The Twelfth Annual One

July 11 through August 18

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

An annual artist favorite. All ArtsWorcester members were invited to bring us the single piece they want to exhibit most, regardless of medium or theme. Artist and educator Claudio Eshun was our prize juror for this exhibition.

Sophie Pearson: Beneath the Memory

May 9 through June 16, 2024

ArtsWorcester East Gallery

Sophie Pearson keeps her past and present in dialogue, telling a powerful story of childhood trauma and recovery from it. She uses two different techniques that carry symbolic meaning: child-like scribbles for young innocence, and realistic figurative work to represent adult comprehension. With anger rendered in red and sadness in blue, these oil and pastel paintings explore a child’s experience in an abusive home. In some paintings, the adult is erased, their image removed along with their power. What remains are Pearson’s associated emotions, continued into her adult relationships.

View Finder: A Juried Exhibition

May 9 through June 16, 2024

Featuring 46 works by 43 artists, View Finder presents traditional or reimagined landscapes and streetscapes depicting locations in Worcester County. Artworks showcase scenes of majestic natural beauty, geometric cityscapes, and snapshots of the world around us through a wide range of media and styles. Artworks for View Finder were selected by Sarah Montross, Chief Curator, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum/The Trustees.

Feast

in collaboration with the Fitchburg Art Museum

March 14 through April 21, 2024

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

For our twelfth Call and Response exhibition in collaboration with FAM, artist members respond to the theme of food, and to artworks on loan from the Museum's permanent collection. FAM’s curatorial staff selects ten works from Feast by ArtsWorcester artist members to be exhibited at the Museum with the loaned works.

The 20th Annual College Show

February 15 through April 21, 2024

ArtsWorcester at the Davis Art Gallery

Now in its twentieth year, the annual ArtsWorcester College Show recognizes the next generation of regional artists. This competitive exhibition draws on the strengths of student artists in Worcester and beyond. This year's College Show was juried by Chloe Zaug, Associate Director of the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM).

Emmanuel Opoku: We Ourselves are Shared

January 18 - February 25, 2024

ArtsWorcester West Gallery

An immigrant from Ghana, Opoku reflects on his diasporic experience with a twist of surrealist humor and occasional sarcasm. With a strong cultural belief that all broken objects have value and potential, Opoku’s symbolic portraiture and sculptural assemblages take shape from repurposed and transformed objects of various utility. While modernist influences like Duchamp and Brancusi are evident, Opoku examines his own cultural assimilation, while raising questions of how we value, commodify, and consume the things of everyday life, wherever it is lived.

Jeanette Staley: Predators and Pray

January 18 - February 25, 2024

ArtsWorcester Window Gallery

Staley’s series of collaged paintings reinterprets the histories of early modern artists and illustrators, including J. J.Audubon and Maria Sibylla Merian, who wanted to document the natural world. The artist juxtaposes their depictions of animals with religious and political texts, folk tales, and maps of U.S. regions where industry is interlocked with economic inequality and environmental destruction. These overlays reflect the complicated environmental legacy engendered and gendered by American industrialization in a visual language spanning three centuries.

Artist Shoeboxes

Casey Fisher: Anthropocentric Reality: Our Constructed Wasteland
Matthew Kamholtz: On Screen
Luca Nova Webb: Fragmented Reflections: Birth of a Supernova

January 18 - February 25, 2024

ArtsWorcester East Gallery

Shoeboxes are opportunities for artists to produce compact installations or highlight a limited number of artworks. This year, three artists will carve out spaces in the East Gallery to exhibit collagraphs, photography, and mixed media assemblage pieces.

Kara Patrowicz: Parallel Play

November 16 – December 17, 2023

ArtsWorcester East Gallery

Parallel play is the developmental stage in which toddlers play side-by-side without interacting with each other. In Patrowicz's richly textured fiber works, the ancient techniques of wool felting and weaving are used to represent contemporary motherhood and the isolation of parenting small children during a pandemic.

Page Turner: A Juried Exhibition

November 16 through December 17, 2023

ArtsWorcester at the Davis Art Gallery

All artwork tells a story, and we want to hear yours. This juried exhibition features artist's books and works that connect to the acts of reading, writing, and storytelling.

Scaled Down: A Members' Exhibition

November 16 through December 17, 2023

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

To round out the year, all artist members were invited to participate in this non-juried exhibition of small work with no theme and no media limitations. Featuring works by 124 artist members that push the limits of a small scale.

Finders & Keepers

November 16 through December 17, 2023

Central Corridor

Curated by Aaron Brodeur, this collection of work surveys a group of artists that thoughtfully use materials in unconventional ways. Artists explore themes of post-consumerism, memory, environmental concerns, and reclamation in our first member-curated exhibition.

Material Needs 2023

Brad Chapman Bleau, Carrie Crane, Kate Egnaczak, Amanda Gibson, Tia Kinsman, Nathan Manna, and Lucy Marcigliano

September 14 – October 29, 2023

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

Material Needs Grants support the expenses of supplies and materials for the creation of new art in Worcester County. This year’s Material Needs exhibition features intricate instruments to measure the immeasurable, life-sized puppets that put us in touch with endangered species, large-scale collages examining queer theory and sexual liberation, and more. Since they were first awarded ten years ago, eighty-nine artists have had their work advanced by these grants.

Jongeun Gina Lee: Noah’s Ark

July 6 through September 24, 2023

ArtsWorcester at the Davis Art Gallery

The architectural abstractions of Jongeun Gina Lee’s hand-built ceramic sculptures reveal her experiences with immigration and fertility treatments, both involving isolation, disappointment, ongoing hope, and a hoped-for arrival.

