” Fitzpatrick’s studio visit led her to plan, “Mildred Johnson and Others,” adding, “really I’ll be introducing Mildred Johnson. Although, she has had work in shows before, she’s virtually unknown. It’s so exciting to introduce somebody at this time of their life...bringing so much.”

Eighty-two-year-old Mildred Johnson finds the idea of having a show at Fitzpatrick’s gallery both “wonderful and scary.” To hear Johnson call something scary surprises me, knowing that she graduated with a degree in architecture in 1948 as one of the only females in her class. Although Johnson doesn’t consider herself a feminist, and wasn’t aware as a student that she was doing anything unusual, Johnson admits her parents “probably would have wanted me to go to secretary school and learn how to type...but it worked out in the end.” Johnson declared her intention to be an architect at age ten, not fully understanding its meaning. Her penchant for building things, replicating the elaborate metal toys of her pampered neighbor by fashioning pieces from her father’s scrap woodworking bins, was an indication of her future.

Celebrating New Hampshire Artists, Currier Museum of Art

Rick Agran

Currier Museum of Art
50 Ash Street ;/br>
Manchester, New Hampshire

Through mid-September

A little gem of a museum, nestled in a suburban Manchester neighborhood, the Currier Museum of Art has some new facets to show off. An almost two-year remodeling project polished the old jewel and reveals so much new that sparkles and shines. They’ve added five galleries, and more than a third to their footprint, an additional 33,000 feet of gallery and ancillaries.

Maxfield Parrish, James Rosenquist and Mark di Suvero are new acquisitions and excellent additions to the collection. The curatorial staff has space now to bring national shows to Manchester and will also be able to exhibit 50 percent more of their resident collection.

“Celebrating New Hampshire Artists” is an embarrassment of riches: paintings both tiny and monstrous; glass, blown, etched and slumped; sculptural silverware, and wooden spoons, and folksy faux primitive ceramics and fine art furniture; small crisp wood engraving and large masterful prints; creamy silver gelatin and giclée photography. The show’s curation is a theoretical work in progress. New Hampshire artists and their myriad expressions will rotate through a gallery dedicated to this conceit through mid-September.

Allison Paschke, 5 Traverse Gallery

Meredith Cutler

5 Traverse Gallery
5 Traverse Street;/br>
Providence, Rhode Island

May 9 through June 14

Allison Paschke’s studio overlooks the tangle of plunging asphalt where routes 195 and 95 skirt the Providence River, winding south to Narragansett Bay. A panoramic view takes in a swath of sky, brick, steel and the wink of ever-moving water. I ask whether the scene influences her new work, a series of square compositions built up over time in layers of pigmented resin over Mylar and mirrored acrylic sheet. She admits to avoiding time spent admiring the spectacular view so that she can better focus on the quiet voids, reflective color and subtle spaces of these paintings, which require a meditative focus to fully enter.

Regardless of her focused will, a hint of the glittering, peripheral realm of reality permeates the paintings’ glossy surfaces. Each abstract square composition contains an echo of its surroundings: the eggshell to violet hues of whitewashed wall and ceiling, the amber of well-worn floorboards, the cerulean and slate of coastal Rhode Island’s ever changing sky and sea. It’s a pleasant revelation. As Pashcke noted, “When subtleties are fine, you become more sensitized to your environment.”

Styrofoam, RISD

Meredith Cutler

Rhode Island School of Design Museum
224 Benefit Street;/br>
Providence, Rhode Island

Through July 20

Name a lightweight, manmade material that emits toxic vapors when heated, yet is historically used to package food. It can be carved or molded; it floats on water and is stubbornly non-biodegradable. If you are still stumped, this controversial substance is expanded polystyrene, commonly referred to by its trademarked name: Styrofoam™.

Fraught with environmental pitfalls and increasingly banned by municipalities for use as food-service packaging, expanded polystyrene nevertheless offers many material qualities that make it attractive to artists. Concisely curated by Judith Tannenbaum, the “Styrofoam” show offers a survey of Styrofoam art created within the past 25 years.

Several big names are represented, such as Richard Tuttle and Sol LeWitt, whose posthumously installed “Black Styrofoam on White Wall and White Styrofoam on Black Wall” starkly greets visitors upon entering the museum, flanking the stairway to the main gallery.

Harmony in the Age of Noise

Hope Stockman

Tisch Library Building Rooftop
35 Professors Row;/br>
Medford, Massachusetts

Through August 10

We live in a deaf age, according to sonic thinker and artist Bruce Odland. Sure, we tune into the intentional sounds of ringing cell phones or music playing in our earphones, but we’re deaf to the unintentional sounds that fill the places we pass through each day. Step onto a city street and you’re bombarded by visual stimuli, you’re catapulted from one sign, screen or billboard to the next. The breakneck speed of the visual world tends to overwhelm its auditory elements. Traffic, airplanes passing overhead, cafeteria chatter, whirring heating systems… these sounds form a distant cacophony we block out of our consciousness. Odland, one of the masterminds of this interactive sonic installation, believes the act of tuning out not only expends energy but has ruptured our sensory relationship to place. “Harmony in the Age of Noise” challenges you to open your ears and reconnect to the sounds that define the architecture daily life.

