artscope magazine: September/October 2007

Welcome Statement: Brian Goslow, features editor

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

Welcome Statement, September/October 2007

Was it only four months ago we were begging the cold to go away so we could start our summer gallery road trips? Now we’re hoping it stays warm enough to enjoy all of September and October’s festival events, including the Art Goes Wild Gardener’s Festival at Garden in the Woods on September 15 and the Fifth Annual stART on the Street cultural arts and music festival on September 16 Worcester.

Three new writers are in our pages this issue: Louise Mutterperl, who reviews the Art Quilts Lowell 2008 show at the Brush Art Gallery; Jeff Badger, who visited Stuart Obert at his Maine gallery to preview his Gallery NAGA exhibition; and William Henderson, who talked to the founders of the Haverhill Center for the Performing Arts. Our first international artist feature on Nederlands sculptor Joris August Verdonkschot is the result of a tip from one of our readers who discovered his work while visiting Europe.

We also talked with two artists who exemplify how art can be a leading medium for social change. Jeffrey Marshall, this month’s featured artist, has made a 10-year commitment to document the rebuilding progress (or lack of) in New Orleans, most of which has yet to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Franklin Liu visited Marshall at his Gloucester studio to talk about his shows at the New England Institute of Art and University of Rhode Island.

Another person doing important work is Amber Davis Tourlentes, whose photographs can be seen at the Art Institute of Boston Gallery in Cambridge as part of the “Same Sex America” exhibition. The legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts promises to be revisited as former governor Mitt Romney makes his run for president; her beautiful photos say as clear as can possibly expressed how misdirected his attitude, and that of gay marriage opponents, is.

If you plan on attending either of the first two presentations of the Lyric Stage Company’s 10th anniversary – “Man of La Mancha” or “Dying City,” call the box office at (617) 585-5678 and mention “artscope” and you’ll get two tickets for the price of one. We’re happy to be partnering with them in this offer; make sure to read Chet Williamson’s interview with artistic director Spiro Veloudos in this issue. Chet was recently honored with the annual ARTSWorcester ARTS Award for his long time coverage of the Central Massachusetts cultural community.

We continue to be gratified by the quality of entries we get for our cover contest. The theme for the November/December 2007 is “reflections,” be it the reflections of past holiday experiences, faces in holiday display windows or lights in the sparkle of wet or ice-covered trees. More details can be found in the back of this issue.

Enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you. I leave you with a reminder it’s not too early to start making plans to attend the Eleventh Annual Boston International Fine Art Show from November 16 through 18 featuring 40 galleries from the United States, Canada and Europe at the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts. To order tickets for the gala preview on the evening of November 15 to benefit the Boston Symphony Orchestra call 617-638-9423 or email rjung@bso.org.

Edwin Dickinson In Provincetown 1912-1937

James Foritano

Provincetown Art Association and Museum
460 Commercial Street

Provincetown, Massachusetts

Through September 23

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Germany’s Renaissance man, is reported to have said on his deathbed: “Light…more light!”

And, for viewers of this exhibition, the experience of this pioneering 20th century painter’s work is filled with illumination, both physical and intellectual.

But, if it was the nature of Provincetown which informed and inspired Dickinson, it was also the nurture of his teachers and fellow artists which encouraged this intense and devoted man to explore his own nature to meet the world’s half-way – more or less.

Stefano Arienti: The Asian Shore

James Foritano

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway

Boston

Through October 14

Milan-based artist Stefano Arienti is one of a long line of Gardner Museum resident artists - a 15-year-old program that invites contemporary artists of international standing to live in and respond to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s timeless, eclectic collection. Having an interest in Asian art, Arienti has rummaged through museum archives to find and transform photographs of Mrs. Gardner’s fin-de-siecle acquisitions in Asian sculpture, furniture, vases and landscape drawings.

Using a combination of original and traditional techniques, Arienti has transformed these archival photographs into black and white drawings, tracings and photocopies, as well as sepia-tinted “representations” which he “burns” into an elusive state between visibility and invisibility. All of these uniquely crafted representations are push-pinned onto the bottom half of a wall to a depth of four rows and a length of about 10 feet in a room of modest dimensions just behind the museum’s famous indoor garden.