The Biblical story of Noah's ark--his preparation for a journey, and his arduous task of building a vessel to ensure life--resonates with Lee. Her meditative process of deconstructing and reassembling pieces of clay results in works that reflect organic forms often found in nature, and provide a sense of reconciliation and completion.

The Eleventh Annual One: A Members' Exhibition

July 27 through August 27, 2023

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

The 11th Annual One is an annual artist favorite. All artist members were invited to exhibit the one artwork they most want to exhibit, regardless of medium or theme. $500 in prizes were awarded by Stacey Parker, Gallery Director of The Mary Cosgrove Dolphin Gallery and Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, Worcester State University.

The Twentieth ArtsWorcester Biennial

May 4 through July 9, 2023

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

The year 2023 marks the twentieth ArtsWorcester Biennial, an exhibition that has included a range of the region’s best visual art since 1985. This year’s Biennial will be juried by Conor Moynihan, Assistant Curator, Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the RISD Museum.

Impact: A Members' Exhibition in partnership with the Fitchburg Art Museum

February 25 through April 8, 2023

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

The natural world has always inspired artists with its beauty, power, and the raw materials it offers for artmaking. Today, in the face of our climate crisis, many artists bear witness to and represent environmental changes in their work–even as others draw from the beautiful ways humans have shaped and utilized the earth. For this eleventh annual “call and response” exhibition, artist members are asked to consider humanity’s complex relationship with our environment through artworks on loan from the Fitchburg Art Museum.

The Nineteenth ArtsWorcester College Show

February 9 through April 8, 2023

ArtsWorcester at the Davis Art Gallery

After two years of virtual exhibitions, the College Show returns in-person! The Nineteenth Annual College Show is a juried exhibition open to all undergraduate college students studying or residing in Massachusetts, in any major. This year’s juror is Ellie Krakow, Assistant Professor of Art and Mazmanian Gallery Director, Framingham State University.

Strut: A Members' Exhibition

January 13 through February 12, 2023

ArtsWorcester Main Galleries

Wearable or frameable, these works are all about fashion, textiles and styles Prizes were awarded by theo tyson, Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Strut also showcased five new pieces by Worcester designers acquired by the Worcester Historical Museum for its Costume Collection.

Leslie Schomp: With You Here Between

November 3 through December 18, 2022

Window Gallery

Leslie Schomp’s stitched hair drawings are both objects of devotion and drawn illusions. Hair has a history of being a medium of commemoration and love. By pairing self portraits with images from nature, the artist emphasizes our place in the natural world through this humble medium. Her drawings serve as a love letter to all that nature is: heartbreaking, terrifying, awe-inspiring, nostalgic, and magical.

Catherine Smith: Dread Running

November 10 through December 18, 2022

East Gallery

Smith’s series investigates humanity’s relationship to the animal world, establishes a place to mourn and pay tribute to countless unnamed shelter dogs, and asks the viewer to acknowledge painful truths about our society. In a complicated act of grieving and honoring their lives, she combined the discarded cremains of dogs with ceramic glaze to create a set of relief sculptures. When compiled into a stop-motion video, these reliefs evoke the past lives of these creatures and the eternity in which they now run.

Go Big: A Juried Members' Exhibition

November 3 through December 18, 2022

West Gallery

Large-scale works induce drama and can provoke oversized reactions. For this competitive exhibition juried by Nancy Burns, Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at Worcester Art Museum, we invited members to think big.

Outside of Class: Works by Worcester Public Schools Visual Arts Faculty

November 3 through December 18, 2022

ArtsWorcester at the Davis Art Gallery

In collaboration with the Worcester Public Schools, Outside of Class highlights the studio work of the WPS visual arts faculty, the artists teaching this city's K-12 students. Artists constantly explore their environments and personal histories in the creation of new art. This wide-ranging exhibition showcases that process for these unique artists, and their diverse studio practices.

partnership exhibition

Fathom: The Art of Kat O'Connor

July 16 – October 16, 2022

Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street

Worcester artist Kat O’Connor, explores the world above and below the surface of swimming pools from the unusual perspective of someone underwater. Her otherworldly paintings feature figures gently distorted by ripples, bubbles, and reflections, and immerse the viewer in a dreamlike environment. O'Connor  was awarded the top honor of the the Sally R. Bishop Prize at the ArtsWorcester Biennial in 2021, which rewards the artist with a solo show at the Worcester Art Museum. Click here for a price list of artworks.

Material Needs 2022

September 8 through October 9, 2022

West 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 extruded ceramic sculptures, mixed media portraits of notable historical women of Worcester, and enamel works inspired by African traditions. Since they were first awarded in 2013, eighty-nine artists have had their work advanced by these grants.

Project Spaces

Evan Charney, Woodcut and Wood Engraving: Craft and Art

John Slepian, Small Worlds

Amber Rose Tortorelli, Mani(a)c

Jill Watts, From my Yard

Mark Zieff, Ghosts of Seasons Past

September 8 through October 9, 2022

East Gallery

The Tenth Annual One: A Members' Exhibition

July 14 through August 21, 2022

East and West Galleries

An annual favorite turns ten! For the Tenth Annual One, all ArtsWorcester members were invited to exhibit one artwork they want to exhibit most, regardless of medium or theme. Prizes were awarded by Karl Cole, Art Historian and Curator of Images of Davis Publications and Co-Curator of the Davis Art Gallery.

Tom Grady: 100 Views of Worcester

April 30 through August 27, 2022

Multiple locations

This ambitious series of small oil paintings depicts with pride and love Worcester’s everyday vistas, buildings, and streetscapes. As a 300th anniversary gift to the City, the entire series goes on view during the last half of May in additional downtown venues, including the Printers Building, the Jean McDonough Arts Center, and the YWCA.