Press Release: Coming Home

Coming Home
November 2, 2022 – December 18, 2022
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, 460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA

Featuring: Hillary Babick, Brendan John Carroll, Sunny Moxin Chen, Alexandra Chiou, Hilary Doyle, Ana Maria Farina, Andrew Fish, Max Heiges, David Heo, Lavaughan Jenkins, James Johnson, Abbi Kenny, DaNice D. Marshall, Meghan Murray, Aliyah Salmon, Elspeth Schulze, Ezara Spangl, Leigh Suggs, Gus Williams, and Helena Wurzel.

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Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Coming Home, a group exhibition curated to showcase a wide range of interpretations of home: home as space with close friends; a sacred place alone outdoors; holidays with a house filled with family shouting; a simple evening dinner with a partner; an unhappy sentiment; returning to a home country that is an ocean away; a familiar smell; anger & frustration; new beginnings, and so much more. The artists featured represent many different media, disciplines, and ideas, and come together to form a full picture of the rich variety in contemporary art today.

Hillary Babick
Sunday Night in Soho (Tom), 2022
Oil on canvas
24 x 18 in.

Hillary Babick (b.1989, Dallas, Texas) is a Boston based painter. She received her BFA from Boston University in 2011 and the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston recognized her as a 2021 finalist for the Walter Feldman Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her oil and gouache paintings of friends, family, and strangers from instagram explore private vs. public personas and daily life. She is interested in how we behave when no one is watching and when we know we are being watched. Taking inspiration from genre painting and social media, she explores moments that deserve closer consideration and presses pause on rapid media consumption to examine our motivations and beauty in the everyday. Her work is held in private collections across the country.

Brendan John Carroll earned a Bachelor’s degree at Providence College, where he studied psychology and art. After graduation, he moved to New York City to develop as a painter while also working at Columbia University’s Division of Neuroscience. He received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts in 2011. Carroll’s paintings have been shown in galleries in Baltimore, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee, and Sweden. His art is included in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Carroll lives and works in Guilford, Connecticut and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Sunny Moxin Chen (b.1996, Moscow) is a multi-disciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Boston, MA. She received her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2022 and a BFA in Painting & Studio for Interrelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She has shown her work recently at the Distillery Gallery in Boston and the Erie Museum in PA, among other galleries in the US. She was selected for the national curated show at Main Street Arts (Clifton Springs, NY, 2022) and won the Best in Show Award.

Alexandra Chiou
Your Favorite View, 2022
Ink and cut paper
21 x 15 in.
Framed: 29.5 x 23.25 x 2.25 in.

Alexandra Chiou (b. Richmond, VA) is a Visual Artist based in Cambridge, MA who draws on nature and memory to create layered works on paper that celebrate the life of her late father. After his recent passing, she looked to positivity and gratitude to cope and find healing. Her latest works give physical form to abstract feelings such as hope, love, joy, resilience, and wonder, all of which defined his amazing life. She hopes that viewers may find peace, calm, and beauty in her work no matter the challenging times or life transitions they may be going through. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Hillyer Art Space (Washington, DC), Launch LA (Los Angeles, CA), Newport Art Museum (Newport, RI), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), and the US Embassy in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia).

Hilary Doyle (b. 1985, Worcester, MA) received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she has since joined the faculty after holding teaching positions at both Brown University and Purchase College. Her paintings begin with simple observations of day-to-day life. The scenes she portrays may seem mundane—a woman walking in the rain, holding a newborn baby, or commuting home on the subway—yet Doyle offers glimpses into the inner lives of her subjects through her deft use of color and the subtle nuances of body language. She has exhibited her work internationally, including at galleries in London and New York, and was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA in 2017.

Ana Maria Farina (b. 1989, Sao Paulo, Brazil) is currently based in the Hudson Valley, NY and paints using a tufting gun along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, she conjures vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. She attended Columbia University and SUNY New Paltz for her graduate studies, and in 2018 she was awarded a fellowship to the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Her work has been featured in many spaces throughout New York such as the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Dorsky Museum, Paradice Palase, Susan Eley Fine Art, among others.

Andrew Fish is a painter and printmaker based in Boston, MA. He grew up in Bristol, VT and studied at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. His work explores the intersection of abstraction and representation, using the figure to investigate contemporary society and personal experience. He has attended several artist residencies including the VT Studio Center, Manship Artists Residency + Studio (Gloucester, MA), Red Gate Gallery (Beijing, China), and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists Residency. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally including The Painting Center (NYC), Childs Gallery (Boston), Artzu Gallery (Manchester, UK) and Addison Ripley Fine Art (Washington, DC.)