That’s about all that any conscionable reviewer can objectively report, since the experience of this exhibit depends, more than most, on where you sit. That is, shoes removed, on which of the seven carpets that Mr. Arienti has dyed to reveal unique patterns and overlapped on the floor - as his “representations” overlap on the wall.

Fred Sandback: Four Forms

George Gerard

Barbara Krakow Gallery
10 Newbury Street

Boston

September 8 through October 16

This retrospective of Fred Sandback’s career opens the Barbara Krakow Gallery’s 2007 fall season. “Four Forms” will feature geometric works of yarn sculptures, drawings and paintings, and a relief of painted wood.

Sandback had an open-minded approach toward his artwork. His goals were met following a simple philosophy: accomplishment by progress. And so it follows that Sandback’s work is as abstract as his philosophy. “There isn’t any program in my work,” he explained. “No going from worse to better, or simpler to more complicated. So instead of saying I’ve made something new, I’ll say I’ve made something more.”

Group Fall Show, Bowersock Gallery

James Foritano

373 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA

September 7 through October 3

The first time I stopped at the Bowersock was to ask directions, something that happens often at this centrally located venue. Its front window is layered with vibrant, inviting colors and inventive forms, the front door is open, and owner Steve Bowersock’s partner was the first of several persons I questioned to give me concise, confident directions to my goal, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

The second time I entered the gallery was to introduce myself and talk to Bowersock about his beginnings as an artist and a gallery founder. Sipping Diet Coke at a neighborhood bistro, Steve remembered charging up to the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar, with fellow Marines (off duty), then enjoying the view and the accomplishment of seeing the world from this unique vantage point. Down below, in the town, Steve felt that same rugged, sunny uniqueness in the people’s independence, warmth and joie de vivre.

Sculpture Works by Lucienne Pereira

Catherine Laferriere

Space Other
63 Wareham Street

Boston

September 7 through 22

In German, a Kunsthalle is gallery/project space featuring temporary collections supported by local collectors and artists. In 2005, South End gallery director Gamaliel Herrera founded Space Other as a sort of Kunsthalle, replicating the spirit of innovation and community but redefining the notion of “local.” Space Other serves as one of New England’s premiere commercial galleries featuring the work of emerging artists from Europe and Latin America. This show is no exception; kicking off the fall season is Lucienne Pereira, a Brazilian by birth who now splits her time between the Netherlands and New York City.

Pereira’s previous work at Space Other was exhibited as part of an international ensemble exploring various media and visions. Herrera specifically arranged for a competing medley of ideas and materials to collide against each other and rise endowed with variations in tone and nuance. This time Pereira’s lanky, languid sculptures standalone.

Rather, Pereira’s pieces do not stand at all. They drape; they hang; they moan in shades of blue and green. They drip and flow in variations of drowsy, fluid fabrics and collect in pools of cloth and wire. They dangle from the ceiling and wilt on the floor. And despite their soporific structure they maintain an energy reserved for the well rested.

Stuart Ober: Mistakes, I've Made a Few

Catherine Laferriere

Gallery NAGA
67 Newbury Street

Boston

September 4 through October 6

In this exhibition opening Gallery NAGA’s fall season, Maine-based Stuart Ober presents a new group of oils on panel that present him as a skilled and meditative still life painter with a dry, affable sense of humor. His love of interior scenes and dramatic shifts of light and dark is clearly demonstrated in two of his paintings that depict the same shabby green bureau.

Joel Janowitz: the Monotypes

Catherine Laferriere

Victoria Munroe Fine Arts
179 Newbury Street

Boston, MA

Through July 21

The world is too much with us agrees John Folsom, the Kentucky born artist whose work haunts Lanoue Fine Art this September. Fusing Romantic melancholy with contemporary mixed media, Folsom’s landscapes quiver under ghostly streams of sunlight. While he celebrates the tree trunks, branches and long fields in his compositions, Folsom seems to paint in mourning, as one mourns a poignant but fading memory.

Folsom’s own memories are infused with art and painting; his grandmother, father and uncle were active artists. Moreover Folsom’s family owned a Hudson River School painting. The movement’s emphasis on rustic scenery and an idealized portrayal of the natural world finds a more than competent champion in Folsom’s later work. In college, Folsom studied photography and was attracted to digital manipulation. As he embraced the romanticism of the Hudson River School so too did he revel in notions of antique and modern, altered photography. Folsom counts both 19th century inventor William Henry Fox Talbot and the provocative contemporary Joel Peter Witkin as key influences.