Over 100 individuals from the Tufts community and beyond have come together under the vision of four artists to create a gazebo that launches you in auditory orbit. The interdisciplinary project is being led by instillation artist Odland, who composed an original carillon piece for the project’s April 23 opening, anthropology professor David Guss, interactive designer Michael Luck Schneider and New York City-based sculptor Michael McNamara, who builds mathematically-inspired structures with sustainable materials.

The project takes the shape of a gazebo with a parabolic roof that amplifies everyday sounds emanating from speakers planted under the floorboards of the gazebo’s deck.

Celluloid Slant: Must Read After My Death

Taryn Plumb

They were boxed-up memories left for the finding – dusty, crackly dirges of a seemingly idyllic suburban family.

In all, the 8-millimeter tapes contained 50 hours of confessions, weepy breakdowns, all-out family brawls, discussions of mental illness and accusations of abuse and alcoholism.

Morgan Dews had seen the box of faded remembrances sitting in the shed, but he’d always imagined they were a jumble of mixed music tapes – perhaps jazz and early 50s rock, the kind of music his grandparents liked. But when he finally took them home one Thanksgiving and looped them into a reel-to-reel player, he was shocked: This was his family, raw and exposed – and in their own words.

Fifty years later, his now-dead grandparents’ triumphs and struggles are chronicled in “Must Read After My Death,” the Connecticut-born Dews’ first full-length film. “It was a terrifying look into my own family dynamics,” said the New York City-based filmmaker, who previously created short films. “I found that really enlightening.”

At 74 minutes long, the documentary splices together home movies and still photos of his grandparents Allis and Charley and their four children – Anne (Dews’ mother), Chuck, Bruce and Douglas – with audio tracks from Dictaphone letters and audio diaries.

Living in Hartford in the 1950s and 60s in a white colonial house with black shutters, the family was a bit unorthodox from the start. Allis and Charley, who deeply loved each other – or at least expressed as much in their back-and-forth audio recordings – had an “open relationship,” meaning they could sleep with other people.

Capsule Previews: May/June 2008

Brian Goslow

The first show of the season for BigTown Gallery, 99 North Main Street in Rochester, Vermont is a small exhibition of works from the estate of sculptor Hugh Townley (who died on February 1 of this year) that runs through May 22 and serves as a preview of a retrospective show at Wheaton College this fall. It’s followed by plein air landscapes and cow paintings from Bernard Chaet’s ‘60s period, which gallery owner Anni Clark calls, “his modern take on the cow in the landscape,” along with prints and drawings by his wife, Ninon Lacy from May 24 through June 24. “She’s a lovely graphic artist,” Clark said. “This show will feature pen and ink drawings of little insects and foliage that look Japanese in form with grace and elegance.”

“Perfect Intimacy,” New York City-based photographer Lili Almog’s photographic exploration of three female Carmelite monasteries in Maryland, Haifa, Israel and Bethlehem, Palestine can be seen through June 15 at the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography, Second Street and Avenue A, Turners Fall, Massachusetts. “These monasteries occupy their locations like bubbles in the middle of the estranged, non-religious neighborhoods,” Almog noted in her show statement. “Here, behind closed doors, the nuns live contented and absorbed in a state of unconditional love and surrender to their savior.”

Utilizing "various forms of literature, theatrical contexts, and historical representation, the artists work with a variety of methods and materials, such as photo-collage, fabric, seashells, paper and wax, and traditional drawing elements." The show shares the spotlight with Tasmanian artist Christina Henri's "Roses from the Heart Bonnet Project." The exhibit features commemorative bonnets to acknowledge the 25,566 convict women who had been brought to Australia from Ireland and the United Kingdom. Stonehill students and area artists have added their own bonnets to join Henri's tribute.

Carl Klimt, great grandnephew of Gustav Klimt, has slowly been building a name for himself out of his Brunswick, Maine studio. His third solo exhibition at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery, 112 High Street, Portland, Maine, takes place from June 4 through July 5 and features a series of small scale, anthropomorphic pencil drawings in graphite and gouache created during a month long residency in Puerto Rico and several months at the South Pole. Described as playful and compulsively explorative, their shapes, textures and colors hold some of the timeless magic of his infamous namesake.

“Impressionist Giverny: American Painters in France, 1885-1915” opens on May 3 and remains on view through July 27 at the Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, Connecticut. The 50 paintings include works by John Leslie Breck, Theodore Robinson, Willard Metcalf, Louis Paul Dessar, Frederick Carl Frieseke and Mary MacMonnies, who were attracted to the French village to be in the presence of Claude Monet. The show features Barbizon-inspired landscapes, impressionistic takes on the scenic town and “The Giverny Group’s” portraits of women in its breathtaking gardens.

