June 28th - August 10th, 2024: Kevin Bennett Moore, Jack Lueders-Booth, Robert Moeller, Karen Moss, Laura Evans

Kevin Bennett Moore: No Bitter Fruit

Influenced by my own queer experience and ideals of mid-century American culture, my work investigates a familiar environment that alludes to something more enigmatic. Creating vignettes of this space and time allows for the images to exist in reality or remain fictitious.

No Bitter Fruit explores uncertainty in the American dream by utilizing tropes from cinema we seem to recognize as a collective. These images become fragments of my transition out of a pandemic and into an America full of unknowns. By focusing on themes of disaster and tragedy I am able to address the human condition; attempting to thrive in times of turmoil.

In the fall of 1977, Jack Lueders-Booth began teaching photography to the inmates of Massachusetts Correction Institution (MCI) Framingham, a women’s prison. 

During his decade at the facility, he would make a series of Polaroid images produced collaboratively with the women who lived in the prison. 32 of these images are presented in thisnew book alongside oral histories taken at the time by Booth. 

Founded in 1878, MCI Framingham was opened to house incarcerated women for the crime of giving birth out of wedlock i.e., begetting, (Hester Prynne’s crime in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter). Some few years later MCI Framingham began incarcerating women for shoplifting, organized prostitution, using and trafficking drugs, armed robbery, child abuse, and murder. Many women at Framingham were convicted for helping their husbands or boyfriends commit crimes. By the Mid-70s, the correctional facility was part of an ongoing normalization experiment that sought to mitigate the psychological consequences of incarceration. In Booth’s images, neither inmates nor guards are uniformed, cells are made to look like dormitory rooms, and inmates can furnish and decorate them within the constraints of guidelines. Male inmates were introduced, constituting 20% of the communal population. Many of the inmates in Lueders-Booth’s images had dependent children who were placed in the care of relatives or court-appointed foster parents, they were allowed to visit with an adult.

“My time there was scheduled to end in 1979, but by then I had begun photographing these women, and what began at their request grew to occupy me personally, and fully. I wished to continue and did, remaining at MCI Framingham for another 7 years, photographing, while also tutoring inmates who had a continuing interest in photography.' Jack Lueders-Booth 

These Polaroid pictures, which were shot alongside a wider black and white series, were intentional. In 1980, having been awarded two consecutive fellowships with the instant camera company, Lueders-Booth had access to infinite film and began making these photographs. Included alongside Lueders-Booth's images, are a series of oral histories, and poems taken from female prisoners at MCI Framingham Prison.

Robert Moeller: Democracy Under Seige

The work consists of very rough, fragmented portraits of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. The portraits are “fictionalized” and aren’t representative of actual people but rather depict the emotional duress of a democracy under siege, along with the craziness that accompanied it.

On January 6th, 2021, after an incendiary rally held by Donald Trump and his Republican Party allies, thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election. As a consequence of the attack, 5 people died, and hundreds (mainly police officers) were injured, some seriously. While these events unfolded, the President sat in the White House and watched on television as his supporters violently beat police, vandalized the Capitol Building and insisted that the Vice President be hanged for treason.

In this abridged version of an ongoing, larger project that focuses on a time where it seemed half of America was at war with science, the rule of law, and an unrelenting pandemic, “A Series of Seditious Portraits with Adjacent Landscapes” focuses on the individuals that stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

These portraits attempt to depict the interior surfaces of an insurrection, the spaces that are/were filled with anger, misinformation, and the unruliness of the mob with its public facing displays of violence. The forms are fragmented, half-drawn and brutal. Crushed charcoal is dragged and pushed to shape faces and limbs. Paint tugs at the figures, pulling at them and forcing them to abruptly reconsider their shape in the world. Extremities are missing or washed away. The figures are venomous cartoon characters, bloated and misshapen yet also fragmented and confused. Some have simply been swept away by lies and maddened by propaganda and social- media-based conspiracy theories. As many will learn, they are also disposable. Long prison sentences for those involved would confirm this fact.