Barbara Moody: Remains

Roanna Forman

Kingston Gallery
450 Harrison Avenue #43

Boston, MA

October 2 through 27

In “Remains,” Barbara Moody heaps up the debris from a previous artistic phase, readying herself to move on. These piles of flotsam also symbolize our over-burdened, “stuff”-laden society, and the difficulty we have deciding what to keep. On another level, the compositions skillfully celebrate the development of complex patterns within the piles, one of the artist’s constant fascinations.

The exhibit is a combination of large charcoal drawings on paper and a collection of small works that will be mounted together for an integrated viewing effect. To understand the new drawings, you should know that Moody’s previous work was a series of surreal, poetic animals, mostly goats. Drawn with tight virtuosity, they formed a kind of funky, hallucinogenic Aesop’s fables and were in the DeCordova’s “Going Ape” exhibit last fall.

Marie-Josée Roy: Enfin/At Last

Poupak Sepehri

Gallery Anthony Curtis
186 South Street

Boston

September 5 through October 6

“Enfin” – Québec is here, at last!

“I love metal! It’s a beautiful medium to work with – its luminosity is fascinating and it allows for a lot of contrast,” said Marie-Josée Roy, whose face lights up when she talks about her work. Metal is her medium of creation, and as much as she loves it, she is not shy to cover it up with her paintings and work it into tortuous shapes. “Enfin is about how we come to those times in our lives when we can say “At Last” – when we reach profound understanding, when we get out of the challenges we were facing, when we understand life’s realities and the depth of things.”

Same Sex America: A Film by Henry Corra and Charlene Rule and Photographs by Amber Davis Tourlentes

Brian Goslow

Art Institute of Boston Gallery
at Lesley University at University Hall

1815 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Through October 6

This exhibition takes its name from the 2006 film documenting the events leading up to and the celebrations that followed Massachusetts becoming the first state in the country to sanction same sex marriage. Thanks to the filmmaker Henry Corra and editor Charlene Rule’s fair and balanced presentation of both sides of the debate, they created a visual document that could become gay marriage’s Eyes on the Prize,” the landmark TV series on the American Civil Rights Movement.

In the film, one gay marriage opponent insists the legislation should not be passed, stating, “Think of the chaos that would happen across the country.” The photographs of Amber Davis Tourlentes serve to respond to that fear and way of thinking which still resonates throughout most of the country.

“Families on Stage, Provincetown Town Hall, 2001-2007” is a grid-style collage featuring 48 shots of 48 couples, most with children, who return to Provincetown from around the country each summer when Tourlentes gathers them for their annual portrait. “The kids are real sweet to each other,” she said. “It’s like a reunion for them.” She aims to have each family look dignified in a Disney-like way. “I’m poking fun at that. The families really got that was what I was trying to do.”

Abstraction Updated: G.A.S.P. Gallery

Matt Griffin

362 Boylston Street

Brookline, Massachusetts

September 7 through October 11

My visit to Suzanne Volmer’s studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island was timed to allow me to look at her work prior to it being brought to the G.A.S.P. Gallery for this Alicia Faxon-curated exhibition that also spotlights recent work by Deborah Muirhead and Susan Schwalb.

The studio is filled with items related to the processes of her materials. There are support drawings and models for Volmer’s large-scale projects that are interspersed with finished sculptural works. The environment was a dynamic backdrop to our conversation exploring ideas and influences that she uses to make abstraction relevant and meaningful today.

“All my artworks have a process dynamic that is essentially performance based,” said Volmer who uses welded metal and mixed media in addition to her trademark medium of porcelain to convey her artistic ideas. “My own style is an amalgam of thought, emotion and techie-ness. The window sculpture that will be on view at the gallery, “Peel‘n’Crush,” is a sculpture that is made of porcelain which contrasts visual serenity with a kind of internal violence.”