Max Heiges (b. 1988, San Francisco, California) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 2010, the artist worked as a studio assistant to the painters Chris Martin and Joe Bradley, eventually transitioning to the metal shop-oriented studio of sculptor Carol Bove. The artist currently operates a metal shop fabricating metal works for other artists as well as focusing on his own practice.

David Heo (b. 1992, Acworth, Georgia) received his MFA in 2018 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He creates artwork that flirts with a variety of genres, including large-scale paintings, works on paper, mural paintings, and brand collaborations. Heo employs elemental materials – acrylic, paper collage, and crayon – to create an intricate interlacing of layers. Through his many influences, such as short stories, Cy Twombly, and anime, Heo intimately improvises between abstraction and biography which synthesizes his lived experiences.

Lavaughan Jenkins (b. 1976 Pensacola, FL) is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor currently working in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2019 Jenkins was awarded the James and Audrey Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Vielmetter Los Angeles, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Abbi Kenny
Driving Home for a Big Fish, 2022
Signed on verso
Acrylic, molding paste, yupo collage, and glass beads on panel
30 x 24 in.

James Ming Johnson was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Southern California. His work focuses on historical events and eras, and how we tell stories about our own history. He holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from Stanford University and is currently attending the MFA painting program at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Abbi Kenny (b. Boston, MA) is an emerging artist and painter living and working in Boston, MA. She is an MFA candidate in painting at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. She received her BFA with honors in painting and a concentration in the Theory and History of Art and Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. After completing her undergraduate degree, she worked in the Nicholson File Artist Studios in Providence, RI, until moving to Toronto, Canada, in August 2021, then to Boston. Abbi has received the Royal Drawing School’s Dumfries House Estate drawing residency and grant near Cumnock, Scotland, and participated in RISD's European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. In 2022, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in painting. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions across New England and New York.

DaNice D. Marshall (b. Boston, MA) paints Black Portraiture art, as much to record ordinary activities of African American life, as to show the viewer that we all can laugh and have moments of joy. Six years ago, a rare illness left her unable to write and so she began painting the stories that she wanted to tell. She uses paint to mix metaphors and dabble in the richness of color to add syntax to the incomplete sentences and dangling modifiers, also known as the elements of style. To that end, she is a writer who paints.

Meghan Murray
Sun' Flowers can Bloom in Shady Places, 2022
Oil on handmade paper
9.5 x 12.5 in.

Meghan Murray is an emerging artist based in New England. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Murray has been passionate about artmaking since childhood. After graduating cum laude from Skidmore College, she completed a year-long Emerson Umbrella residency in Concord, MA. Murray then began work as an art educator while maintaining a rigorous independent studio practice. In 2022, she received her MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her most recent work is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Murray’s fascination with nostalgia and sentimentality continues to be integral to the work.

Aliyah Salmon is a multidisciplinary textile artist, currently residing in Brooklyn. She attended Savannah College of Art and Design and received her Textile Design BFA in 2018. Her studio practice explores the playful relationships between color, form, and black identity through a variety of tactile mediums.

Elspeth Schulze (b. 1985 Grand Coteau, Louisiana) is a Visual Artist from Southern Louisiana, a place where land and water meet. She sews, casts and cuts forms, combining digital fabrication with ceramic and textile processes. Recent work explores the idea of a porous place, a passage between one thing and another. Schulze holds an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder, a BA in Literature from Loyola University New Orleans, and an AAS in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She is currently an artist in residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Ezara Spangl is a painter living in Vienna, Austria. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Oberlin College. She co-curates the Artist Lecture Series Vienna program and its publications. Solo exhibitions of her work have also been held at Song Song, Vienna; Skestos Gabriele Gallery, Chicago; and Devening Projects, Chicago. She has been included in group exhibitions at Essex Flowers, New York; Ve.sch, Vienna; and Mauve, Vienna. Publications of her work include Black Pages and Moby Dick Filet.

Leigh Suggs (b. in Boone, NC) is currently based in Richmond, VA. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2003 and her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. Her recent shows include a three person show at The Visual Arts Center in Richmond “I >< YOU >< WE” (2018-2019), a two person show at Penland Gallery Conversation | Unspoken Language (2016), and several solo shows this year including Hurry Slowly at Second Street Gallery (VA), TOAST at Massey Klein Gallery (NYC), Keep Coming Round at Reynolds Gallery (VA), and Pushing Edges Rounding Corners at Cole Pratt Gallery (LA). Suggs has been awarded several grants and honors, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award and the North Carolina Fellowship Award. Her work is a part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Weatherspoon Museum collections and numerous corporate collections.

