Material Matters: A Members' Exhibition in partnership with the Fitchburg Art Museum
March 17 through April 24, 2022
ArtsWorcester East and West Galleries
This tenth anniversary celebration of our partnership with FAM returns to their extensive collection of African art, the catalyst of the first “call and response” collaboration in 2012. For this exhibition, artists consider the materiality of their own work, the choices behind their medium, and engage with one of the works loaned by FAM. From Material Matters, FAM’s curators select ten works to go on view there, alongside the original loan.
Tracy Spadafora: Left Behind
January 8 through April 23, 2022
The Franklin Square Salon at The Hanover Theatre
Dumpsters and trash bins are ubiquitous yet often go unnoticed. Through her observation of containers behind office buildings, strip malls, construction sites, and restaurants, Spadafora captures signs of corrosion and decay in her latest series. By documenting the layers of wear, she searches for a history within the marks, creating a record of human impact on our environment.
The 18th ArtsWorcester College Show
a juried online exhibition
online only
The Eighteenth Annual College Show is a juried, online exhibition open to undergraduate college students in any major. This year, prize winners were exhibited in-person at ArtsWorcester after the online exhibition went live. The College Show has no theme and is open to students pursuing any degree program. This year's juror was Jessica Roscio, Director and Curator, Danforth Art Museum. Artists selected for exhibition have been announced.
Lisa Barthelson: meld merge mix
January 20 through February 27, 2022
ArtsWorcester East Gallery
A sharp look at sustainability, meld merge mix is an immersive, site-specific installation that scrutinizes consumerism and its persistent byproducts. Through the creation of a new environment using one family's cast-off debris, Lisa Barthelson reimagines the impact of "disposable" objects familiar to our everyday lives and actions.
Dodge and Burn: A Juried Members' Exhibition
January 20 through February 27, 2022
ArtsWorcester West Gallery
Dodging and burning are the ways photographers in the darkroom either lighten or darken different areas of an image, a technique that has since been modernized in digital editing software. The resulting effect is a heightened visual contrast. For this juried exhibition, artists capture elements of contrast--visual or thematic--within a single artwork.
The Little One: a members' exhibition
November 18 through December 18, 2021
ArtsWorcester West Gallery
We’re bringing our biggest exhibition down to scale. For the ninth iteration of ArtsWorcester’s “One,” all artist members are invited to exhibit one small-scale artwork.
Joan Ryan: Myth Busters
November 18 through December 18, 2021
ArtsWorcester East Gallery
Ryan’s paintings and drawings juxtapose visual imagery–historical depictions, cartoons, children’s stories, and political iconography–to explore modern society and concepts of identity. Myth Busters takes the form of a wall installation, creating a dynamic interplay between pictorial elements and expanding the open-ended and disjointed narratives suggested by her imagery. By invoking and critiquing nostalgia for an America that never was, Myth Busters asks us to question our manufactured desire for a fictitious past and the belief system through which we see ourselves.
Chelsea Bradway: Be a Lady They Said
September 19 through December 11, 2021
The Franklin Square Salon at The Hanover Theatre
Bradway’s photographs capture unique images of female empowerment in a challenging age. Women of different ages and races were invited by the artist to bring important personal objects into her studio and to pose for black and white portraits in a stark, simplified environment. The monochromatic, bare setting sets off the joy and confidence radiated by the subjects, and their diversity of strength, power, and presence.
Material Needs 2021
October 7 through November 7, 2021
ArtsWorcester at the Davis Art Gallery
The artists of this year’s Material Needs exhibition received awards ranging from $500 to $1,500 to create new work in Worcester County, art that is new to the region and to the artist’s practice. Projects supported by these anonymous grants this year include welded steel sculpture, a series of paper-based works inspired by Indigenous teachings on humanity’s relationships to the natural world, full-size portraits inspired by 20th century Viennese Expressionism, printed-silk photographs that consider alternate forms of visual perception, and more. Since they were first awarded in 2013, seventy-seven artists have had their work advanced by these grants.
Jennifer Davis Carey: Redemption
October 7 through November 7, 2021
ArtsWorcester East Gallery
At the intersection of art, craft, and history, these portraits in enamel re-interpret nineteenth-century American daguerreotypes depicting unclad, enslaved people. Carey uses a combination of photographic transfer and vitreous enamel to give the figures clothes in vibrant colors, drawn from different fashions and eras. This intervention removes the figures from the distortion of "race science," shifting the images towards portraiture and transforming them into figures of agency, presence, and grace.
Virtually Identical: Works by Worcester Public Schools Visual Arts Faculty
October 7 through November 7, 2021
ArtsWorcester West Gallery
Part of ArtsWorcester’s partnership with the Worcester Public Schools, Virtually Identical showcases the diverse studio practices of the artists who also teach this city’s students.
partnership exhibition
Urban Green and Blue
October 7 through November 21, 2021
Preservation Worcester's Park View Room
Urban Green and Blue is a juried exhibition of paintings featuring Worcester’s urban green and blue spaces: the city’s public parks, wildlife sanctuaries, nature reserves, publicly accessible reservoirs, lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds. This exhibition is a collaboration between Preservation Worcester and ArtsWorcester, funded in part by the Worcester Arts Council.
