artscope magazine: January/February 2008 Welcome Statement: Brian Goslow, managing editor Office Space North Shore Originals Rania Matar: Lebanon at the crossroads Ad/Agency Sticky Bun City The Museum of Russian Icons One Hundred Years of Art: The Whistler House Museum The Owbow Gallery artSPACE@16 Currents4: Amy Stacey Curtis New Acquisitions 2007 Dennis Lucas: Provincetown artist migrates inland for the season Lean back. Consider it for a moment. Women's Rural Entrepreneurial Network(WREN) ART, art, ART, and more Art: Sixteen Boston art dealers go to Art Basel Miami 2007 Edurne Esponda: Codico propio (personal code) Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project The Little Dog Laughed Puppetry in New England: Bread and Puppet Theater, The Tanglewood Marionettes and Dan Butterworth artscope Capsule Previews The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

artscope Capsule Previews Brian Goslow Still holding onto some of that Christmas gift money? Throughout the month of January, A Z Fine Arts is offering “Small Wonders,” local scenes by gallery-represented artists including Carol Summers, Celia Judge, Anthony Petchkis, Karen Baker and Sharon Price that range from 5” x 7” to 16” x 20.” Alex Khomsky channels the sparkle of the Art Nouveau age for February’s gallery exhibit. Featuring an array of “beautiful ladies,” his latest works are enhanced by his recent addition of copper leaf which join his mastery of oil, gold and silver paints in his creating of stunning yet tranquil paintings; they can be seen in the month of February at A Z, 339 Washington Street (Route 16), Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. Another late shopping option is the “Decorative Art Sale” which continues through January 26 at Gallery Z, 259 Atwells Avenue in Providence. It’s your chance to get a unique jewelry piece by artist and goldsmith Steven Tegu, who’s done design work for Revlon, Warner Brothers and Christian Dior after serving an apprenticeship with the Bulova Watch Company. His commercial success has allowed him to follow his own creative path, which he explained in his artistic statement for the show: “I am intrigued by the transformational power of heightened consciousness and the universal language of the Expressive Arts as a redemptive force for positive change in this chaotic and uncertain age.” The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine and the Pilchck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington have made some of the most major and adventurous contributions to the craft of glassmaking. “A Gathering of Contemporary Glass” follows the craft’s lineage from the 1951 opening of Haystack, which employed the groundbreaking Harvey Littleton (who had moved glassmaking from the huge factories to the studio in the previous decade) in 1964, his teaching of Dale Chihuly, who would go on to change the way the world looked at glass and, after a stint of teaching at Haystack, established Pilchck in 1971, to the creations of their students and fellow instructors in the years that followed. This remarkable and memorable exhibition continues through February 17 at the Farnsworth Art Museum, 18 Museum Street in Rockland, Maine. Show curator Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer set out to showcase some of the latest contemporary innovations for the “Improvisations in 2D and 3D” exhibition that opens on January 2 and continues through February 3 at the Depot Square Gallery, 1937 Massachusetts Avenue in Lexington. Walzer joins Goergette Benisty, Jodi Collela, Jean Proulx Dibner, Melanie Zibit, Gracia Dayton, Dora Hsiung, Emily Passman and Siri Smedvig in this collection of bronze and marble sculptures, fiber art, paintings, prints, mixed media and objects d'art that mix past influences (half the fun is guessing which) with the implementation of new ideas and experiments. The International Association of Art Critics gave its 2007 “Best Emerging Artist in New England” award to “artscope” contributor Gary Duehr, who has been busy with the publication of his book “What Happens” (available for $19 from garyduehr.com) and preparing works from his “Soft Cities” (ghostly images from Paris, Venice, Amsterdam and Mexico City) and “Liminalities” (that moment between things happening when anything is possible) series, which you can see in their full- scaled glory from January 7 through February 22 at the Khaki Gallery, 9 Crest Road, Wellesley. Printmaking is one of the oldest art forms but until recently, most of the works ended on paper and suitable framed. In the course of history, its expansion into new forms of display – on leather, carpet, plaster, copper, steel and even wax – not to mention fabrics like silk and cotton (remember learning how to silkscreen your own patterns into t-shirts?) are relatively new. These new innovations are celebrated in the Center for Contemporary Printmaking’s “Not Printed on Paper” which opens on January 17 and continues through March 15 at Matthews Park, 299 West Avenue in Norwalk, Connecticut. The show includes prints by Phyllis Peckar Clamage and Allison Roberts, a rare plaster print work by Stanley William Hayter and Gabor Peterdi, copper prints by Suzanne Benton and silk printworks by Margaret Turner. Several classes are being held in conjunction with the exhibition; call 203-899-7999 for more details. Dina Brodsky calls her latest 16-painting collection, “In a Different Light II,” a curio cabinet of life capturing her perceptions and reactions to everyday objects. The works, which will be on view throughout the month of February at ARTANA, 1378 Beacon Street, Suite B in Brookline, Massachusetts, promise to stand as a lasting view of what our lives were like as we moved from the 20th to 21st centuries. The New York-based artist, who blends her mastery of the style of the 17th century Dutch Masters with contemporary realism, will be on hand for the opening on February 2 from 6 to 8 p.m. Barbara Hitchcock “crawled” through the Polaroid Collection archives of over 16,000 museum-quality images in curating “Fins, Wings and Other Such Things,” a nature-oriented collection that gives you the opportunity to “Meet the Beetles” through Andrea Woolf’s sepia-toned images, William Wegmen’s beloved dogs, glamorous barnyard pigs and imagine the sounds that were made in the making one of the show-stoppers, Bettina Rheims’ studio portrait of a rooster. The exhibition can be seen through February 10 at the National Heritage Museum, 33 Marrett Road, Lexington, Massachusetts. The show’s last two days will feature concerts by the Lexington Symphony Orchestra; call (781)861-6559. The first decade of the 21st century has seen cities and towns realizing the role art can play in developing a fresh new image. Over the past year, the long-running Hudson Arts Alliance in the Central Massachusetts town of Hudson has tripled its efforts to promote both the visual and performing arts in the town. Longtime resident, photographer and 2001 Mass College of Art graduate Jordan Kessler has documented its Water and Loring Streets neighborhood in a series of selenium-toned silver gelatin prints that can be seen through mid-March at the Hudson Town Hall, 78 Main Street weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Since it’s a winter road trip, you’ll want to stock up on warm coffee, tea and soup from the nearby Harvest Café at 40 Washington in Wood Square, which showcases local artists. Boston’s SoWa (South of Washington) district gets a new gallery on January 25. Space 242, 242 East Berkeley Street (second floor) debuts with photographer Liz Linder’s “Records and Refuse,” a mixture of images of iconic products in unlikely places and musicians. In “Product Placement,” Linder manages to make a discarded squished Budweiser can on an otherwise idealistic beach scene look entrancing while she captures the beams of the sun perfectly on “Blaze Hazard” in a way that hasn’t been seen since Robert Mapplethorpe did the same for Patti Smith’s iconic “Horses” album shoot. The show runs through February 22. Read the entire article in our magazine pages...