Gus Williams
Moving Boxes (Stack), 2022
Shingles/ Clapboards, plywood, trim board, card board boxes, house paint
68 x 22.25 in.

Gus Williams is from a family of house flipping hobos always looking for the next train to nowhere in particular. Throughout his life his family has spent more time fixing up and moving out than moving in. By the time he got to 12th grade he had already been in 14 different schools. Never having the patience for drawing or the steady hand for painting Gus discovered he could create sculptures and concepts out of the very materials he was handling on a daily basis. By combining universal household objects with the materials and processes used to build houses, Gus found a method of communicating concepts that were relatable to him as well as others.

Helena Wurzel is an award-winning painter, educator, wife, and mother living and working in Cambridge, MA. She received an MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2007. She has won Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants in 2010 and 2016, and currently works non-exclusively with independent art dealers BK Projects and Carrie Coleman Fine Art. From 2014-2022 Helena taught drawing and painting at Buckingham Browne & Nichols Upper School in Cambridge, MA, as well as running their art gallery.

Press Release: Layered Truths

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Layered Truths, a group show featuring James Parker Foley, Josh Jefferson, and Lavaughan Jenkins. The show brings together three unique painting styles that explore figurative storytelling.

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Installation view: Layered Truths (on view March 2 - April 17, 2022)

Lavaughan Jenkins, Message from a Black Man, 2022. Acrylic and spray paint. 42 x 13 x 12 in.

Lavaughan Jenkins paints with a three-dimensional, sculptural technique that incorporates layers of paint to form rich, freestanding figures. Jenkins reflects that, “with three-dimensional paintings…everywhere you look, you can see a different painting because it changes with every angle.” His most recent painting, Message from a Black Man, was created during his residency at the Fine Arts Works Center. The work stands powerfully at 3.5 feet tall, depicting the quiet countenance of the single Black individual.

Josh Jefferson continues this theme of layered painting as he reveals, “I don't paint a painting, I build one.” In his Big Brush series, Jefferson uses two brushes at the same time to create balanced yet free flowing work. He describes this fresh method as a way to get into the painting from the inside out. A recent studio visit brought us to a vibrant room filled with collage components that lived and worked alongside Jefferson until he decided where they would belong in his compositions.

James Parker Foley paints as a reclamation of power. They state: “painting is becoming for me a place where I get to make all the rules, and I can build my own feminist universe where women are awesome and terrifying and in total control.” Parker Foley’s works embody this sense of feminist assertion, often conveying worship and deification through their vivid hues and rich textures.

Through their own distinctive styles, all three artists take on themes of storytelling, both in the personal contemporary as well as the mythic and ancient. Each painting relays the artists’ truths, layered in paint as figures in a bigger story. Painting is a central part of both life and identity for each artist.

James Parker Foley, Raising the Dory, 2022. Oil on linen. 46 x 42 in.

Parker Foley explores the spiritual and ritualistic through works like Raising the Dory and The Departure. Often, their work incorporates mythic journeys and quests, centering on one or more heroic figures. They incorporate yonic symbols, portrayed as divine in Raising the Dory, where two gossamer figures raise a boat over their heads in exaltation. Parker Foley leans into the epic, and describes the figures’ task as Sisyphean “in the sense that they’re stuck doing this task as long as the painting survives.”

Jenkins also explores this mythic exaltation of women in his work as nearly all of his subjects take on a female form. John Greiner-Ferris writes in his article, Why Lavaughan Jenkins is Not a Sculptor, that this subject choice pays “homage to the women in [Jenkins’] life. The list begins with his mother, who raised him as a single parent, and his grandmother. It also includes two teachers in Florida who kept him in school when he wanted to drop out, and the gallerists who gave him his first breaks, of whom he says, ‘They didn’t have to take a chance on my work, but they did.’” Jenkins’ storytelling is personal, but also harkens back through history to return Black female figures to a place of worship.

Josh Jefferson, Bird on a Wire. Acrylic, flashe, and cut canvas on canvas. 48 x 60 in.

Jefferson’s work also draws lines from the personal to the ubiquitous as his work expresses “universal, mystical and ancient truths about family relationships, pets and self-identity.” Pulling from Aztec iconography, he spins a contemporary twist on the ancient to relay a new narrative that appears simultaneously original and familiar. Storytelling and technique are central to each of these artists’ works as their pieces tell stories that pay homage to the classics through new and innovative artmaking techniques. 

