Bloomin’ refers to new growth coming out of a harsh time. It is a celebration and a reminder to all of us to trust in the idea of working together and collaborating. In this exhibition the sum of the parts are greater than the individual components, a metaphor for how we can join together to make progress on shared issues and problems. Optimism, generosity, and empathy are essential considerations for this installation.
This body of work is an expression of some of the challenges faced while living under the restrictions of Covid. I wanted to express the notion of limitations and boundaries in my artistic process as well as in the visual format and the process I chose.
The series called “Breaking Out” employs a cast of characters inspired by my stuffed animal and toy collection. The danger of contagion triggered an open-ended time of people being confined, which led to the format of this series. I experimented with color, texture and various permutations of these shapes crowded and layered into a rectangular format. The rigid boundaries were broken by the characters’ desire to escape a claustrophobic environment.
This group of small collages, as well as another set of individually titled large framed works, all derive from a collection of toys that I found in a thrift shop five years ago. They have continued to provide me with metaphors and source material which keeps evolving. In my last exhibition called “Abandoned” the toys were depicted without color but in detail, whereas now both groups are abstracted to become flat colorful shapes and quirky silhouettes. In the framed work, pop culture figures such as Lisa Simpson, Woody, the cowboy from Toy Story, and Micky Mouse, appear trapped within a dense fragmented world of layered cut paper.
Three wood wall reliefs evolved directly from the black and white drawings. One of them titled “No Elbow Room” echoes the theme of living in close quarters with no room to move. Another one called “Flight” depicts those who escaped from densely packed areas in search of a safe place to hide from contagion. The third work, a vertical piece called “Support System,” is more optimistic, relieving the tensions and anxiety expressed in the other works by showing the interdependent relationships that help people get through challenging times.
I have been smitten with the color black for decades, with its inky depths and visual punch, and now blue, especially shades of cyan are new fascinations. I acknowledge the deep roots in history, music, literature and art of the meanings and importance of color. I am adding my own interpretations here.
My exhibition, Black & Blue is a love song and a lament, a suite of ideas - rendered through intaglio prints, photographs, and sculptures (Dusk, Floating World & Reveries) that are embedded with layers of black flowers, blue atmosphere and intertwining black branches. The images for me, attempt to convey moments - from the translucent allure of dusk to the mysteries of human nature.
Hinting at man’s hand in creating global events in the name of progress and peace, Trinity Elegy (hanging fabric sculpture) takes the form of the first nuclear test (July 16th, 1945, in Socorro, New Mexico) as part of the Manhattan project. Formed of “innocent” materials, Trinity Elegy hovers like a mad chandelier, having created a momentary and blinding light and decades of aftermath.
The Women to Watch (W2W) exhibition series was conceived by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and is designed to increase the visibility of, and critical response to, women artists. W2W was created specifically for the Museums’ 29 U.S. Regional and international affiliated committees. Each exhibition focuses on a specific medium or theme chosen by the National Museum’s curators; for 2024, that theme is New Worlds. When women artists envision a different world, how does that look? This exhibition invites a close exploration of this question.
Lisa Tung, Artistic and Executive Director of the MassArt Art Museum, has nominated five artists whose work fits this year’s theme. One of these artists will be selected by the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ curators to participate in the group show in Washington D.C. in the Spring of 2024.
The Massachusetts State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts gratefully acknowledges Gallery Kayafas for its generous support of Women to Watch.
Learn more about the individual artists below:
Candice Smith Corby
Woomin Kim
Ceci Méndez-Ortiz
Chandra Méndez-Ortiz
Daniela Rivera
Anyone! While this cause is aimed at people with uteruses, we welcome all allies in the fight for reproductive rights.
This is a pop-up event comprised of protest posters tacked to our gallery walls. In response to the overturning of Roe, director Arlette Kayafas wanted to bring our community together to make our voices heard and raise money for Planned Parenthood.
The event will take place at Gallery Kayafas at
450 Harrison Avenue, Suite 37, Boston, MA 02118.
The pop-up has two parts: the poster drop-off on 8/3 from 5:30-7:30pm where we will tack our signs to the gallery walls and First Friday on 8/5 from 5:30-8pm. Come to one or both if you can!
During the pop-up exhibition, we will be open from 11am - 5:30pm each day between 8/3 and 8/13. Come by and say hi!