Art Quilts Lowell 2007: A National Juried Exhibition

Louise Mutterperl

The Brush Art Gallery
256 Market Street

Lowell

Through October 28

Only 38 quilts populate this exhibition, part of Lowell’s citywide Quilt Festival, but they represent a breathtakingly comprehensive virtual - and literal - kaleidoscope of artistic and quilting styles, personal philosophies, design theories and treasure troves of experience. From Pat Pauley’s prismatic, many-colored, multi-paneled, “Broken Chair” and Barbara Schneider’s bird’s eye view of skyscraper window panels to Nancy Halpern’s portrait of a squirrel in motion and Emmie Seaman’s appreciation of her vacuum cleaner, these 38 creations in fabric run the gamut from the very abstract to the nearly three-dimensional and everything in between.

Funny thing about quilts: they can be as abstractly rendered as a Rothko, but they’re still handcrafted, tactile objects. Each artist in this exhibition assembled pieces of fabric into a picture; some then applied an overlay of quilting, a stitch design that adds an additional layer of texture. Despite the gallery’s signs telling you “no,” you still want to reach out and feel the intricate designs and textures that are so integral a part of the display. Indeed, the show’s catalogue itself announces “some (quilts) are whispering, ‘don’t you wish you could touch me?’ Resist!)”

Tseng Kwong Chi: Ambiguous Ambassador

George Gerard

Bernard Toale Gallery
450 Harrison Avenue

Boston

Through September

Seventeen photographs from Joseph Tseng’s “Ambiguous Ambassador” series in this collection of images taken between 1979 and 1989, created by the context and evolution of the visual subject, as well as the period of time in which they were taken. In order to set the context, a little of Tseng’s history is needed.

Joseph Tseng was a young artist who lived in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was during this time that Tseng wore a second-hand Mao-styled suit to an opening at the Metropolitan Museum, triggering his transformation into Tseng Kwong Chi and providing the basis for “Ambiguous Ambassador.” Once he put on the suit, he was extremely moved by the reactions of the people he encountered. People would either treat him with an air of respect that a foreign dignitary might receive, or would show contempt for him as a communist. In the suit there was a cultural separation and stereotype that Tseng aimed to explore, and as an artist, his means for his journey was to photograph himself in well-known tourist destinations.

Tseng started the “Ambiguous Ambassador” series in the U.S but over time expanded it to a global scope. He remained always in the Mao suit, standing out as glaringly in his earlier photographs as he did to the people he encountered in person. For him it was a statement of contrast, whereby his adopted persona concealed a person of a rich intelligence, expressed in the subtlest fashions, and with an emphatic ability to escape the stereotype of the suit that he wore. For example,

Women Who Travel

Britt Beedenbender

South Shore Art Center

119 Ripley Road

Cohasset, Massachusetts

September 14 through October 28

Responding to the experiences, textures and colors of their travel, six artists have created a variety of work that is the focus of this fall printmaking exhibition. “I didn’t want it to be just a traditional printmaking show – but wanted to look at the breadth of the printmaking image,” said Esther Maschio, a long-term South Shore Art Center faculty member. She eschewed the juried show format, instead opting to hand-pick a small group of women whose creative output is as varied as their backgrounds.

Susan Gallagher is a relative newcomer to the printmaking medium. After reconnecting with her creativity at a 1999 art institute sojourn, she made her first foray into mono-printing last year. “The printmaking process gives me more opportunity to work with color and to be more creative,” she said. Using photographs taken in Cuba, France and in the canyons of the Escalante in Utah, Gallagher has chosen images “that are repetitions or reflections…pools from a cave or repeating arches.”

A recent residency in Costa Rica and a trip to Ireland provided a number of profound visual experiences for Mass College of Art professor Nancy Cusack. The bamboo that surrounded her in Costa Rica inspired several works. “I had never been quite so surrounded by it as I was there – I did tons of hiking, I couldn’t get enough of it,” said Cusack, whose elegant and ethereal bamboo prints are intimate in scale, reflecting the contemplative and “healing qualities” that can be felt in the bamboo grove.

Featured Artist Jeffrey Marshall: Re-Covering New Orleans

Franklin W. Liu

Art Institute of New England

University of Rhode Island

When disaster causes frightful deaths and rampant destruction, artists are compelled to capture the heart-rending misery; it’s as if art suddenly demands a prompt return to its original, more purposeful roots to validate, and now to heal.

In the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Gloucester artist and teacher Jeffrey Marshall, assistant professor of Drawing and Graphic Design at the New England Institute of Art since 2005, started thinking of his art as a prudent steward, benevolent, beckoning a restoration of the human spirit that Mother Nature has callously dampened. The end result, “Re-Covering New Orleans” is a large-scale traveling exhibition of Marshall’s drawings.

