In The News

For 50 years, the Marblehead Festival of Arts, a year-round all-volunteer organization, has produced a summer arts Festival over the July 4th holiday.

This year's festival promises to be outstanding, a days-long free event comprising art exhibits, performances, a logo contest, a culinary arts reception, a street festival, and more. The call for art is located on their Art exhibits page. 

Check out their webpage for special events being planned for the 50th Festival Celebration, which will run concurrently with the festival, July 2–5, 2015.

The Winthrop Art Association 2015 Festival and Craft Fair will be held from April 24th - 26th at the EB Newton Cultural Center, Winthrop, MA. They are seeking artists to enter the Festival with original art works and crafters for the Craft Fair. Entry forms are due by April 15th according to the instructions on the forms. Visit their website for more information about the festival.

Collectors within the Artistic Community

Presenter: Maggie Cavallo: Curator of Education, Montserrat College of Art

The art collector plays a complex role in contemporary art communities. Hear stories of influential collectors who dedicated time to developing emerging artists; learn methods and guidelines for developing a holistic art collecting practice.

Thursday April 9, 2015
7:00-8:30 pm
Marblehead Arts Association
8 Hooper Street Marblehead Ma 01945
$25 members/ $50 non members*
Reservations & prepayment requested; Call 781-631-2608 or email: info@marbleheadarts.org
Visit: www.marbleheadarts.org or call 781-631-2608 for more information

*First of a two part series included in the fee. An onsite visit to Montserrat will follow on Thursday, April, 23 6:30-8:30pm. Maggie and Montserrat's Take20 team, a group of student gallery teachers, will bring participants for a closer look at leading Montserrat student work and for a visit to a Senior Thesis Exhibition with students working in a variety of disciplines.

"The art collector plays a complex role in contemporary art communities. Today, many individuals collect purely for the investment value of a work of art and collecting has, for ages, been a tried and true method for proving one’s cultural capital. The interest and agency of art collectors often influence the careers of working artists and the styles of art that are celebrated and produced. Beyond the financial or cultural gain, the contemporary collector should be aware of her important role within the fabric of artistic communities. how might she make the most of her connections with works of art and artists?"

Maggie Cavallo Bio:

About the MAA:

Arts Marketing with

Jackie Ganim DeFalco

Thur. March 26, 6:30 - 8:30 pm 
$10 members/$15 non-members
King Hooper Mansion,
8 Hooper St. Marblehead

To register contact: 781-631-2608781-631-2608 or info@marbleheadarts.org

"In the world of technology marketing, we are all trying to tell the story.  Not always easy to turn complex notions into interesting stories despite access to the world’s best marketers.  So, turning this on it’s head, it’s equally difficult for artists to tell some of the world’s most interesting and poignant stories – as they lack the marketing expertise and in some cases, the courage – afraid to toot their own horn." - Jackie Ganim-DeFalco

        8 Hooper St. Marblehead, MA 01945 marbleheadarts.org 781-631-2608781-631-2608

Hello Artists or Friends of Artists,

 The Brush Art Gallery and Studios is asking artists who have had an affiliation with us to participate in a fun project that will help us raise money for our art scholarship program.

We are having our 4th annual Four By Four For Education fundraiser for our University of Lowell Art Scholarship Program on April 11.  This fundraiser will feature 150 - 200 little 4"x4" works of original art.  These canvases will be displayed in our gallery beginning March 7 and sold the day of the fundraiser. The money raised from sales will go to the program which awards a scholarship to a deserving student majoring in the visual arts. 

We are asking our affiliated artists if they would like to participate. We will provide you with a 4 inch by 4 inch canvas. We invite you to create whatever you wish with whatever media and materials you like.  If you need to remove the canvas from its frame and replace it with fabric, metal, paper, glass, etc., please do so.  The only restrictions are:

1. you use the canvas we provide;
2. the outer dimensions of the finished work not exceed 4 x 4. 

Because this is a fundraiser, we really regret that we cannot compensate you for your labor, but invite you to attend the fundraiser as our guest.

The deadline for completion of your canvas is Feb 28.

For more details and an on-line registration/canvas request form, please click/go here:

http://www.thebrush.org/4x4

This will be a fun event and we hope you'll participate!