The fundraiser from August 3rd to the 13th will be a combination of poster sales and donations. All money raised will be donated to Planned Parenthood on behalf of Gallery Kayafas and the artists.
There are no size restrictions or limits on the number of posters you can hang. They can also be free-standing or on the wall. If you wish to sell your poster, all proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood (none to the artist or gallery).
On 8/13 we will give back any remaining posters to their owners (please come by the gallery for pickup).
Please call us at (617) 482-0411 for further questions.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." -Albert Einstein
In 2018 I began experimenting with the photographic process called color separation. I was inspired by the work of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an early practitioner of color photography. As if by magic, color photographs can be created with black and white film. When three negatives are exposed with red, green and blue filters the grayscale exposures function as records of the separated colors within a scene, somewhat similar to using separate screens in printmaking. When the three negatives are assigned to the corresponding color channels in photoshop a full color image appears. Color Channels determine the color of the pixels on the screen. Red pixels correspond to the information contained in the negative that was filtered for red light.
It soon occurred to me that I could record the separated colors across time and space. As the Sun appears to travel through the sky over the course of a day the movement of the sundial’s shadows mark the passage of time. In the morning the face of a rock may be in shadow but upon the arrival of noon it basks in full sunlight. This movement of light across time captured through the color separation process reveals unusual variations in the colors of the world. Sundial with Compass displays a sequence of shadows cast by the object one afternoon. The presence of green in the image, for example, is the absence of red and blue light. This means that green appears in the shadow areas of the red and blue filtered negatives.
In 2020 I was curious if I could apply the experimental nature of the color separation process to the final print. I began pondering how to merge two analog photographic processes with digital inkjet technology to create unique works of color. The process starts by printing the black information on a traditional black and white gelatin silver print. A liquid cyanotype solution is then brushed on the print by hand. A negative of the cyan information is registered over the silver print and exposed to ultraviolet light. Finally, the print is carefully run through an inkjet printer to apply the yellow and magenta ink resulting in a full color image.
For me, wonder is a state of mind somewhere between knowledge and uncertainty. It is the basis of my practice and results in images that are simultaneously familiar yet strange. Each piece begins as a question of visual possibilities and develops in tandem with the natural laws of the world. This process often yields unexpected results measurable only through photographic processes.
Michael Hintlian is an American photographer based in Boston. Educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Winner of Traveling Scholarship from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hintlian’s work has appeared in major U.S. dailies and international periodicals, and has been widely exhibited and collected. His photo-documentary Digging: The Workers of Boston’s Big Dig was published in 2004. Hintlian has served on the faculties of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The New School for Social Research, and Parsons School of Design, New York. He is an adjunct instructor in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Currently he is at work on major projects in the United States and travels extensively.
A series of murders were committed in the 1980s in Windham County, CT, colloquially dubbed ‘The Quiet Corner’. The victims were all young women and girls aged 14-26. The assailant was a white man in his mid-twenties. As a child he was physically and emotionally abused by family members on the farm where he grew up in the seemingly serene and quaint town of Brooklyn.
Recognizing my place within this demographic, I began exploring the origins of masculine violence, especially against women. These images explore cycles of abuse, illusions of power and control, and the ubiquitous threat of danger that exists as a result.
The photographs in “An Immense Motionless Pause” were taken in Lynn on a stretch of road lined with new and used car dealerships. Between the businesses are anonymous parking lots where trucks piled high with crushed cars are left on weekends before departing for their final dismantling and destruction. The terrifying contrast of destroyed and new cars living next to each other inspired me to begin working. In this intermediary place between collision and scrap, normally not displayed, the devastation of the crash is paused, the effects of force and speed are made visible.
Eastbound
Wandering down
Main Street
Dreaming of Dostoyevsky,
and how I might manage to weave this into a story.
I travel by sun soaked spiritual shoppes on the edge of the evening
and find sidewalk memorials where Paola Alba once passed.
Curiously searching for the idea that had placed me here –
Polar Park, and how it might alter the neighborhood, but
I am caught off guard by a man in his garden who offers me a rose
for my sweetheart. I say, “Thank you, but I believe we’re beyond what
a flower may mend.”