Marshall had lived in New Orleans, thus memories of places and faces surged in his mind upon his return visit. With a tinge of wistfulness, this experience has awakened and changed him from a landscape painter to a political activist with a new passion and direction in his art.

He made a 10-year personal commitment to examine New Orleans’ ruinous aftermath through his art and to donate part of the proceeds to various charities to help rebuild all that he loved about life in the Lower Ninth Ward. The results were large Conte crayon drawings that were dynamic, earnest and contemplative, all generated while working on site.

In “2015 Lizardi, New Orleans (ghost),” 30 x 40 inches, conte crayon, one sees a strewn pile of debris of collapsed roof, broken planks of wood joists, windowsills, headers jutting and pointing in every direction. They blanket an empty automobile crumpled, overturned, lying on the driver’s door side. This was a makeshift graveyard, rendered in vermilion and brown tones, caked with residue of mud, washed by flood that swallowed an entire community. Many of the strewn planks crisscross like toppled crucifixes symbolic of a plea for life ignored.

Through The Lens -- Contemporary Outlook: German Photography

Gary Duehr

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Avenue of the Arts

465 Huntington Avenue

Through February 10, 2008

When is a face like a place? When both are vacant and empty of expression, according to the handful of artists whose probing work makes up this exhibition at the MFA. And when the color photos are very large so that they fill the range of your vision when you stand up close, you can count the freckles on the neck of the sleek young girl in “Portrait” by Thomas Ruff, or add up the books in the dizzying, ornate stacks in “General Library of the University of Coimbra” by Candida Hofer. Each of these images presents a cool, noncommittal appearance for the viewer to pore over, as if deeper meaning can be gleaned from the girl’s hoop earrings and slash of red lipstick, or from the library’s black hulk of grand piano at the center of all the gold filigree. Surface and detail are everything.

So many of the German photos segregate face from place, as if the categories of portrait and landscape are not to be mixed, that it’s a shock in a couple of the large color pictures to see them blended. “Bundestag” by Andreas Gursky is downright lively with human activity, revealing the seat of parliament in Berlin through a window: at the bottom the unruly hustle of representatives, like a stock trading floor, and higher up, the orderly blue chairs, observed by a balcony of motley spectators and TV crews. It’s democracy at a glance. And you almost become part of the flurry of movement in “Galleria dell’Academia 1” by Thomas Struth, which shows viewers in a Venetian museum, passing by in a colorful blur. Stand back a bit and the MFA gallery enters the scene.

Enchanted Garden: Enamels by an American Master Karl Drerup

Rick Agran

Karl Drerup Art Gallery

Plymouth State University, Draper Maynard Building

17 High Street

Plymouth, New Hampshire

Through October 27

Karl Drerup’s enameling is an elemental marriage of glass and metal; fire officiates. Brightly colored ground glass–opaque, transparent, and translucent–joins to metals, both precious and utilitarian. Images are built in molten layers. Colors blend and deepen and with successive meltings. They’re mixed, richened, and honeyed in the oven. For those attuned to the dark and sparkly, “Enchanted Garden” is a visual feast, a retrospective aglow in the gallery named in Drerup’s honor.

Drerup (1904-2000) was raised in a well-to-do Catholic family in Westphalia, Germany and came to New York City in 1937 by way of Europe. He studied fine art drawing, painting and ceramics academically in Munster and Berlin where he was a student of Kathe Kollowitz. He traveled widely in Africa, Switzerland, Spain and Italy and met and courted his Jewish wife, Gertrude, in Florence.

They loved Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands where Drerup exhibited paintings there early in his career with Klee, Kandinsky, Dali and Ernst. As fascism’s shadow grew and made their return to Germany problematic, they fled for the States.

The influx of war-related émigrés brought many European fine artists to New York. In an attempt to carve out a commercially viable niche for his new family, Drerup, a fine painter and skilled draftsman, began working in ceramics. Early collaborations were realized through good luck and good grace. A fellow ceramist and émigré worked in a porcelain factory. He and Karl fired their work in an industrial kiln amid the rough company of toilets and lavatories. Drerup garnered a prize at the 8th National Ceramic Annual.