The figures are accompanied by kinetic landscapes that propose that the narrative is ongoing and that information and even reality itself is still up for grabs. The landscapes are footnotes that are not even remotely pastoral but rather ruined battlescapes of destroyed habitats and debris with violence presented as an abstraction. They follow the portraits with snapshots of erratic emotions and conflict, while subtle areas of green space suggest the possibility of new conversations to be had.

When every fact is open to being reinterpreted as a lie, the truth vanishes and is replaced by violence and chaos.

Karen Moss: PORTRAITS: PERSONAL SPACES

Months of forced isolation during the first year of Covid made me acutely aware aware of how my life experiences were reflected in the objects that surrounded me. Things from my travels, photos of family and friends, books and artwork I had acquired by other artists composed my world.

Isolation led to self-portraits. First one of myself in a Frida Kahlo print bathrobe sitting among my plants and one of my husband in his sci-fi library and music room. I enjoyed doing these but I missed being with other people. It then occurred to me that I wanted to do their portraits as well.

Since I was unable to visit them in person, I had to work remotely. I selected people I knew who had home environments that reflected their careers and special interests or studio spaces where they created their work. The project was challenging as I totally depended on them to cooperate with me in providing photos of themselves and their surroundings.

In order to get started, I asked each participant to send me a photo of themselves in their favorite chair or location where they preferred to pose. From that spot I would build out the drawing like a director creating a stage set. I would instruct them as the drawing progressed to send details of their furniture, rugs, books on shelves, paintings, musical instruments, plants and pets. As a result, I came to know them in greater depth as we connected through this process. When Covid cases eased up I was able to visit people in person and included a few portraits of artists in their studios.

Having the opportunity to connect with these amazing individuals has been an enriching experience for me. I feel like this exhibition has become a community on paper composed of poets, artists, gallerists, art historians, musicians, authors and curators. I hope that the participants will enjoy meeting each other in person.

Laura Evans: Small World

Small World is composed of “Thingamajigs” which are what I call my recent and smallest sculptures. This series started in mid-2022 when we were all coming out of the emotional trauma of the Covid-19 epidemic and the upheaval and constant friction of socio-political forces.

Working with unused (but saved!) bits and pieces of my collected “treasures” at a very small scale helped me to get kick-started again in my studio. Even now, when I return to my studio space, I often begin by rearranging, stacking and playing with new combinations of materials. This “noodling around” transition time allows me to let go of the daily time-based, “logical” world and move into the imaginative and creative life of my studio.

I have titled this presentation Small World in homage to childhood innocence and exploratory play, a realm I get to re-visit through my delightful grandchildren who, unknowingly, invite me to share their curiosity and joy, setting off echoes of my children’s and my own cherished childhood experiences.

May 17th - June 22nd, 2024: Ceci & Chandra Méndez-Ortiz, & Julie Bernson

This exhibition brings together the work of two artists who explore landscapes of labor, culture, and identity. 

Chandra’s work often utilizes discarded materials and vibrant color to craft intertwined personal and historical narratives. Through her drawing, painting, and collage, she pays homage to a history of mark-making and the contributions of people of color, particularly Black and Latino communities, to American life. Her work connects often nonlinear histories, igniting memories and reimagining cultural landscapes, literal and figurative.

Ceci repurposes security envelopes, transforming the ‘protective’ patterns designed to shield sensitive information into intricate vistas reflecting landscapes of real and imagined natural world(s). Through collage, her textile-like works evoke animated maps, shaped by issues of privacy, possession, control, and identity. 

Both artists inspire a close-looking of patterns - visual, social, historical, contemporary - as powerful expressions of cultural themes. Their work invites us to reconsider the meanings behind everyday objects and landscapes, and to reflect on broader narratives of identity, history, and personal experience.

I am terrified of a blank surface. I have always been an inveterate collector of things both bought and found. When I began making things in my 20s, collage and assemblage were the most natural way to evade my fear of the blank page and activate my growing collections. Over the years, my work has variously used antique watches and photographs, vintage paper ephemera, old wooden boxes and frames, and fruit stickers and paint chips.

In the past few years, my materials and ideas have become focused around my daily interactions with packaging that comes into the home. Tiny boxes, toothpaste boxes, shipping boxes brilliantly engineered to attract, stack, display, ship, and be thrown away to make room for more. Paper, plastic, net, and cardboard containers that hold our daily food, essential and not-so- essential health products, and our electronics until we use and dispose of them.