How else could I express
I love you on Lunelle Street
-m, 2022
Calling the Birds Home is a photographic exchange 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. A year to reflect on the passing of time, sans her, measured out within a snowy winter, over a family holiday in August, through a fall afternoon watching migrating birds pause at her feeder. The expanding and the contracting of 365 days with hope and longing for some semblance of her anywhere.
Cheryle St. Onge grew up in coastal New England, the daughter of a painter and physicist. Her proximity to the ocean and riding horses as a child shaped her curiosity of nature. She received her M.F.A. from Mass Art and has been on the faculty of Clark University, Maine College of Art and Univ. of New Hampshire. St. Onge is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Critical Mass Exhibition Award, New Hampshire Charitable Arts Grant, Polaroid Artist Support. Her work is widely collected, privately and publicly most notably, the Polaroid Corp, the Univ. of New Mexico Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, Fidelity Corp. and the Guggenheim Foundation.
These photographs are made on the Island of Flores, Azores (Açores). I have been photographing on the island since 2014, and while attempting to bring structure to the larger body of work, I noticed these cows looking back at me.
The dairy industry has a rich history on the island. In 1915 Father José Furtado Mota organized the Sindicato Agrícola da Ilha das Flores (Flores Farming Union), the first on the island and one of the first three in the dairy sector in the whole of Portugal. This year, the the Cooperativa Ocidental (Western Cooperative), the largest cheese factory on the island, closed - and with that, ending a hundred year old agricultural history.
Lee Wormald is a Stoughton Massachusetts based photographer. He received a BFA in Photography from Lesley University College of Art and Design in 2016.
I have always lived near the ocean- so close that I could always see it when I walked out my front door. I don’t think I could ever live far from its shores. In 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was lucky to be able to take daily walks by the Atlantic Ocean. I continue to be lucky to be able to take these walks as the global pandemic continues.
This body of collages, entitled The Sea Hates A Coward, was conceived and created during the pandemic. I started to create them in January 2021 and finished the series in early 2022. The series draws from my mapping projects, Crossings: Massachusetts- Malta (2009-2019), and Crossings: Emerson was Here (Boston). Ralph Waldo Emerson on Dec 25, 1832 boarded the cargo ship Jasper in Boston Harbor and set sail for Europe. He landed in Malta on Feb 2, 1833. This was the trip that transformed Emerson into the “Emerson” the world knows.
Emerson traveled from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Ocean. In the 1800’s there was no guarantee one would survive such a journey at sea. All of the collages either have a photographic image I took in January 2021 of the Atlantic Ocean in Boston or an image of the Mediterranean Ocean that I took in Valletta in February 2019 during my residency in Malta with Valletta Contemporary. The Mediterranean continues to claim the lives of countless migrants trying to make their way to Europe and historically many lives have been lost in the Atlantic Ocean. The photographic images in the collages are different sizes – sometimes it is clear it is an ocean image and in some of the works there is only a small sliver of a photographic image of the sea.
The white frames were all sourced during the pandemic and almost all are from local second hand stores. Each work is made for the specific frame it is in (they are frame-specific works). Each work is also made for a specific foreboding literary quote about the sea/ocean. I am working with 15 quotes in total and the quotes are from such writers as Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, Langston Hughes, and Samuel Beckett. The name of this series is a quote from Eugene O'Neill’s 1931 play, Mourning becomes Electra.
I was also thinking about William Turner’s paintings of sea storms when creating these collages. Those paintings are incredibly beautiful and full of energy, but they often mask the fear and horror of being caught in a storm while at sea on a ship. These works are small scale visual odes to the power and terror of the ocean.
Tynan Byrne (b.1992) is a photographer and book-artist based in Quincy, MA. He grew up on the coast of Maine, a place from which he draws deep inspiration and often references throughout his creative process. Fascinated by the intersection between language and image comprehension, he creates bodies of work investigating the impact that photography and sequence have when compounded with the written word. His series center around intimate and honest aspects of his life as a gay man, often containing links to his childhood, his romantic and interpersonal relationships, influences from various forms of magical realism, and a deep love for the craft, history, and methodologies of photography itself. Most recently, his work has been exhibited in Richmond, Virginia; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Montgomery, Alabama; Dallas, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts, as well as several online galleries and publications. Byrne is a leading member of the Boston-based artist collective, Recently, a group of emerging artists who meet monthly to share work, offer and receive critique, and organize opportunities for public exposure. He currently works as the Instructional Media Technologist within the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Opening Echoes is his first solo exhibition, and consists of four bodies of work that share a search for rationale, comfort, and desire in a recollection of histories which may not exist. The books, installations, and assembled photographs are contemplations on the power of nostalgia, including a longing for things that never happened; the urge to salvage a misspent adolescence; the need for reason amid romantic discordance; and the effort to reclaim ownership over a body and self when they suddenly feel foreign.