Jim Dyment
Executive Director
Brush Art Gallery & Studios
256 Market St, Lowell, MA 01852

director@thebrush.org
www.thebrush.org

Hours: Tuesday- Saturday 11:00 - 4:00 PM, Sunday, 12 - 4 PM

(Winter Hours: Jan through Mar 31: Wednesday - Saturday 11:00 - 4:00 PM, Sunday, 12 - 4 PM)

View the statements from candidates for SAA officers and board members at http://www.salemartsassociation.org/2014-Elections.  Ballots for this contested election will be mailed to the address on file for all active members, and voting will be at the annual meeting and celebration on Dec 8.  Be an educated voter!

THE SALEM MOOSE FAMILY CENTER
PRESENTS
OUR 5TH ANNUAL HOLLY FAIR

OUR ANNUAL CRAFT FAIR WILL BE HELD ON
NOVEMBER 8TH 2014

FROM 9:00 AM TO 2 PM

RESERVE A 6 FOOT TABLE WITH 2 CHAIRS TODAY FOR
$25.00.  BOOKING DEADLINE IS OCTOBER 25TH

THERE WILL BE RAFFLES DRAWN AT 1:45
REFRESHMENTS SERVED ALL DAY.

THANK YOU

Montserrat College of Art Awarded Interdisciplinary Learning Method Grant

from Davis Educational Foundation Grant

 

Beverly, MA – A generous grant from the Davis Educational Foundation is recognizing Montserrat College of Art’s creative teaching style, developed by the college’s academic leadership team, which emphasizes learning that is interdisciplinary, team-taught and project-based.

Last spring the Davis Foundation announced that Montserrat would receive a $150,000 grant over two years for the Gateway project, which emphasizes this experiential teaching style.

The grant will provide funding for two new programs that serve, respectively, as gateways into and out of college. Funding will support the two parts of the Gateway Initiative, including: planning, implementation, outcome assessment and, creation of curricular models (best practices, guidelines, handbooks, documentation, templates, online resources) for future use.

Montserrat College of Art President Steve Immerman said, “Montserrat recognizes the need to go beyond the traditional classroom structure to introduce experiences that relate directly to those students will encounter in their professional lives. We are grateful to the Davis Foundation for provding this opportunity to offer new teaching methods to Montserrat students.”

 1.  FX (the Freshman Experience)

Offered to freshman in the first semester, FX serves as a gateway from high school into college. The course is team-taught, interdisciplinary, and integrates studio practice with historical and cultural analysis. Methodologies from studio art and liberal arts (particularly art history) are combined to provide a holistic introduction to the visual arts while helping students to acclimate to college-level academic and studio work. This combination of rich content and tactile experience is designed to fully engage students as visual learners. The aim is to break down preconceptions about art, art making, and contemporary studio practice.

 This 3-credit course features a closely coordinated series of lectures, museum/gallery/studio visits, research, writing, class discussions, team-based and individual projects. Small group meetings for discussion, research, and studio immersion complement three keystone lectures and field trips to the Peabody Essex Museum, Mass MOCA and New York City. The course is designed to function in the way that artists interact with the world, across disciplines at the intersections of research, writing, collaborating, current culture, and making.

 2.  StudioXL (the Studio for Experiential Learning)

StudioXL serves as a gateway out of college and into the professional world. It provides students with a series of carefully structured opportunities, offered outside the traditional classroom/studio, that build skills such as team-work, collaboration,  project management, and working between disciplines in real world settings.  Some, if not all projects, will have community partners, bolstering our relationships with the local and regional businesses and community-based organizations that fuel the creative economy of the North Shore.

 The college has appointed Kate Luchini, formerly of the Lynn Museum and Peabody Essex Museum, as the director of Studio XL.

 The enormously successful pilot project in StudioXL was a team-taught collaboration with Footprint Power at Salem Harbor Station. Montserrat structured it a course called Across the Bridge: Three Perspectives, it combined fieldwork, research and art making. Students examined and documented the decommissioning of the coal-powered Salem Harbor Power Plant, now Footprint Power, which funded the project. Thirty students guided by three faculty members developed a visual and narrative legacy of the plant and the community of people who worked there, through writings, paintings, photography and video, sculpture and installation, and design. The project culminated in an exhibition in the turbine hall in June 2014 that was seen by more than 1000 visitors; it concluded with an evening poetry reading among the turbines, which was organized by the director of the Impossible Places Poetry Tour. That night the turbines sounded for the last time and the dismantling began the following day.

