I am showing 3 pieces along with 9 other artists at Blue Glass Cafe in the John Hancock Tower, Boston. The reception is being held June 22. More info to be announced!

I am showing both new and old work at the Larkin Gallery in Provincetown from June 20 through the first week in July. The opening reception will be on Friday, June 24. Stop by if you're in Provincetown! The address is 405 Commercial St.

THE HUNDREDS SHOW
All Art is $100 // $200 // or $300

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, December 9, 7-10 PM
Show Dates: December 9 - January 14
Gallery Hours: Wed - Fri 4-10 PM, Sat 2-8 PM or by appointment.

Lincoln Arts Project is pleased to announce The Hundreds Show. Featuring over 40 artists in a “everything must go” show. All art falls into of three price points - $100, $200, or $300. A great opportunity to get “cheap” work from some of Boston’s finest established and emerging artists.

FEATURING WORK FROM:

LAP Gallery
289 Moody Street, Waltham MA
http://www.facebook.com/LincolnArtsProject

DIRECTIONS
Parking in rear of building, and on street.

Accessible by:
Commuter Rail (Stops in Porter Sq & North Station)
Buses
70, 70A (Central Sq/Allston/Brighton)
170 (Back Bay, Dudley Sq)
505, 553, 554, 556, 558 (Downtown Boston)

Check MBTA trip planner: http://www.mbta.com/

"Connections," featuring Jess Barnett's piece Earthworm, is hanging at 6 Bridges Gallery, 77 Main St., Maynard, MA, from July 11 through August 12. The artists' reception will be held on the 15th from 7 to 9 p.m.

My piece will be hanging from January 12 through February 23, 2020, at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT! The opening reception will be from 1 to 3 p.m. on January 12. Below is more information about the juried show and reception:

Works will be judged by Richard Michelson, who is the founder of R. Michelson Galleries. MIXMASTER is an exhibition that seeks to discover and recognize the talents of artists working in New England and the Tri-State region. Initiated to support and recognize contemporary art, MIXMASTER provides an opportunity for established and emerging artists to debut their most recent work. The Mattatuck looks forward to highlighting the work of its artist members.

Exhibition: Sunday, January 12–Sunday, February 23, 2020
Reception & Awards: Sunday, January 12, 1:00–3:00 p.m.
Location: TBD

My painting Earthworm will be hanging in the MIXMASTER 2021 show at the Post University location for the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT. Show and reception dates and the venue address are below:

Exhibition: Sunday, January 17–Sunday, February 21, 2021
Reception & Awards: Sunday, January 17, 1:00–3:00 p.m.
Location: Post University Downtown, 140 Bank St, Waterbury, CT 06702

Good news! I have determined it's safe to hold the reception for the "Summer Haze" group art exhibition in person. The event is happening Friday, August 13, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the studio (4 Park St., Suite 216, Concord, NH 03301). Most of the artists will be attending, and all are welcome to join us. The Facebook event is here; I encourage you to RSVP if you're interested in attending. The exhibition will be hanging from August 6, 2021, to September 3, 2021.

Looking forward to hanging the show! Pictured: Drowning in June, Lorna Ritz.

“They drove down Dame Street. The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the Bank Segouin drew up and Jimmy and his friend alighted. A little knot of people collected on the footpath to pay homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that evening in Segouin's hote and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers. They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening." — from Dubliners by James Joyce

“It was a lovely, calm Montana summer evening, a Saturday night after a long weekend of softball. The full moon rose blazing over Mount Sentinel, outlining the maw of the Hellgate Canyon with silver fire. A streak of summer haze like a line of blood lay across the moon's idiot face. The motel's pool lights were reduced to dim glows. The hot tub shimmered around us like a pot of silver. The early August afternoon had been as hot as a fiddler's bitch, and a molten slice of sunset still glowed with a hot golden flame along the jagged edge of the western horizon, but the early evening air had cooled quickly enough to draw vaporous swirls of steam from the heated water. The rising moon seemed to muffle the night for a moment. The only sounds were faint — the hiss of traffic over the Clark Fork bridge, the soft paddles from a gaggle of children in the pool, the romantic whispers of two young blond girls in oversized softball shirts leaning into each other, and the brazen chuckles squirting out of a coven of young men brewing drunken plots of disorder and early sorrow at a poolside table.” — from The Right Madness by James Crumley

What does “summer haze” mean to you?

New England artists (those from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) were invited to submit 1-2 works for consideration for this group exhibition with the theme “Summer Haze.” This group art show was open to 2D artists, 3D artists, and photographers. Types of 2D work accepted: book/paper art, digital art, paintings, drawings, collage, encaustic, fiber art, textiles, mixed media, photography, and print making.

Jess Barnett Art Studio is a small gallery and art studio in downtown Concord, NH, across from the State House, and the only abstract art gallery in Concord.

For more details about this group exhibition, see below.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Contact Email: jesskbarnett@gmail.com

Call Title: Summer Haze, a group exhibition at Jess Barnett Art Studio, 4 Park St., Suite 216, Concord, NH

Exhibition Dates: August 6, 2021, to Friday, September 3, 2021

Reception Date and Time: Friday, August 13, 7-8:30 p.m. Event is free, and all attendees receive a small mystery piece of art.

Eligibility: New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont)

City/State: Concord, New Hampshire

Artist Reception

The reception will occur IN PERSON on Friday, August 13, 2021, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. EST. All artists are invited and strongly encouraged to attend the reception.