This work began over two years ago as the covid warnings and the political climate became increasingly threatening. I took refuge in my beloved studio of 33 years.
At a time of high alert I wanted to comfort and reassure myself as well as others. Playing with abstract shapes and high key color I hoped to show solidarity and connection with my fellow humans, to communicate the thought that we are all in this together.
Art that makes us feel good is as valid as any other.
The work is color driven. I love the infinite color choices, the additive action: putting down a shape, covering it, altering it with another shape, working, reworking, obsessing, making it better (or worse), adding but rarely subtracting until it feels right.
My approach to making work is intuitive and explorative with the goal of creating a piece that speaks with emotion to the viewer.
With this body of work, I look back on and reconfigure the Persian Andaruni (courtyard) as an anthropological architectural living space. Courtyards are common to residencies throughout most of the Islamic world, owing as much to living traditions as climate. Typically, it is a garden that is surrounded by rooms and no window to the public space. Because the courtyard is the traditional private domain of women, I use Andaruni as a thematic element to demonstrate a meaningful continuum that makes these spaces so vital for a nuanced understanding of Islamic domestic culture and its magical beauty. Its location on the axis of the entrance is determined by notions of privacy which are prevalent in Muslim culture. Where the demand for privacy is higher, the movement to Andaruni may follow a complex pact. The architecture symbolizes the Islamic rules and moral burdens that force women to find their way out to these social and political spaces in the contemporary landscape of Iran.
Since 2000, my anti-war series addressed war and its long-term consequences, trauma, and personal identity through storytelling in multidisciplinary art projects including 50 paintings, many drawings, and 15 sculptures. In my Peace March project (submitted), each sculpture is inspired by true stories from interviews with Iranian and Iraqi women. Through the portrayal and utilization of used arm and leg prostheses, I transform trauma into objects of beauty and resilience. This project aims to highlight people’s devastation by the consequences of war in the Middle East, and especially women, whose role has always been undermined in their societies. Using Persian and Arabic traditional aesthetics, material and techniques, the project highlights the continuity of war and conflict in the Middle East.
Reflecting on their collaboration, a conversation between Mags Harries and Thyra Heder. January 2022
Mags: This is not an easy process to collaborate with one’s offspring.
Thyra: I mean, how does one make art with your mother? When your mother is the artist you have most admired throughout your life? We had distinct art practices, conflicting and busy schedules in separate states, and a global pandemic. It felt nearly impossible to start.
M: At first Thyra and I sent these drawings in the mail to each other
T: And that didn't work. They only started working when we were drawing on other sides of the room in the same studio.
M: Yes, but we stuck to the rules! We only revealed the full image when all four parts were completed. We were struck how our lines were so similar and that it was almost as if we were communicating our intentions to each other. These drawings are totally blind yet they have a cohesion and whimsy to them. We questioned whether it was art but continued anyway.
T: The exquisite corpse game was low risk. In fact the idea that a drawing we created would work at all seemed insane, so we were off the hook completely. We relaxed into trying to make ourselves laugh. We weren’t making “Art” we were simply trying to spend time together in the studio until better things emerged. But there was a surprising synchronicity. We were drawn to similar subjects, patterns, and themes–as if we had an overlapping unconscious.
M: We began fusing objects into each other, a hat with two brims to contain a head looking in opposite directions or garments that join two people. These sculptures began as a conceptual way to connect two people but it is only when we tried to wear them that they took on personal resonance.
T: Yes, by documenting ourselves trying them on without a rehearsal, the introduction of chance added richer meaning to what we were doing. We had designed objects to represent our connection but when we wore them it brought that connection to life- Our arms were attached, we couldn’t see, we both wanted to lead, we cradled each other’s heads to get through neck openings and adjusted collars.
M: They became about care, as we each needed to help each other dress, a dance that could be awkward and tender and very funny.
T: It was, at times, hilarious.
With many of our pieces we learned that our synchronicity could not be planned, and we must develop ways of making alongside each other, rather than force a meaning onto what we were making.