As I gather materials, imagine their potential, and deconstruct and reconstruct them, I think about the industrial designers who invented them, the factory workers who manifested them, the carriers who delivered them, and why I need the products in the first place. I continually resist the temptation to make merely aesthetic arrangements, instead allowing the pieces to create a logical rearrangement that references, yet defies, their original purpose.

As equal parts collector, maker, and educator, I am pleased to have the opportunity to share some of my working materials and oFer select cardboard bits for visitors to compose into their own ephemeral collages. I hope you enjoy exploring the materiality, beauty, and intricacies of cardboard design as much as I do!

April 5th - May 11th, 2024: Celebrate Palm Press, Gus Kayafas, Ross Kiah & Mae Whitmore, Kathleen Bitetti

We had moved to our home in Concord in 1975 where I was regularly struck by the tragedy of the demise of the elm tree; reading about the potential devastation of palm trees in Florida I became obsessed with them. Palm Press first came into being when I made an 8 day shooting trip to Miami in 1976, determined to photograph a place peopled with palm trees; at the time I was the founding photography department chair at MassArt and possessed by an obsession to make pictures unlike my earlier work, driven by curiosity with no specific expectation. The Miami work was transformative for me, and I decided I should publish it (a very different prospect than today). My friend Lee Friedlander had Haywire Press, I imagined Palm Press. The desire for more description led to an exploration of larger cameras, frustration with them, and the ultimate development of 6x9cm and 6x12cm handheld cameras that I designed and manufactured (something useful from a couple years at MIT in mechanical engineering).

Then, in 1977 I produced a portfolio of Harold Edgerton’s photographs that became a harbinger of the future. After leaving MassArt, I incorporated Palm Press (1980) and began the photographic atelier and portfolio publishing. It’s been a terrifically interesting obsessive journey - my employees coming from internships, my need to teach continually fulfilled... in nearly 5 decades we’ve produced more than 60 portfolios, collaborated with thousands of artists, museums, galleries and other organizations in meaningful and fruitful ways. Palm Press has been dependent upon the skills, insight and commitment of its dedicated interns and workers. These exhibits explore some of Palm Press’ history, publications, projects, and current staff work.

Gus Kayafas | Arizona Landscapes

As we develop an interest in a place or subject matter, the application of parameters helps to guide our curiosities. Just as a body of water is contained by physical barriers, our attention to detail is concentrated when we opt to confine it, either geographically or conceptually. We are always guided by curiosity, but when we funnel that into a defined subject, it transforms into deep and thorough investigation, revealing ever more about the chosen subject. 

Ross Kiah often follows rivers to guide him when photographing new places, providing structure to the exploration of unfamiliar surroundings. Shown here are images made along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts, the Quinebaug River in Eastern Connecticut, the Mohawk River in New York State, and the historic Charles River in Eastern Massachusetts. 

Mae Whitmore traverses the perimeter and interior of expansive fields in Southern Vermont where they utilize property lines to guide them in their exploration of confines of fragmented land.

Kathleen Bitetti | Gardening Because Murder Is Wrong

For my second solo show at Gallery Kayafas, Gardening- Because Murder is Wrong, I have chosen to exhibit photographs, all taken on my I-Phone, of flora. The title of the exhibition is taken from a photograph included in the show which depicts my back stairs hallway that leads to my pollinator garden. Gardening, whether outdoors or indoors, is for me is a way to de-stress/de-rage and to enjoy the wonders of nature. The title of this show has become a catch phrase for many of my colleagues and close friends. We often share images of the plants we buy or plan to buy with each other. I also have found that when I share this phrase with others, particularly other women, a knowing smile and twinkle in their eyes is shared. And when the phrase is shared with those who are gardeners/are flora caregivers, they often impart a knowing laugh.

