ALight on MARS : a nocturnal exhibition
OPEN WEEKENDS after Sunset, 6:30-8:30 pm, advance ticketed entry required
RESERVATIONS + PROOF of VACCINATION or NEGATIVE STATUS REQUIRED
LINK TO SAFETY GUIDELINES
N.B. Space is limited due to parking restrictions and the coronavirus. Although there is no charge to attend, if you do not come, you will be “costing” someone else an opportunity to attend the exhibition! Please register only if you are definitely planning to come. Many thanks for your courtesy!!
ARTIST BIOS
Christopher Abrams
I make objects that focus on the tension between the natural and built (or engineered) environments. As humankind cultivates its understanding and attempts to control the natural world, nature responds, often dramatically, to our hubris, evading our grasp and offering further evidence that there is always more we don't know.
Adria Arch
Adria Arch is a sculptor whose work has been exhibited around the eastern United States, including solo exhibitions at Danforth Art in Framingham, MA, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA, and the Hunt Gallery at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. Arch has also completed site specific murals at Lesley University's Porter Square building in Cambridge, MA, Stonehill College, and Danforth Art in Framingham, MA. She has been awarded residencies across the world, from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, India. Arch’s work is also included in many private, public, and corporate collections including the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fidelity Corporation, and the Federal Bank of Boston. Later this fall, Arch’s work will be shown at the Fitchburg Art Museum.
Jodi Colella
With a weaver’s sensitivity to the balance of tradition and innovation, Jodi Colella uses needlework to give renewed power to craft traditions often glossed as feminine. Colella, a member of Boston Sculptors Gallery and the recipient of a 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship Award for Sculpture, exhibits and teaches internationally. Colella’s work is exhibited at The Textile Museum in Washington D.C., Minneapolis’ Textile Center, Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA, World of Threads in Toronto, and Da Wang Culture Highland in Shenzhen, China, among other museums. She has also collaborated on several public art projects. Recently, Colella was interviewed for WGBH’s Open Studio with Jared Bowen, and her work has also featured in The Boston Globe, Surface Design Journal, The Woven Tale Press, Vasari 21, Artistry in Fiber, POSIT and online at TextileArtist.org.
Murray Dewart
Murray “Mac” Dewart is an internationally recognized sculptor with works held in thirty five museums and public collections around the world. He takes inspiration from Ernst Berlach, the German sculptor who famously defined his work as “an interval of longing between a where-from and a where-to.”
Chris Frost
Chris Frost is a sculptor living and working in Somerville, MA. He began his education at Bates College in Lewiston, ME and from Maine proceeded to Parsons School of Design, in Paris. Frost continued his education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he received a masters degree. Frost’s work has been exhibited and collected in museums and art institutions throughout the New England area. His indoor and outdoor sculpture is part of many private and corporate collections. Visit www.christopherfrost.org for more information on and documentation of Frost’s varying body of work.
Mags Harries + Lajos Heder
Mags Harries and Lajos Héder are integral parts of the MARS community who, as a duo,have collaborated on over thirty major public art projects nationally and internationally. Coming from the different yet related disciplines of Art and Architecture, the partnership strives always to enhance the use of public spaces for communities, designing works that imbue space with strong aesthetic value and metaphorical significance alike. Many of the duo’s projects engage in environmental issues through land use, water components, and the harnessing of solar energy. Harries and Héder have been recognized for many local and national awards. For all of their major work, please see the projects archive at www.harriesheder.com.
Michelle Lougee
Michelle Lougee, a Cambridge resident and instructor at Lesley University’s School of Art and Design, meticulously crafts otherworldly sculpture focusing on discarded plastic remnants of the human presence in nature, equally evocative in large installations or intimate groupings. Lougee recently completed a year-long Public Art Residency with the town of Arlington, MA, and in 2019, she was Artist in Residence at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston. Her work has been exhibited in the Boston area at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Christian Science Plaza, and The Heritage Museum and Gardens. Lougee has also shown internationally in Germany, Peru and Canada.The artist maintains a studio at Vernon Street Studios in Somerville.
Claudia Olds Goldie
Claudia Olds Goldie is a 2017 Mass Cultural Council finalist and member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Goldie received her BFA from Boston University and has since taught sculpture and ceramic for over three decades at Dexter Southfield School in Brookline. Currently, Goldie also works as an instructor within Harvard University’s ceramics program. She has received a Kiln God Residency from Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, ME, a residency fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and a nomination for a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas fellowship. Goldie’s work has been exhibited nationally in shows such as the NCECA Biennial in Houston, SOFA Chicago, and numerous State of Clay National Juried exhibitions. In addition to her pedagogical work in Brookline and Cambridge, Goldie has also taught figurative ceramic workshops across the country and in Mexico. Her work has been published in 500 Figures in Clay, 500 Figures in Clay Vol. 2, by Nan Smith, Sculpting Clay and Low Fire: Other Ways to Work in Clay, both by Leon Nigrosh, and in Ceramics Monthly, Clay Times, and American Craft magazines.