M: We both like the Doing.
T: Ha! Well, you do for sure. I had to relent my need to know the outcome.
M: It must have been hard growing up with me jumping around to lots of different things.
T: It was sometimes. I think I needed to know the plan. But you know I'm the same way now as an adult. If you had asked me about our personalities last year, I might have said we weren't very similar, but this process has revealed a lot of parallels.
M: I think it has happened a lot more organically than I thought. There was so much anxiety around it. To actually do this felt like I wouldn’t be comfortable. You never quite quit being a mother.
T: And I couldn’t quit pushing back.
M: I am not sure we reached a deeper understanding.
T: I think through our various experimentations we've both gotten a sense that our connection might exist deeper than understanding.
What Families Talk About
3 years ago, we (Clara & Dedalus) started discussing the possibility of a collaboration. Over the years we had worked together in different ways, but this was to be the first time where we met as equals, rather than one of us contributing to an idea the other had initiated. It took us a few months to settle upon something that felt fruitful and provocative. Inspired by a fantastical family invention (developed in mirthful collaboration with dear friend Pratap Talwar) - The Elder Luge: an amusement park ride on which seniors claim their exit with style and thrill by riding a roller coaster through a ring of fire that cremates them and scatters their ashes over an ocean bay. We saw an overlap in these two stories which both take modern amusements (luxury cruises and roller coasters) and use them as an aesthetic vehicle to laugh through our end-of-life anxieties and imagine an alternate relation to the complexities of mortality.
This amusements-embodying-anxieties idea inspired Clara to propose a gallery exhibit that could include other creative families and when we invited Mags and Thyra to collaborate, they were excited to work in parallel on the project. Early discussions clarified a 4-way interest in the collaboration between generations of a family as the uniting principle. Mags & Thyra felt the Last Supper/Elder Luge idea was a Wainwright project, so we agreed to develop it on our own.
Getting to work in 2020, the two of us met for intensive sessions as often as life allowed. We searched for approaches that could be shaped from both of our creative sensibilities, and had many starts and stops, until we reexamined an old family favorite. At least since Dedalus’ childhood, after dinner drawings of Exquisite Corpses (inspired by the Surrealists) has been a family tradition shared with Bill Wainwright and Dedalus’ sister Caroline (plus any dinner guests). So the two of us started a series of expressive character portraits using the chance based “what came before is a secret until the image is complete” technique. The early portraits from 2020 closely followed the rules while the later portraits used the process for the initial generation of images that could then be re-considered and developed as a complete composition.
Clara brought her exuberant collaged fabric methods and Dedalus introduced paper, charcoal and paint. This range of materials show up in different combinations across the images and introduce questions of unity and division in individual works. We each borrowed methods from the other, enriching the boundaries of possession. Through out the series, we found challenge and inspiration in the juxtapositions of our image making impulses, and are excited to introduce this cast of eccentric characters to the world.
When we turned our efforts to the Elder Luge, the call and response aspect of the Exquisite Corpses was an excellent momentum generator. One of us would create an environment, the other would inhabit it with some counterpoint and then we both could tune it. Over time, we reimagined and reinvented the Elder Luge, which manifests alternately as a roller coaster, a maze or a field of brass horns, with the cremating ring of fire taking the animate form of a dragon embodying its own chance like intentions. In this series, Clara introduced threshold-like fiberglass screen as a background material that expanded the Elder Luge and its existential possibilities.
The process has shown us myriad ways in which we share understandings, and many where we diverge. At times the process has been a struggle, but both of us have found much inspiration and something solid to cultivate together during these crazy times.
Joel Janowtiz’s new paintings and monotypes create a Refuge for the viewer, a safe space where one can feel protected and secure. Refuge for Janowitz has become the greenhouses at Wellesley College. First painted in the 1970s, he returns to the subject with a new series. The brush strokes are freer, the content more abstract, and his extraordinary use of light and dark illustrate day and night. Painted during a long period of isolation, the resulting pieces are not about loneliness but a meditative solitude and hope.
This exhibition presents my fourth series of greenhouse paintings. In the mid 1970s, I worked from life at the Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College. That first series focused on the complex structure of light and space within the greenhouse, resulting in work that felt lively yet quietly contemplative. In the 1980s, I returned to the greenhouse theme, this time at night, to paint the contradictions and mystery of artificial illumination and darkness in its normally sun-filled interior. A third series from the early 2000s dissolved and abstracted the spatial structure, with loosened brushwork and invented color.