At a university ceramics annual, a designer remarked offhandedly that no fine enamels were being produced in New York. The opportunistic Drerup began to study and experiment, drawing upon his skill with ceramic glazes. He produced fine art enamels which where both praised artistically and adopted commercially. Early explorations with his mentor, W.S. Stark (another German émigré) were exhibited at the 1940 World’s Fair in the New American’s section and lead to an important purchase by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Enchanted Garden” chronicles Drerup’s progress and process as an artisan, beginning with decorative art and moving toward fine art. Mythological creatures, cubist designs and Greco-Russian icons grace his surfaces.

Carol Gove: Intimate Drawings and Collages

Rick Agran

September 7 through 23

Monadnock Arts/Friends of the Dublin Art Colony

September 28 through October 8

Redmond Bennett Gallery

1283 Main Street

Dublin, New Hampshire

Southern New Hampshire’s surface was worked and reworked (first volcanically, then glacially) leaving two sentinel mountains: Pack and Mount Monadnock. In fact, Mount Monadnock is the most-climbed mountain in the world. The area has beckoned to artists and eccentrics, writers and hikers for a century and a half. Artists ring the mountain’s broad granite shoulders and art colonies settle at their feet (presently McDowell Colony and historically the Dublin Art Colony). Abbott Thayer painted angels, women, lilies and landscapes here. Cigar-chomping imagist poet Amy Lowell held summer court. Mark Twain was a frequent visitor on the Lyceum circuit.

There’s something comforting about having those mountains as visual touchstones if you live nearby. Carol Gove lives in Temple, near the foot of Pack Monadnock. The artists of the Friends of the Dublin Arts Colony live widely scattered to Mount Monadnock’s north, south and northwest. Their fall shows at the Bennett Redmond Gallery keep with the area’s rich fine arts tradition and mark the turning of the season nicely.

From Street to Studio

Paula Melton

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

10 Vernon Street

Brattleboro, Vermont

Through December 1

This exhibit showcases the work of the late Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat are featured alongside fresh work by Scot Borofsky, Brian Gormley and Ken Hiratsuka, five 1980s street artists who successfully channeled the improvisational energy of street art and graffiti into the gallery.

The works range in mood and style from Haring’s clear, confident lines to Gormley’s thickly layered abstract surfaces. But a common aesthetic thread stitches these five oeuvres together. Each has its own symbolic idiom, mastered 20 years ago in the entryways, alleyways, sidewalks and subways of crumbling New York neighborhoods, and brought to the canvas or stone in a richer, more complex form.

Allure Gallery -- Women in the Arts: Clair, Gool and Pape

Chet Williamson

125 Turnpike Road, Suite 10 (Rte. 9 West)

Westborough, Massachusetts

Through October 27

Allure Gallery owner Marc Theroux tells the story of being in San Francisco on business and wanting to purchase an anniversary present for his wife. He was dressed in a suit with money in his pocket and serious intentions. He walked into a gallery hoping to find the perfect gift, only to be treated so badly by the owner that he left empty handed.

He promptly took his business elsewhere - across the street to a competitor. Not only did he find that precious gift – one that both he and his wife still cherish - but also a welcoming gallery that made a lasting impression for its friendliness.

Theroux has been collecting art for 20 years. He traveled a great deal in his job as a medical device engineer and in his travels he would often purchase art. He liked art enough to remark on many occasions that when he retired, he would like to open a gallery. His wife, just as often, would say, “Why wait?” And when Marc’s job ended at the firm, she declared, “Now is your chance.”

Robert S. Neuman: Selected Work 1954-2007

Sarah E. Fagan

Beard/Weil Gallery, Watson Fine Arts Center, Wheaton College

26 East Main Street

Norton, Massachusetts

September 9 through October 20

Painter, illustrator, bookmaker, soldier, professor, traveler are some of the occupations of Robert S. Neuman; 1954, 1961, 1983, 2007 are some of the years on the wall tags accompanying Neuman’s work at this, the largest retrospective of the Neuman the artist at Wheaton College. This esteemed, multitalented American abstract expressionist has been creating for decades; the show’s grand opening on September 9 coincides with his 81th birthday.