James Parker Foley’s spooky landscape paintings are populated with a cast of faceless characters. Their works are derived from studies and sketches of coastal Maine, which becomes their setting for fantasy. Their oil paintings are characterized by saturated, optical color work, an expansive vocabulary of mark-making, and lanky, ambling figures. By blending the historied Maine traditions of horror and landscape, they create scenes in which the body is a force within nature. The scenes range from moments of peril—passive subjects being touched, grabbed, and stepped on to moments of force; subjects striking, lifting, and strangling. The faceless bodies contribute to the open narrative structure of the work—the lack of expression allows the figures to coolly disassociate from the proceeding activities. Self-possessed and self-aware, the paintings themselves gaze back toward the viewer.

Josh Jefferson was born in St. Petersburg, FL in 1977. He attended The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has shown work both nationally in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and internationally in Amsterdam, Milan, and Quezon City. He currently lives and works in Boston with his wife and son.

Lavaughan Jenkins is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He was raised in Pensacola, Florida and currently creates his work in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. Since that time, Jenkins has become a recipient of the 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize awarded biennially by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). Jenkins donates annually to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Auction which supports student scholarships.

Press Release: Miss Black America

July 21 - August 29, 2021

Artist Lavaughan Jenkins in the gallery

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery proudly presents its first solo exhibition by Boston- based painter Lavaughan Jenkins. The exhibition, titled Miss Black America, is a powerful message that honors women past and present, embraces Blackness to address the marginalization of a group that is underrepresented in visual spaces, and is a demonstration of Jenkins’ personal resilience as an artist. As his career has developed, Jenkins has experimented with dimensional space, texture, and color. Heavily influenced by fashion, the resulting body of work is an explosion of dynamic patterns used to explore the intersection of race, womanhood, and the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition is named after a song released in 1970 by musician and activist Curtis Mayfield, and still the lyrics remain just as relevant today. The paintings themselves capture both the chaos of the past year as well as the hope for the future.

Gazing at the expressionless female figures central to Jenkins’ compositions, it is impossible not to wonder, who are these subjects that are able to command so much attention, display so much individuality and yet remain anonymous? Previously, each figure was a specific woman in the artist’s life who had personally impacted him in some way. In his recent paintings, there is a shift towards portraying women he has not met but who are making history for us, a remembering of the lives lost in the #SayHerName movement and a celebration of those alive and still fighting. As Jenkins describes, “I wanted to make paintings about them, praise them, share how I felt reading their stories.” That said, his personal history has still played an important role in developing this series. Jenkins and his mother spent a large part of the last year reconnecting with his grandmother and hearing her stories before she passed in July of this year. Embedded in the artwork are those conversations.

Another noticeable shift in Jenkins’ work is the addition of cotton fields into the backgrounds of select paintings, alongside others layered with vibrant patterns inspired by the latest couture stylings of Gucci and Valentino. Jenkins’ artwork is deeply rooted in the history of fashion. He admires designers such as Virgil Abloh who brought t-shirts and sneakers to couture status, specifically in Black culture. “The t-shirt and sneakers was a uniform for me,” Jenkins reflects, “and Virgil [Abloh] put that into runways and museums – yet the idea originated in a cotton field.” The remaining patterns are an eruption of stripes, dots, leopard print, and more, intentionally mismatched because that was how he was feeling at the time. While bright colors can often be associated with happiness and optimism, the artist was more frequently reflecting on the darker moments of 2020 and channeling them into the patterns. With the backgrounds speaking so loudly, suddenly some of the emotional weight was removed from the figures and focused elsewhere.

Lavaughan Jenkins, Hold us together (cotton field), 2021. Oil paint on paper. 30 x 22 in.

This body of work served as a way for Jenkins to navigate the triumph, celebration, mourning, anger, and every important emotion felt this past year. He embraces the importance of allowing oneself to acknowledge it all. As we celebrate these women, we also come to terms with the hard work that still needs to happen.

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Lavaughan Jenkins is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He was raised in Pensacola, Florida and currently creates his work in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. Since that time, Jenkins has become a recipient of the 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize awarded annually by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). Jenkins donates annually to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Auction which supports student scholarships.