Now, 2021 has brought me back to greenhouse imagery again. As we live through the isolation of the pandemic and the growing anxiety of global warming, these paintings suggest a refuge of safety
without ignoring the cacophony and weight
of our current crises. J. Janowitz, 2021.
Janowitz, a Boston-based artist, has exhibited his works since 1973, both in the United States and abroad – totaling 30 solo exhibitions to date. His work is in numerous collections, including Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; University of California, Santa Barbara, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. The recipient of many awards, Janowitz received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2008 & 2016 Artist Fellowship in Painting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a 2013 Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
Anne Lilly’s events in a field is a series of 18 new paintings using both watercolor and acrylic. Painted on panels and without the confinement of the frame, they become sculptural objects. The vibrating lines and patterns of Lilly’s mark-making are hypnotic––coupled with her use of color, this movement creates a three-dimensional quality that alters our perceptions.
e v e n t s i n a f i e l d Over the past year, it struck me that my way of painting has a metaphor in farming, a posthumous bequest from my grandparents perhaps. After drawing a grid on a flat surface, I insert an array of marks into it, then cover the marks with a succession of enlarging and ever-paler washes. They thereby grow in organic and unpredictable ways, retaining the traces of earlier states. The whole field becomes an intricate and incremental record of time’s progress. The paintings that result from this cultivation feel to me like accurate representations of what it means to be alive in the world: events in the subtle continuum constituting everything that exists. By contrast, our every day and pragmatic state of mind posits reality as an infinite population of sharply distinguished, durable things. You are separate from me. This plant is distinct from that animal. The earth is clearly delineated from the sky. But if you imagine watching any of these for a hundred years or so, they change. Take a handful of dirt, for instance. Over a century, it can change into many things. In my own imagination, it changes into Oklahoma. My mother in her childhood, her parents for much of their lives, and all of their kin around and before them, farmed the drought-ridden prairie of southwest Oklahoma. They were sharecroppers, too poor to own the land they worked, instead paying a fee to the landlord. They raised cotton, or tried to, until the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the locust swarms set in. After the 1889 Land Rush, three generations of farming had stripped that magnificent landscape of its buffalo, its virgin prairie tallgrass (“high as the chest of a man on horseback,” according to family lore), and its fertile topsoil. By the 1940s, the farmers had thoroughly impoverished the land, and the land impoverished them in return. My mother and all her family are buried there now, surrendered and assimilating with the clay, which brings us back to my thought-experiment. For me, that clod of earth in my hand blurs into a withered cotton boll and my mother’s blighted life. Further back, both the cotton and my mother lapse into the parched, furrowed fields from which they arose. Back further still, and the earth’s richness is restored with the buffalo that graze and blend with their towering forests of grass. In this vista of intimate and incremental succession, nothing is separate. Each thing flows into the next. The edges are fuzzy at best. anne lilly DECEMBER 2021
Lilly holds a Bachelor of Architecture, graduating magna cum laude from Virginia Tech, and has taught at MIT and Massachusetts College of Art. She received the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Grant Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Blanche E. Colman Grant, visiting artist positions at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Art Institute of Boston. Lilly’s work was included in a landmark 14-month exhibition of kinetic art at the MIT Museum. The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum has collected her work along with the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Middlebury College Museum of Art, and numerous corporate and private collections internationally. In March 2017, she was an invitational lecturer and guest critic at Lebanese American University, in Beirut, Lebanon.
We are excited to be exhibiting Tabitha Vevers’ new series, BATHERS, EXPOSED as we welcome her to the Gallery. Her 18 powerful paintings on vintage wooden film holders are of bathers appropriated from art history. The referenced paintings have been reversed from positive to negative, completely changing the nature of each painting and its colors. They are small and fit discretely into the film holders, which measure up to 8x10”. When the holder is closed, “EXPOSED” is evident. When the slide is raised, the painting is visible. They are delicate, intimate, and specific to the original painting – with the reveal, we become the voyeur.
