NORTH ADAMS — It used to be that artists working at a distant remove from the metropolitan centers of art — above all, Paris and New York — had no real way of getting in on the game. Doomed to observe from afar, they were reliant on random reproductions and third-hand gossip, and had little hope of affecting the standards of originality and worth radiating out from those centers.

If the arbiters of taste and quality in the capitals deigned to notice them at all, they inevitably branded them “provincial.” Worse, these artists saw themselves that way.