Press Release: Back Together

BACK TOGETHER

June 10 – July 18, 2021

Installation photo, Back Together

Featuring: Clint Baclawski, Teddy Benfield, Mishael Coggeshall-Burr, Austin Eddy, Marlon Forrester, Holly Harrison, Lavaughan Jenkins, Katelyn Ledford, Kristina McComb, Susan Murie, Wilhelm Neusser, Haley Wood, Natalia Wróbel

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Back Together, a group exhibition curated to showcase strong, new pieces by our represented artists, as well as introduce high quality works by emerging artists. Featuring primarily local artists, Back Together seeks to open dialogue with the Boston arts community, focusing on work that presents an interesting process or concept. It also serves as a celebration of reconnection after the pandemic. The artists featured represent many different mediums, disciplines, and ideas, and come together to form a full picture of the rich variety in contemporary art today.

Clint Baclawski (b. 1981, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania) is a contemporary artist working with photography, technology, light, and space.
His solo exhibition locations include San Luis Obispo, California; St. Louis, Missouri; Boston, Massachusetts; Edinburgh, Scotland; and group shows at the Chelsea Art Museum, Danforth Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, San Diego Art Institute, The Jen Bekman Gallery, and the University College Falmouth in England. His work is included in private and institutional collections. Baclawski has been featured in FRAME magazine, The Boston Globe, The Creator’s Project, Boston Home magazine, Designboom, and The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Volume II. Clint’s studio is located in Boston’s South End.

Teddy Benfield works primarily as a painter, screen printer and photographer. His works consist of a mixture of the three mediums to create a dialogue between traditional still life genre painting and the relationships individuals have with marketplace and consumerism through the internet culture of today. 

Signage combines the modern product with interior space yet has the ability to transform the modern pedestrian back in time. Representational imagery introduces the past to the present and pays homage to hand painted signs as well as the comments of class and value in traditional still life painting while room for abstraction is absorbed within traditional advertisement qualities.

Teddy Benfield is a Boston based artist from Connecticut (b. 1992). He received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2018) and his BFA in Visual arts from Union College (2015) as well as a certificate in Sneaker Design from Fashion Institute of Technology (2019).

Mishael Coggeshall-Burr, High Line IV.

Mishael Coggeshall-Burr integrates the art of photography and oil painting to create novel and compelling images on canvas.  Taking blurred shots with a 35mm camera, the artist searches for peripheral scenes with cinematic color and tone.  He translates selected images into abstract-realist paintings with convincing color, formal structure, and subtle references to art history.  Through his actions Mishael questions both the truth of photography and the fiction of painting: we enter a liquid, cinematic space, capturing the magic moment when Alice seems to step through the looking glass.  The photorealistic image melts away, the prosaic merges with poetry.

“We live in a mostly blurry world. Our eyes only actually focus on a tenth of our field of vision at any one time. Our viewpoint, emotions, and context blur our memories. The landscapes I paint are in some way our genuine environment: the backgrounds to our lives, always present and often out of focus.”

Mishael studied painting at Middlebury College, The Glasgow School of Art, and the Art Student's League in New York.  His artistic adventures have led him to many countries and continents, with many images from his travels featured in his art exhibitions. He lives, works and paints in Montague, MA with his wife and four children.

Austin Eddy, Every Duck In Its Place While Moving From Here To There Forgetting Nothing

Austin Eddy was born in Boston, MA (USA) in 1986 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Select recent exhibitions include: Fresh Windows Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2018), SetUp 2018 Art Fair, Cellar Contemporary (Italy), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA (2018), Ampersand Gallery in Portland, OR (2018), David Shelton Gallery, Houston, TX (2017), Dallas Art Fair (2017), Code Art Fair, Bendixen Contemporary Art. Copenhagen, DK. (2016), Agnes B. Gallerie, Paris, FR (2016), and Left Field Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2015). He recently completed the Liquitex International Residency in London, England (2018). Austin Eddy is the founder and curator of EDDYSROOM, a nomadic curatorial project launched in 2015. 

Marlon Forrester, born in Guyana, South America, is an artist and educator raised in Boston, MA. Forrester is a graduate of School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, B.A 2008 and Yale School of Art, M.F.A. 2010. He is a resident artist at African-American Masters Artist Residency Program (AAMARP) adjunct to the Department of African-American Studies in association with Northeastern University. He has shown both internationally and nationally, concerned with the corporate use of the black body, or the body as logo, Forrester’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, and multimedia works reflect meditations on the exploitation implicit in the simultaneous apotheosis and fear of the muscular black figure in America.