The reception for Contentment will be held 5-9 p.m. on Saturday, 3/19, at Winston Gallery. The gallery is within the Kilburn Mill in New Bedford, MA, at 127 W Rodney French Blvd., and is generally open Monday-Friday, 6-9 p.m. The Contentment series features mostly new work, except for one or two older pieces, and the paintings and exhibition description will be posted on my website after 3/31.

If you'd like to RSVP to the reception (which I highly encourage!), you can visit the Facebook event page and RSVP there. Please forward to anyone who might be interested.

The Contentment series was born on New Year’s Eve of 2021, the last evening of the second calendar year of the pandemic. The grief inspiring the series was born four years earlier, however, on May 2, 2017, when I was told of my mother’s sudden passing after her yearslong battle with depression.

Like a car crash or home invasion, grief is a massively traumatic event, affecting everything—sleep; emotional state; love, friendship, and work relationships; ability to communicate; ability to work; and general resilience, among others. For me, after being hit broadsided with my mother’s death, grief was sudden but sticking, spreading like a cancer into every area of my life. I became suicidal, faced a renewed struggle with my own battle against alcoholism and addiction (or substance use disorder [SUD], as it’s become more acceptable to call it), lost jobs, entered and struggled within harmful romantic relationships with people who had their own SUD and mental health challenges, and, finally, checked myself in to the hospital and then a residential facility in New Hampshire.

Contentment is titled as such in a somewhat tongue-in-check manner, as I’ve sought that state of mind since my adolescent years. Due to perseverance, 12-step program participation, and therapy, I am finally more content than I ever was previously. The series title is also slightly ironic given the scribbled chaos contained in some of the series’ paintings, but that’s intentional; dealing with grief feels like constantly pushing against waves in a turbulent sea. I have to let myself feel the emotions and be tossed about by those waves in order to reach any semblance of contentment and serenity.

Besides the themes of grief and a struggle toward serenity, the Contentment series holds within it another theme: the carrying of materials from one piece to the next. Each piece borrows from another at least one element. Materials include the more typical (acrylic paint, pastels, colored pencils) and the less usual (Scrabble tiles, eyeshadow, pokeberry ink). This secondary theme also shows up in the seemingly random sprinkling of English letters throughout the series. While some of the letters, when combined and rearranged, spell out the word contentment, others are in actuality “random” and their incorporation meaningless in the sense that they don’t spell out any series-related words. Their inclusion echoes the loss of my ability to communicate due to my grief, a phenomenon that has fortunately lessened recently due to therapy and an improvement in my self-esteem.

Lastly, the series embodies the mixture of deep melancholy and giddiness that has characterized my mental state since childhood. I hold within myself alternating emotions of profound hope and dark cynicism, although I most often strive for the former to win over the latter. The majority of pieces (including the three eponymous paintings, Contentment I–III) use a pastel palette reminiscent of a less saturated version of Lisa Frank,¹ although a few, including Fabrication and Bottom Line, incorporate a more somber palette. The letter by Rupert Brooke to F.H. Keeling in September 1910² is an exquisite presentation of this emotional fusion, particularly the lines that follow:

What happens is that I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see. In things I am moved in this way especially by some things; but in people by almost all people…. I roam about places and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet…. Half an hour’s roaming about a street or village or railway station shows so much beauty that it’s impossible to be anything but wild with suppressed exhilaration.

I believe that these feelings—just like the gift that Mary Oliver calls grief—are an unmerited gift; without them, I couldn’t have survived my mother’s loss.

¹ Designer, artist, and businesswoman who influenced me beginning in my elementary school years; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Frank and https://shop.lisafrank.com/.

² “Do not leap or turn pale at the word Mysticism (spiritual awakening), I do not mean any religious thing, or any form of belief. It consists in just looking at people and things as themselves—neither as useful nor moral nor ugly nor anything else; but just as being. At least, that’s a philosophical description of it. What happens is that I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see. In things I am moved in this way especially by some things; but in people by almost all people. That is, when the mood is on me. I roam about places and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway carriage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted unclean waistcoat. I know their states of mind are bad. But I’m so much occupied with their being there at all that I don’t have time to think of that. I tell you that a Birmingham gouty Tariff Reform fifth-rate business man is splendid and immortal and desirable. It's the same about the things of ordinary life. Half an hour’s roaming about a street or village or railway station shows so much beauty that it’s impossible to be anything but wild with suppressed exhilaration. And it’s not only beauty and beautiful things, but in a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, or a reach of muddy pavement, or smoke from an engine at night, there’s a sudden significance and importance and inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp of certainty and happiness. It’s not that the wall or the smoke seem important for anything, or suddenly reveal any general statement, or are rationally seen to be good or beautiful in themselves, —only that for you they’re perfect and unique. It’s like being in love with a person, one is extraordinarily excited that the person, exactly as he is, uniquely and splendidly just exists. It’s a feeling, not a belief. Only it’s a feeling that has amazing results. I suppose my occupation is being in love with the universe” (excerpt from letter dated September 20–23, 1910).

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Six of my paintings are hanging and for sale for the next few months at HOME, an interior decor/design store in Acton, MA, located in the Wellness at Villageworks plaza. I had the pleasure of hanging several other pieces there a few years ago, with great success, and I'm thrilled to be back. Amy and her crew are where it's at!

(By the way, please ignore the Feb. 28 date of this exhibition entry; my calendar forced me to include a date, so I picked one ahead of now so that the event would continue to show up.)

Four paintings are hanging and available for purchase for a limited time only at the downtown Concord, NH, location of Pompanoosuc Mills. Visit their website for info on hours and the address.

(By the way, please ignore the Feb. 28 date of this exhibition entry; my calendar forced me to include a date, so I picked one ahead of now so that the event would continue to show up.)