 The second StudioXL project for fall 2014 is a course called Food and Culture. In contrast to the power plant project, this course was initiated in-house; it combines cultural history, research into food economies and politics, resulting in the production of creative work. Among the local partners are the Food Project and Beverly Bees.

 More collaborations are being planned for future semesters.

 For more information about this grant, please contact Montserrat College of Art’s Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs Laura Tonelli at laura.tonelli@montserrat.edu or 978.921.4242978.921.4242 x 1601.

 Montserrat College of Art is a small, private, residential college of visual art and design, founded in 1970, by artists, for artists, educating the creative problem solvers of tomorrow. The college offers the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, continuing education classes and four galleries exhibiting works by international, national and regional contemporary artists, intended to offer art education beyond the Montserrat classrooms through a series of public lectures, gallery talks, catalogs and events. www.montserrat.edu

 

For Immediate Release

Contact: Elizabeth Gianino

Media Relations Coordinator

elizabeth.gianino@montserrat.edu

978.921.424 x1121

One-Woman Show                              Oct. '14 thru Jan. '15 

The Mass. Gen. Hospital Cancer Center, Danvers, invited Sheila Farren Billings to do a 1-woman show as part of their Illuminations Program, a rotating art exhibit designed to enhance their environment of care. The show will run Oct. - Jan. featuring "feel-good" paintings. Reception: MGH Yawkey Ctr., 55 Fruit St. Boston, Tues. 10/28 5:50-7pm.

Salem resident Jim Bostick, a local photographer, began creating his own tarot card deck, shooting locals in his Salem home’s photography studio, in 2009. Here he hangs his photographs in In a Pigs Eye on Derby Street in preparation for his show on Sunday, Oct. 12.

WICKED LOCAL PHOTO / WILLIAM J. DOWD

Jim Bostick’s grandmother gave him his first tarot card deck as a Christmas stocking stuffer when he was about 6 years old. The deck’s cards depicted characters of the James Bond 007 movie franchise.

"I started playing the cards, and I still have the deck. I love it," said Bostick, standing on Saturday morning inside In a Pig’s Eye, the Derby Street pub where he curates a monthly revolving door of art exhibitions for owners Jenny and Jon Reardon.

His grandmother’s gift not only sparked a lifelong fascination with tarot cards as a craft of fortune telling and divination but also as individual and collective pieces of artworks that tell stories.

"To me, they are creative things. I look at them as storytelling devices, too, and I think that is how people who read them interpret them," Bostick said. "When they are laying out the cards, they are telling as story."

Bostick, a talented local photographer and Lancaster, Pa. native, began creating his own tarot card deck, shooting locals in his Salem home’s photography studio, in 2009. The ambitious project now years in the making is over two thirds done, with 66 of 78 cards completed.

Recently, Bostick finished all 16 court cards and is displaying blown-up, matted and framed images of them on the walls of In a Pig’s Eye through October.

"I’ve been working the project for a solid five years now, I’ve been jumping around," said Bostick as he set up the show Saturday morning. "I’ve been buying armor for like four years, because I couldn’t afford to buy it all at once."

All of the cards, which one could also consider as group and individual portraits, contain theatrical and old film-stills qualities, brought about through Bostick’s impressive manipulation of light on his subjects.

"I like to refer to them as a little piece of theatre, because each one is center stage, props, costume and actors, and took some effort to put everything together," Bostick said.

Bostick completely photographed in white-and-black, believing color to be frivolous, unnecessary and a hindrance to the art-goer’s interaction with the art pieces.

"I don’t want them not to look like photographs," Bostick says. "You see a lot photographs people try to make look like paintings or illustrations."

He continued, "I love the rawness of photography, and I want to celebrate that."

And this month-long exhibition is as much about the rawness of photography - the art of showing rather than telling - as it is a celebration of people, Bostick said, who he has met since he and his husband, Liam, moved to Salem.

"Jim is a receptive person, well liked open and includes anybody and everybody," said Judy Rudd, who is the subject of Bostick’s darling-of-the-show "Queen of Swords" on display. "He cares about the subject and his artwork."