This show presents several bodies of work. There are excerpts from my 2023 Neighbors installation which also features new images that were not included in the 2023 version of the work. This piece focuses on images of pollinators in my garden and celebrates neighbors all kinds. I am also debuting two new bodies of work: Flowers for Clara and Welcome to Wonderland. Like my Neighbors installation, both of these bodies of work depict gardens of all sizes and/or flowers. Flowers for Clara highlights what other “gardeners” are growing as well as flowers that are growing on their own. This piece features a selection of flower images that I have texted as morning greetings to a beloved co-worker (I began this during the first days of the COVID pandemic and continue to do so). Much like Neighbors, this project celebrates relationships we have and grow with others. Welcome to Wonderland is also a new ongoing project that I started last summer. My garden, like Neighbors, is one of the key stars of this project. This body of work introduces the front steps of my apartment building as an additional garden that I tend to. This project is in the very beginning stages and I am hoping it will become a much larger installation work in the very near future. The figurines and objects used for this project are sourced mainly from woman-owned small businesses on Etsy.

The books that are on display for visitors to browse through are sourced from the Friends of the South Boston Public Library’s book sales and from More Than Words- a store/organization (and so much more) that is located just around the corner from the gallery. More Than Words supports the “most vulnerable youth in Greater Boston -those youth who are in the foster care system, court involved, homeless, and/or out of school. At More Than Words they earn a paying job, learning job skills while receiving focused support to ensure they persist in school and map plans for their future work, education and life.”

The cut flowers that are part of the exhibition are from the two florists I frequent: The family owned Stapleton Flowers in South Boston and Beacon Hill’s Rouvalis Flowers & Gardens which is located near my day job. The hanging wall planter’s flora is from South Boston’s MicroPlant Studio- a LGBTQ owned store and “the first Latinx owned and managed plant business in Massachusetts and in New England.”

Special thanks must be given to the following: Arlette Kayafas for all her help and support; Alina Balseiro for their help with installation & design of the card for my show; to Jackie Anderson and her team at ColorTek for printing the images for the show; to Marcella Sliney and Christine Coffee Kane, my neighbors who helped to transport my work to the gallery; and a special thank you to my Mom- who has always supported me and my dreams- no matter how outlandish they might be.

February 16th - March 30th, 2024: Yorgos Efthymiadis & Leslie Sills

Whenever I travel back to my country, it feels like I come across a shoebox in the back of my childhood bedroom closet, full of memorabilia I didn't know were there. As soon as I open the box, an inner whisper says “I will remind you of everything.”

There is an instant rush of fond memories of the house I grew up in by the sea and of the maze-like city I moved to when I got older. But mostly, of family and friends: the people that I care for and who have always been there for me since the beginning. The ones I take for granted.

Growing up, so many of us were queer in our seaside town we joked “it must be in the water.” Some have left, many have stayed. Like everyone else, from the proud “mother” of the village who helped most of us come out, to the sentimental ones that are still hanging onto a past that is no longer there, we are struggling in our own way. Loneliness, isolation, decline. Secrets and regrets. But each one a lighthouse keeper. Strong and resilient, fragile and tender, always there to help, guiding each other through life, and reminding me of where I belong.

Leslie Sills | Artists I Have Known

While in art school in the early 1970s, I began to teach art classes to children after school: first in a housing project, then in a neighborhood art center, later in after school programs, and eventually in my studio. While my students were well educated, very few knew of any women artists. I looked for books for them but found none. Because I was also trying to exhibit my work and be a part of the feminist women’s art movement, I knew I needed to change things. While I didn't think of myself as a writer, I created a proposal for a children’s book on women artists. This was the genesis of Inspirations: Stories About Women Artists, my first book on women artists that went on to sell 30,000 copies, win numerous awards, and enter the collections of 4,000 libraries in 14 countries.

Now, as a painter, I have created Artists I Have Known, inspired by my research and sometimes meetings with well-known women artists. Everyone I researched and /or met inspired me to paint a story. Sometimes the story evolved to be humorous or enchanting. Other times they evoked fear or even anger. All were interesting and memorable allowing me to intertwine my life with theirs.

Artists I Have Known is a sampling of this confluence. These are the painting stories I needed to tell right away, but there will be more to come.

I would like to dedicate this exhibit to the memory of one of my most engaged and loving students, Liza Oppenheim of Brookline, who I met when she was five years old, grew up to be an artist, but sadly passed on in her early forties due to a liver disease.