Neuman was born in Idaho, and it was there his interest in painting was fueled by whatever tools he could procure. After several years in the Air Force, his work began to take him places - literally. He studied art in California, traveled to Germany on a Fulbright Award, and later to Spain on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The exhibition makes it clear that Neuman found inspiration in his travels - both from place and from living in the moment. This livelihood is reflected in the energy and sensuousness of his strokes, but also, I learned, in the way he works to bring an entire piece to life. A painting is worked back into until Neuman feels it is completed, an inert machine finally given the spark of life and let loose into the world. “He could have up to 12 paintings lying on the floor at any one time, and whenever he hit an impasse, he would switch to another” said curator and Wheaton College professor Ann Murray.

“Robert Neuman: Selected Works” consists of work from various series Neuman delved into during his career.

International Spotlight: Joris August Verdonkschot

Brian Goslow

Joris August Verdonkschot of the Nederlands never intended to become a sculptor. He had been running his own film and television programming production company, which he opened after attending the Film Academy in Amsterdam in 1968. Then, he was seduced by classical sculpture and its fine details while visiting the Bargello Museum in Florence in the early 1990s. “‘Some statues struck me, specially the ones of Cellini,”‘ he said. “‘I was almost in tears. I left with the decision to try to make something in Holland with clay.”‘

Fifteen years ago, he began to draw and paint. “‘I discovered that I was seeking something else,”‘ Verdonkschot said. He spent two years learning tricks of the trade from “‘an old intelligent sculptor”‘ and reading books about sculpture as art and a trade, the body and monographs about important sculptors and their ideas, seeing and physically feeling famous statues and experimenting in making things. As kept one of the key elements of his work as a filmmaker – the manipulation of light – and using that skill to address the way light falls on his statues when they are displayed.

All of his works are of the human form and the paradox between the balance of the introvert with the extravert, extreme body parts versus soft parts and the female and the masculine. “‘I’m fascinated by the body,”‘ Verdonkschot said.

artscope Capsule Previews

Brian Goslow

After being closed for over a year, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, Massachusetts, has its grand reopening celebration on September 19 from 6 to 8 p.m. The first show at the renovated museum, which had its roof replaced, is “Global Feminisms,” a major exhibition featuring works by over 60 women artists under the age of 40 from 40 countries. The New York Times said the show, which was at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this summer, was “energetic, illuminating and irksome, and in all ways worthy of careful study.” The show, which remains on view through December 9, is broken into four segments – Cultural Encounters; Power, Violence and Protest; Self as Subject/Self as Object; Motherhood; and Sexuality and the Body.

Donna Hamil Talman’s works give the impression that she’s a master paleontologist. Her art isn’t of dinosaur bones, however – they’re human body parts photographed by physicians, blown up by Talman, and then painted in a way that gives the impression they’ve existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They originate in her own personal experience with the autoimmune illness lupus, which introduced her to the possibility x-rays could serve more than a medical purpose. “Danse Ardente,” her latest collection, can be seen from October 14 through December 19 at the Carney Gallery at the Fine Arts Center at Regis College, 235 Wellesley Street in Weston. Talman’s work (and that of John Buron) can also be seen as part of “The Process Within” show from September 6 through 26 at ARTSWorcester’s Aurora Gallery, 660 Main Street, Worcester.

“Intimate Portraits: Celebrity Photography by William Coupon” features three foot portraits of every U.S. president since Richard Nixon and musical icons Mick Jagger, Miles Davis and Jerry Garcia by the renowned photographer from September 7 through October 31 at Susan Maasch Fine Art, 27 Forest Avenue, Portland, Maine. “He’s photographed every celebrity you could imagine and is truly brilliant,” said assistant gallery director Melissa Nowak.

5 Traverse in Providence reopens on September 7 with “The Transportation Show.” The gallery has commissioned members of the Dirt Palace Collective, Sasha Wiseman, William Schaff and other area artists to create original designs to be used on skateboards produced by Providence boarding company Candy Spanks. Sculptor and bike design artist Peter Fuller and Circle A Cycle are designing bicycles specifically for this show that can be seen through October 13.

The artists featured in the Brickbottom Gallery’s “FABRICATIONS: Fabric As Medium” show have taken the silk and the synthetic and turned it into a fresh show of soft yet excitingly colorful works. Featuring quilts by John Tricomi and Clara Wainwright, stitched drawings by Marilyn Pappas – (her “History Lessons,” created with cotton thread on linen is breathtaking in detail that’s hard to believe wasn’t drawn in pencil), sculpture by Kate James and Mario Kon (whose “Tensions” installation, made of lycra and bamboo rods reinvents how gallery space can be used) and a fabric collage by show curator Beverly Sky, the show’s on view from September 14 through October 13 at 1 Fitchburg Street in Somerville, Massachusetts.