A nude photograph of Lee Miller in a bathtub was the catalyst for this work. Taken in 1930 by her father, Theodore Miller, it seemed to exemplify the inescapability of the male gaze. We often speak of “taking” or “capturing” an image, implying possession, which is particularly loaded when speaking of nudes. In Bathers, Exposed, I’ve painted bathers appropriated from art history, framing them to be physically contained within vintage wooden film holders, much as photographic negatives would be.
The structure of the film holders—mechanically complex and yet ingeniously simple—became integral to the work. Their thin black slides, often imprinted with the word “EXPOSED,” can be raised or lowered, concealing or exposing the bathers to varying degrees. With this peep show effect, the flesh of the bathers becomes analogous to the film the holders were designed to protect and, the viewer is transformed into voyeur.
Inverting the images from the positive to the negative in black and white or converting color images into their “opposite” or complementary colors seemed logical. In doing so, I was struck by how flesh tones became various shades of blue, reminiscent of Matisse’s Blue Bathers. Perhaps Matisse’s inspiration came from closing his eyes after intense study of his models, seeing them etched on his eyelids in the opposite of warm flesh tones—complementary blue. I considered mounting the paintings upside-down in the film holders, as they would be seen on the ground glass of a view camera, but ultimately decided against it. In a final nod to photography, I have incorporated palladium leaf into most of the paintings, referencing early palladium prints.Tabitha Vevers 2021
(In 2018, Gus and Arlette Kayafas loaned me a gelatin silver print of “Lee Miller in the Bath” by Theodore Miller, after seeing a number of paintings, sculptures and a short film I had done exploring the relationship between Lee Miller and Man Ray.)
Tabitha Vevers is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The George + Helen Segal Foundation, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and painting fellowships to The Ballinglen Arts Foundation (Ireland), Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Germany), Fine Arts Work Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The MacDowell Colony. Vevers was a co-founder of artSTRAND and has served as a member of the curatorial committee of the Provincetown Art Association + Museum, the admissions panel of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Artists’ Advisory Board of Castle Hill Center for the Arts. She received her B.A. from Yale University and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting + Sculpture.
Vevers has exhibited across the country and Europe, having work in numerous public and private collections. Her work is currently on exhibit in On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women as Yale, at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. It was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, Tabitha Vevers: Lover’s Eyes, at The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC in 2019-20 and was featured in a major exhibition entitled GOLD, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria in 2012. She was honored with a mid-career retrospective entitled Narrative Bodies at the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum in 2009.
Caleb Cole’s Collective Feelings is a multidisciplinary exhibition that examines questions of queer identity, intimacy, community, and history. With collaged photographs, installations, sculptures, video, and anthotype portraits, Cole challenges the need to create community based on sameness, and instead insists on the power of collectives that are messy and malleable, uniting because of their shared feelings of difference. Collective Feelings encourages the viewer to resist stagnation by drawing on the past to imagine new and better possible futures.
In Lieu of Flowers, a series of over 80 anthotype portraits, lines three walls of the gallery. Anthotypes are created using photosensitive material from plants. First, an emulsion
is made from crushed flower petals and applied to paper. The coated sheet of paper
is then dried, and a photographic negative is placed on top. Finally, it is exposed
in the sun until only the shadowed parts remain.
Working on this series of ongoing portraits, Cole relied on the availability of roses
in their garden and days of sunshine. Each portrait is an individual from the trans community who was murdered in the United States or Puerto Rico in 2020-2021.
‘In Lieu of Flowers' is an ongoing series of memorial portraits of the trans people murdered in the United States and Puerto Rico due to transphobia, state violence, and neglect.
Part mourning ritual and part photograph, I use the roses from my garden and portraits primarily made by the subjects themselves to create a series of anthotypes, images created using photosensitive material from plants and the sun that cannot be fixed, therefore, will eventually fade. The process is an act of devotion and extended witnessing over the course of days – to weeks-long exposures. The resulting work is an examination of community, loss, time, and impossible effort to extend both the life of their roses and the memory of these stolen lives.
Caleb Cole 2021
Caleb Cole was just named one of the Top 50 finalists for Critical Mass 2021 and selected amongst ten finalists (out of 535 submissions) for The Print Center 96th Annual International Competition Winners. Cole’s portraits series In Lieu of Flowers was their submission.
Cole is also 2015 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, 2013 Hearst 8x10 Biennial Winner, 3-time Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Winner, 2011 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award winner, 2011 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship Finalist, 2009 Artadia Award winner, and a 2009 Photolucida Critical Mass finalist.