March 1st - 30th, 2024: Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

I first read Primo Levi's "Psychophant" in The New Yorker in 1990.   The psychophant in his short story is a device that produces uncanny portrait-objects.  Ten years later, I made my own uncanny object, a shelf-sculpture that, like his psychophant, invites interaction. I called mine a restless shelf.

This book documents the Restless Shelves as solitary works in my studio and then in situ in my collaborators' domains.  Included is Levi's "Psychophant".  The book's form, tète-bêche (French for head-to-tail), is a manner of bookbinding in which two books share a spine but face opposite directions.  With delight in this synchronicity, I join my work to Levi's. 

January 5th - February 10th, 2024: Kristen Joy Emack, Jack Lueders-Booth, & Cheryle St Onge

What does it mean to exist in the shadow of an innovation economy? To live in one of the oldest intellectual capitals of the world – and see opportunity around every corner – but know that it remains just out of reach?

Cambridge, Massachusetts is now one of the top 25 innovation cities in the country and is known for incubating global tech companies and developing life-saving vaccines. While lower-income and working-class families have always struggled here, this tech-driven gentrification model is particularly invasive. It prioritizes wealth building for the financially secure and doesn't consider or incentivize equity .

This series is my response to watching the demographics of my city neighborhoods change, and seeing familiar and loved community spaces redefined by, and for, the benefit of the wealthy. Instead of investing in opportunity for all, replacement, displacement and cultural harm is the norm, as the existing digital, educational, and access gaps widen.

A saint, in its most simple definition, is an ordinary person who lives a courageous and good life, and because of this, is worthy of imitation.

Book of Saints is my way to venerate those most affected by these gaps – neighbors, family, friends, activists, artists, wordsmiths, musicians, city employees, students, the undocumented, and others, by making a visual archive of their portraits, and their disappearing, everyday landscapes.

They, like my own family, are most impacted by the overlooked consequences of an innovation economy, yet continue to create, hustle, love, learn and thrive in spite of it.

Jack Lueders-Booth | Inherit the Land

What has been produced, over these years of unprecedented access to the garbage dumps, tarpaper shacks, barrios, jails, back alleys, and forbidding canyons of this unknown boarder, is a vast and comprehensive image bank of pictures the likes of which have rarely been seen. Few have had the chance to penetrate the daily lives of their subjects so completely as had Lueders-Booth. His cameras have lived among the people he photographs, he has picked trash with them, baptized their babies, played with their children while their mothers cook meals gleaned from the trash dumps in the hills. – Luis Alberto Urrea. 

These photographs were taken between 1990 and 1998 in the barrio settlements that surround the landfills that are the municipal dumps of Tijuana, Mexico.

Cheryle St Onge | My Mother My Atlas

My Mother My Atlas is a photographic exchange, portraiture, of the energy of life— the give and take of the familial between mother and daughter who lived side by side on the same New Hampshire farm for decades. Our love was mutual and constant. In 2015 my mother developed vascular dementia, and with that began the loss of her emotions and her memory and the relationship of mother and daughter as we had known it for nearly 60 years.

In my mother’s earlier life, she was a painter and then in more recent decades she began to carve birds. A carving would begin with her vast knowledge of birds, her research and then after whittling away at chunks of wood. My mother would eventually offer up an exquisite painted out chickadee or barred owl, life size and life like. I began to photograph her with any camera in reach—an iPhone or an 8x10 view camera as a distraction from watching her fade away, as a counterbalance to conversation with her about death, as a means to record the ephemeral nature of the moment, to find some happiness and light, and to share the images with others we loved.

Because of the dementia, my mother and I no longer had conversations. But we did still have a profound exchange through photography. She must have recalled our history and the process of picture making because she brightened up and was always eager and willing to be photographed. My mother did her best and I did mine. And then in turn, I offered up the pictures away to anyone who would look. It was an excruciating form of emotional currency.

My mother died at home On Oct 3. 2020. Time has been excruciatingly measured by that loss. Days into months to reflect on the passing of time, sans her, measured out within a snowy winter bird count, a summer witnessing the gold finch and wrens eating from the fruit laden shrubs in her backyard, fall afternoons watching migrating birds pause at her bird bathes and feeders. The expanding and the contracting of time with hope and longing for some semblance of her anywhere.