New works by landscape painter Pete Bergeron will be on display from September 14 through November 5 at the P.H. Miller Studio, 495 Main Street South, Woodbury, Connecticut. They include inland and coastal scenes of Connecticut and Maine’s Atlantic coast. Bergeron was already making a living off his work before he entered the Paier School of Art; extremely dedicated to improving his craft, he’s been studying the classical academic painting style of master painter Frank Covino of Vermont. Recent oil paintings “Morning Shadows on Giles Hill” and “Black Rocks & Surf” show why Bergeron has (rightfully) been compared with the landscape painters of the Hudson River School.

The Worcester Art Museum’s latest contemporary exhibition couldn’t be timelier. “Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home” matches Rosler’s 1967-1972 “Life” magazine photographs of the Vietnam War that were coupled with interior photographs of the homes of the country’s more prosperous citizens and with her modern update of the works, “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series (2004), addressing the current situation in Iraq. Each call into question the media images that barrage us on a daily basis by bringing together very different but connected views of life. One example: the burkha-covered women of Iraq with so-called glamorous runway models and other iconic images. View these challenging photomontages from September 22 through January 13, 2008 at WAM, 55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, where Rosler will present a talk on the evening of October 18.

Community: Haverhill Center for the Performing Arts

William Henderson

David Drummond is on the phone from Bermuda, where he is teaching at the Bermuda Civic Ballet. He’s been there for the better part of six weeks and has just four more performances to oversee before returning to his home in Haverhill to complete renovations on two Lafayette Square properties and open the town’s first all-purpose performing arts center by the time the new school year begins in September.

He’s working on the project with Center Stage Dance Academy founder Tina Davis. No stranger to kick-starting artistic movements in the strangest of places, Davis calls Drummond visionary. Separately, Drummond credits Davis with believing in the Haverhill project from the beginning and keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground, an unfamiliar place for the internationally revered ballet soloist turned art director for Ballet New England in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Boston Ballet teacher.

“The arts are all struggling,” Drummond said. “Because I know how bad it is for ballet, and I know how bad it is for theater, too, I decided that if we all joined forces and worked together and had a central place where things can be worked out of, then we can all benefit from it. I love Haverhill. It’s a great little town that’s on the rise again, and, at least I think I know, that if you want to get more families to settle in Haverhill, then you have to offer them the arts.”

The Haverhill Performing Arts Center will be equal parts art gallery, dance studio and theater, though Drummond will focus, at least initially, on enrolling students in his beginning and intermediate ballet classes.

Theater - Perfect 10s: The Lyric Stage Company of Boston and Boston Theatre Works celebrate milestone anniversaries

Chet Williamson

In the process of programming this year's lineup of shows for the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Spiro Veloudos, celebrating his 10th anniversary as its artistic director, never considered presenting a retrospective to reflect his tenure. “When we did those shows there was a real specific reason for doing them,” he said. They were done at a certain time that was right for that show to be produced. I feel the same way to some extent with a number of the shows this year.”

Reflecting his artistic sensibility, Veloudos, the 2006 recipient of the Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence, has chosen projects of special significance to anchor this milestone season.

The 2007-2008 season is Lyric Stage's 2207-2008 season, its 34th, features the company's trademark variety with a miscellany of musicals, dramas and comedies, including three shows Veloudos very much wanted to present – “Man of La Mancha,” “Three Tall Women” and “The Importance of Being Ernest.”

“They are three plays that I have long admired,” he said. “The story of ‘Man of La Mancha’ is about how there is a transcendent quality of art that puts hope into people’s lives.” The classic opens the season on September 7. Veloudos chose “Three Tall Women” for two reasons: "I absolutely admire Edward Albee and, after working on his magnificent play ‘The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’ I relish the opportunity to explore another of his scripts.” As for “The Importance,” he said, “I live in comedy. That is just where my heart is and how could I not direct arguably the greatest comedy ever written?” The New England premieres of “Dying City” and “This Wonderful Life” concludes the 2007 portion of its schedule. For the complete rundown, visit lyricstage.com.