Cole exhibits regularly at a variety of national venues and has held solo shows in Boston, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Newport Art Museum, Davis Art Museum, Brown University Art Museum and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.
We are pleased to be exhibiting Sanjé James’ Familiar Interplay in the Alcove Gallery. The photographs, video, and installation represent James’ bedroom and her classroom during the Covid-19 pandemic. During her senior year at Lesley University, she took classes on zoom making most of her relationships virtual. Missing the contact and camaraderie she had for the past three years with classmates and professors, she hung images of her friends in her room to have them with her.
My friends and I are in a transition leaving adolescence and growing into adulthood. Through an unexpected haze of queries. Tangible interactions are obsolete. The act of hugging or walking closely with someone is now hazardous. Personable interactions are absent indefinitely. Therefore, platonic relationships are exclusively online. My childhood bedroom has turned into my stage where I perform my growing desire for the attention of others on social media. My friend’s portraits scattered throughout the room as my adored audience. Through mixed media, collage, and photography, my altered avatars flutter through the cloud for anyone to bear witness as I struggle to grow up into an adult in the unaccompanied space. Conversing with AI intelligence has become my new normal.
My life is encapsulated in my childhood bedroom with my friends watching me from the walls attempting to keep them close when they seem unattainable. Through their glossy non-blinking eyes, they observe me scramble across the internet with glaring blue lights in my eyes to find aspects of them in someone’s account. All that is left is my reflections on the screen embodying remixed versions of myself as entertainment. Amidst Alexa mispronounces my name and reports to me unprompted news. SJ 2021
Sanjé James is a twenty-three-year-old multimedia artist who focuses in photography. She received her BFA in Photography at Lesley Art + Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. James’ work is fueled by topics of race, class, and self-exploration. Through collage and video she layers culture’s influences on her generation and the complexity of being raised in a predominantly white suburb. James challenges her viewers to reflect on the past and the ever-changing way we view the world. This is her first gallery exhibition.
We are pleased to be exhibiting Robert Richfield’s new series, BUDDHA + CHRIST. Richfield has always photographed cemeteries during his travels capturing the ways different cultures remember those who have passed. BUDDHA + CHRIST explores gravesites of each religion – in Vietnam, France, Spain, Portugal, New Mexico, and Guatemala. These deeply saturated color images reveal what remains to remember those who have died – candles, crosses, flowers, photos, flags, political statements, rosaries, incense, and statues – objects that bring comfort and connection to those who mourn.
Religion has never played a significant role in my life. I grew up in a secular Jewish household; my father was an atheist—a practitioner of science and medicine over Jewish law—while my mother, having grown up in the Orthodox community, actively sought to distance herself from her devout upbringing. As adults, my wife and I chose to raise our two daughters the same way. For us, holidays are about family traditions—Christmas tree decorations, pound cake, matzo brei, and Easter egg hunts—rather than religious customs or beliefs. Despite my own secularity, however, I have always been intrigued by the emotional and philosophical importance of religious practices. My father (a pathologist and Army surgeon during World War II) often spoke about the negative repercussions of extreme faith—how religious interpretation has caused more human suffering and death over time than all the pandemics and plagues combined.
I, too, remain acutely aware of the often devastating interplay between religion, politics, and violence—what Comparative Religion scholar James Wellman calls “Belief and Bloodshed.” And yet, as an itinerant photographer, I have also always gravitated toward religious iconography in both cemeteries and shrines. In particular, I am fascinated by the ways different cultures, faiths, and families choose to bury, mourn, honor, and commemorate the dead. Through my work, I also explore the stark contrasts between these visual expressions of faith: the gruesome imagery of Christ’s crucifixion juxtaposed with the serene imagery of Buddha’s enlightened state; or the austerity of Jewish gravesites juxtaposed with the vibrancy of Christian shrines, brimming with flowers, knickknacks, and personal ephemera. Cemeteries and shrines, I believe, are gateways into the lives and cultures they memorialize. RR 2021
Richfield first became interested in photography as a teenager. He studied photography at Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a BFA in Photography in 1969 and MFA 1972. His professors, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, profoundly influenced him. Photographs by Robert Richfield are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Center for Creative Photography, Cincinnati Art Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work is also featured in many private, institutional, and corporate collections including Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase.
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