“Shiao-Ping Wang: New Paintings” finds the Taiwan-born artist continuing her exploration of abstract patterns and the “swarming” the integration of many of them into a single work can create. While unplanned, she says, “Nature often emerges in my work through the movements and textures I see in the environment around me. The layers of paint and material I use generate the physical change in the process that is very interesting to observe, just like the change of seasons.” Wang’s show, which coincides with a display of sculpture by Melissa Turner, can be seen from May 9 through June 9 at Three Graces, 105 Market Street, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In the second part of his career, Leo Manso mainly focused his attention to creating collages which took on Eastern or Renaissance period tones and of which Robert Motherwell said held an “impeccable sense of placement and musical silence amidst a noisy world calls up the Quattrocento of Manso’s beloved Italy, if not its grandeur.” Magical, breathtaking and forever memorable, you can see some of these gems from May 9 to June 21 when “Leo Manso: Collages” is displayed at Acme Fine Art, 38 Newbury Street, Boston. The exhibition coincides with “Howard Gibbs: A Modern Perspective,” oil paintings and works on paper from the early 1920s to 1950s of Gibbs’ early fauvist inspired landscapes of pre-World War II France as well as his later avant-garde canvas works.

Ceci Mendez’s “Palabracion” can be experienced from May 15 through July 2 at the Jorge Hernandez Cultural Center/ Center for Latino Arts, 85 West Newton Street in Boston’s South End. The show includes sculptural objects and installations, drawings and three stop motion animation films. “All of the works in the exhibit reference language and culture and the search for meaning within and between English, Spanish, and Spanglish,” Mendez said. “In many of the works, tools, especially kitchen tools, emerge as metaphors for the human body, anthropomorphized in both two and three dimensions.” She uses technology that references and celebrates a very analog way of working. “The drawings and objects of tools in the exhibit are very much the kind that require use of the human hand - they are not automated by the push of a button or a program.”

While the artists featured in the Tao Water Gallery of Chinese contemporary art’s opening group shows may be new to American audiences, director Dian Tong said they’re all talented and prominent in their China homeland. “We love to introduce younger artists and more different kind of media art to our clients,” he said. This year’s crop includes new media artists along with printmakers, ink and oil painters. “They all trained in China and Europe, and some of them won awards in Germany.” You can see their work at both Tao galleries; the show runs from May 23 through June 20 at 352 Commercial Street, Provincetown (followed by “Kou Jiang Hui’s Lithography” from June 20 through July 3) and from June 14 through 27 at 1989 Route 6A, West Barnstable, where “Li Wang: An Intellectual’s Daydream” will be displayed from June 28 through July 11.

California artists Andy Davis, Jeff Canham and Tyler Warren are the “Three Amigos” whose work can been seen from May 31 through June 29 at the Montanaro Gallery, 18 Franklin Street in Newport, Rhode Island. Warren, a pro surfer, creates pen and ink drawings combining art nouveau and psychedelic imagery. Sign painter Jeff Canham’s work has ended up on Jack Jackson CD covers and his multi-paneled acrylic words, patterns and symbols on wood have become highly collectible. And not only can you buy Davis’ imaginary oceanscapes to brighten up your home, but as part of your wardrobe too, through his Ando and Friends clothing line, which will be sold during the exhibition. All three will be in attendance for the May 31 opening from 5 to 9 p.m.

Curator Barbara Danser put together “Interplay: Inward Outward Transference” to create a dialogue between contrasting, yet complimentary qualities in art ranging from sculpture and stoneware, mixed media and digital and holographic fiber arts to acrylics and encaustic painting. Danser’s own bronze sculpture will be on view along with that of Maureen Ahern, Trina Greene, Marsha Hewitt, John Lacz, Paul Pollaro, Wen Redmond, Toland Sand, Earl Schofield and Pam Tarbell. “The work of each artist in the show allows for the viewer to oscillate between the internal and external in different ways, such as form and space, transparency, ambiguity, light and reflected light,” Danser said. The show runs form June 6 through July 5 at the Cunningham Gallery at the Jaffrey Civic Center, 40 Main Street, Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Studio artists Thomas Adkins, Pete Bergeron, Robert Holden and Tom Yost will be on hand when P.H. Miller Studio, Frame-Makers, 495 Main Street South in Woodbury, Connecticut celebrates its 25th anniversary on June 26 from 6 to 8 p.m. “This Milestone marks a point in my career the reflects my dedication to the ancient art of water gilding and the concept of ‘crafted by hand’ as established by the European Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century,” said gilder and framemaker Peter H. Miller. “The ideal of rejecting industrialization, to me seems to have just as much relevance, if not more, in today's society.” On June 27, Bergeron will give gilding and carving exhibitions and a certified appraiser will give informal valuations from 2 to 5 p.m. “I have always embraced the challenge of educating our clients and the community about the Gilding Arts, ‘hand-made,’ the presentation of works of art and the history of frames,” Miller said.