Ellen Schön
Ellen Schön is an Adjunct Professor in Fine Arts and Ceramics Studio Supervisor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she has taught since 2002. Schön received a BA from Marlboro College in Ceramics and Perceptual Psychology, as well as an MFA in Ceramics from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry. She has exhibited in numerous shows in the United States and has also organized and co-curated interdisciplinary, thematic group exhibitions in non-profit venues in the Boston area and abroad. Schön’s interest in international art has led to her participation in symposia and residencies in Finland, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Turkey, Israel, Germany, and Malaysia. Accordingly, she has been a member of the European Artists Association since 2011. Schön’s work is in the permanent collections of the MFA and the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA. She is a recipient of The Artist Foundation Fellowship from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, was an Artist Fellow at the St. Botolph Club, and is currently a member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery.
Nancy Selvage
Nancy Selvage is a sculptor living in the Boston area. Her artwork has been recognized and supported by numerous exhibitions, public art commissions, reviews, residencies, and awards - including two Artist Fellowships and New Works Commissions from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a National Endowment for the Arts Projects grant, and a New England Foundation for the Arts Public Art grant. Selvage has also produced public art projects for myriad institutions local and global, including Google, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, the City of Lowell, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Bristol Community College, Keene State College, the City of Cambridge, the National Park Service’s Grand Canyon Visitor Center, and for the North Carolina Zoo. The artist is also a member of Boston Sculptors Gallery and credits the group for its role in the facilitation of opportunities for exploration, growth and engagement.
Jessica Strauss
A native of New Hampshire, Jessica Straus currently lives in the Boston area. Straus works primarily in wood and mixed media, and has most recently been creating site-specific, large scale installations, filled with Inventiveness, humor and narrative. Straus has exhibited her work at numerous venues including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Danforth Art Museum, the Duxbury Art Complex Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Brattleboro Museum, the Ohio Sculpture Center, the Qorikancha Museum of Peru, and ArtTerritoire in Normandy, France. Her work is in the collections of DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Art Complex Museum, the Davistown Museum, and numerous private and corporate collections.
Marilu Swett
Marilu Swett, a greater Boston native and member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery, lives and works in Jamaica Plain, MA. Swett is an Associate Professor of Art at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, where she has taught since 2004. She has also offered her expertise to the Milton Public Schools and various local universities in her time as an educator. Swett’s artwork has been exhibited throughout the US in venues including The Peabody Essex Museum, Cleveland’s Sculpture Center, Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art, and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts in Racine, WI. Outdoors, Swett’s work has been exhibited at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, the Chesterwood National Historic Site at Stockbridge, MA, the Wentworth Coolidge Mansion Historic Site in Portsmouth, NH, and the Christian Science Center Plaza in Boston. She has work in several corporate collections and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a First Light award for the Town of Brookline, a residency for iron casting at the Maryhill Art Museum in Washington state, a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, a Somerville Arts Council general support grant, and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Studio Exchange grant.
Kenson Truong
Kenson Truong is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Boston, MA. He received his BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts, and his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where he also spent time as a postgraduate teaching fellow.Truong is a member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery as well as Newton’s Nearby Gallery. Truong’s drawings, sculptures, and text intermingle and culminate in light-based installations which explore the artist’s intersectional identity as a gay Asian-American. His work reflects on his own struggle with trying to reconcile issues of race and sexuality while attempting to find belonging within gay male culture.
Leslie Wilcox
Leslie Wilcox studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on scholarship after graduating from Kent State University in Ohio. A founding member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery, her work is shown annually through both solo and group exhibitions. Wilcox’s recent work has also been shown at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, MA, Berlin’s Kunstverein Tiergarten, the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston University, the Fuller Museum in Brockton, MA, and currently on the grounds of Jason Russell House and Museum in Arlington, MA. Wilcox’s work is included in the collections of many major institutions such as Fidelity Investments, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Decordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Boston Public Library, the MFA, and Brandeis and Harvard Universities. Reviews of her work appear often in regional and national periodicals.
Christina Zwart
Christina Zwart creates work that challenges people's perceptions of reality. What appears to be one thing from afar is, upon closer inspection, often something else entirely. She takes items that have been constructed for specific purposes and transforms them into something that has nothing to do with their intended use. She works with materials as simple and easily-recognizable as flour and snow, or harder-to-find items like horseshoe crabs and plaster teeth models, giving solitary objects new life as she multiples them to yield an overall piece. Some of her work is simply abstract, but much of it serves as social and political commentary, blurring the lines between organic and manufactured, humorous and disturbing.