Now in Technicolor: A Juried Members' Exhibition
August 19 through September 19, 2021
Thirty-four ArtsWorcester artist members turn up the heat with bold hues for Now in Technicolor. Juried by: Joshua Croke, Founder, Action By Design; Stephen DiRado, artist and professor; Birgit Straehle, Associate Painting Conservator, Worcester Art Museum and Creative Consultant, Sprinkler Factory Art Gallery.
Madge Evers: The New Herbarium
August 19 through September 19, 2021
Mushrooms generate tiny aerosolized spores to reproduce. Working with fungi cultivated for this purpose, Evers catches the spores and their pigment as they land on paper, filtering them with other plant materials and manipulating their powdery traces. In this series, Evers uses foraged plants to shape the light-colored spores on black paper. Inspired by early modern herbaria, in which plants were preserved for study, these works conjure a natural world both strange and deeply familiar.
The Nineteenth ArtsWorcester Biennial
June 3 through August 1, 2021
Since 1985, the ArtsWorcester Biennial has exhibited a range of the region’s best visual art. From over 470 submissions, juror Beth C. McLaughlin, Artistic Director and Chief Curator at Fuller Craft Museum, selected 63 works for inclusion in this celebrated exhibition.
They Travel Together: Leslie Schomp, Mary Kenny, & Andrea Olmstead
April 1 through June 13, 2021
They Travel Together is a three-artist exhibition–Mary Kenny, Andrea Scofield Olmstead, and Leslie Schomp–whose drawings and sculpture seek to shorten the imaginary and experiential distance between humans and animals.
Inside Voices: A Members' Exhibition in partnership with the Fitchburg Art Museum
March 18 through May 2, 2021
Our ninth "Call and Response" collaboration with the Fitchburg Art Museum, an important center for contemporary art in New England. Inside Voices prompts artists to consider a wide range of interiors, including domestic environments, psychological subjectivity, bodies, architecture, and sculptural containment. These spaces reveal symbolic weight, mental and emotional states, fantasy worlds, gender roles, and personal memories.
The 17th Annual College Show
Winter 2021 | online only
One of our favorite annual exhibitions returns, this time with a virtual twist. The Seventeenth Annual College Show is a juried, online exhibition open to Worcester-area college students in any major. From over one hundred and eighty submissions, Aprile Gallant (Smith College Museum of Art) selected 51 works by 44 artists in traditional and new media, including film, printmaking, photography, paint, and digital art.
PRESENT TENSE PRIZE WINNER
Rebecca McGee Tuck: Along the Wrack Line
December 3, 2020 through February 14, 2021
Rebecca McGee Tuck weaves a sculptural narrative using sea debris she collects along the Massachusetts shoreline. The Present Tense Prize, awarding a solo exhibition and a $1,000 award, recognizes an artist whose work exemplifies new practices, artistic risk-taking, and excellence in execution. We thank the individuals who generously support the Present Tense Prize.
State of Being: Works by Worcester Public Schools Visual Arts Faculty
December 3, 2020 through February 14, 2021
Part of ArtsWorcester’s partnership with the Worcester Public Schools, State of Being showcases the diverse studio practices of the artists who also teach this city’s students.
Material Needs 2020
Eugenie Lewalski Berg | José Criollo | Christine Croteau | Rebecca Duffy | Maureen Hebert | Clifton Hunt | Amanda Kidd Schall | Donalyn Schofield | Joanne Stowell
Fall 2020 | online only
Material Needs Grants fund the cost of the supplies required to make new artwork. Awards range from $500 to $1,500, and are supported by a single anonymous donor. This year's exhibition showcases new work created in Worcester County by the 2019-2020 cohort of Material Needs Grant recipients.
The Eighth Annual One: A Members’ Exhibition
September 10 through November 8, 2020
The largest and most varied exhibition ArtsWorcester produces each year, the "One" represents the work that each artist most wishes to show, regardless of medium or theme. Over 160 works by our artist members filled the galleries. See every piece--as well as artist talks from three prize winners--here.
Gravity/Levity: A Juried Members’ Exhibition
July 9 through August 16, 2020
Gravity/Levity, a juried exhibition of three-dimensional artwork, is the first all-sculpture show at ArtsWorcester. Lisa Crossman, Curator of American Art and Arts of the Americas at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, selected twenty-nine sculptures by twenty-five artists that capture approaches to weight and weightlessness.
Gloria Goguen: Botanical Dreams
Spring/Summer 2020
Botanical Dreams is a solo exhibition of fourteen drawings by Gloria Goguen. Her work in deeply-layered colored pencil marries traditional botanical subjects with personal perspectives. This work draws inspiration from traditional French, German, and Flemish botanical artists such as Pierre-Joseph Redoute, Gerard van Spaendonck, and Johann Christoph Dietzch, in a contemporary medium and format.
In Transition: A Members’ Exhibition in partnership with the Fitchburg Art Museum
Spring/Summer 2020
In this members’ exhibition--the eighth “Call and Response” partnership with the Fitchburg Art Museum--over one hundred and twenty artists show a single work in response to this year’s theme of transition. This exhibition begins with a loan of ten works on the year’s theme from FAM’s permanent collection, on view at ArtsWorcester to illustrate approaches to the theme, and to provide inspiration. From the resulting members’ exhibition, Marjorie Rawle, Terrana Curatorial Fellow at FAM, selected ten works to go on view at FAM alongside the original loan.