Holly Harrison lives and works in Concord, MA. She received an MA in creative writing from The City College of New York and a BA from Wesleyan University. Her artwork has been featured at galleries and museums throughout the country and is held in private and corporate collections nationally and internationally. Additionally, she has curated two well-received shows at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts, where she was subsequently invited to join the Board of Trustees.   

Lavaughan Jenkins, Skin I’m In

Lavaughan Jenkins is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He was raised in Pensacola, Florida and currently creates his work in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. Since that time, Jenkins has become a recipient of the 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize awarded annually by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). Jenkins donates annually to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Auction which supports student scholarships.

Katelyn Ledford is an artist living and working in Boston, Massachusetts, but born and bred in the American South. She received her MFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. Ledford’s work is a consideration of the role of images in shaping the curated portrait of women at large and individually while also reflecting on the complex and often painful reality of what it means to be a woman and artist. She uses appropriated images sourced from historical paintings, television shows, social media, and Google fever dreams while contrasting them against improvisational symbols and shapes in order to create deconstructed portraits. The tone across her work lies in a mix of cynicism, humor, and absurdist logic— like the feeling of sucking on a sour candy, you smile through the pain and pleasure.

Ledford was featured in SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2020 in a two-person booth, “The Person- Less Portrait,” curated by Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. She has been featured in exhibitions internationally with select group exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY; Public Gallery, London, UK; Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA; and Plan X Art Gallery, Milan, IT.

Kristina McComb's practice focuses on the intersection of photography and sculpture. Through layering images and light, McComb examines the passing of time, merging past, present, and future in a haunting composition. Present is one in a three-part series of lightbox sculptures. Printed on acetate and suspended in backlit steel structures, McComb’s photographs drift and overlap, appearing fragile and untethered. She arranges selected fragments from a range of different shots into one coherent image, defined by their relationships with each other. The foreground is sharp and clear, while the background layers blur into ghosts of the original image. This subtle play of light, line, and texture creates a delicate exploration of transience versus permanence.

Kristina McComb is an interdisciplinary artist from Western Mass. She graduated with Distinction from Greenfield Community College, receiving her Associates of Science in Visual Art with a concentration in Photography. McComb also holds a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her work has been exhibited since 2014, most notably at the Brattleboro Museum and Arts Center in Brattleboro, VT and the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.

Susan Murie is a New England-based artist. She most recently exhibited at the Members Prize Show, Cambridge Art Association, 2021 and was awarded Artist of the Year by juror Ben Sloat, Director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at Lesley Art + Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Susan was also awarded a CAA Artist of the Year, Members Prize Show, 2020, by juror Jessica Roscio, Curator, Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University. Her artwork was published in the London-based INKQ, Inky Leaves Publishing, Issue 9, Spring 2020 as well as featured in The Hand Magazine, Issue #26 in the Fall of 2019. Her work was juried into and sold at the MassArt Auction in 2020 and 2019 and is juried into the 2021 auction as well. Murie’s work has been featured on The Curated Fridge, Autumn 2018 Show (Somerville, MA) curated by Kat Kiernan Editor-in-Chief of the photography magazine Don’t Take Pictures, and The Curated Fridge, Spring 2018 Show curated by Francine Weiss Senior Curator, Newport Art Museum. In addition to private collections, Murie’s work is in the permanent collection of Fidelity and the City of Somerville.

Wilhelm Neusser’s artwork has been widely exhibited and he has received numerous awards and fellowships. His recent museum exhibitions include the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 2019), the Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA, 2019), and MASS MoCa (North Adams, MA, 2018). In 2020 he was honored with a finalist grant in Painting from the Mass Cultural Council. Additional awards and recognition include the MASS MoCA Studio Program (2017), Vermont Studio Center (2013), Finalist, Wilhelm-Morgner-Prize, Soest (2010), International Artist in Residence, Boots Contemporary Art Space (St. Louis, MO, 2009), ZVAB Phönix Art Prize (2007). Neusser’s work has been included in notable publications, including The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Artscope Magazine, Boston.com, and Big Red & Shiny.

Wilhelm Neusser was born in Cologne, Germany. He relocated to the United States in 2011, and currently lives and works in Somerville, MA.

Haley Wood, WOAD, Page 1

Haley Wood is a fiber artist, surface designer, and musician living in Boston, MA. She has recently received her BFA in Fibers at Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Haley is influenced by 1960’s and 70’s folk horror films, illuminated manuscripts, mid century home decor, and her Omi. She also plays guitar and violin for the Croaks.

Natalia Wróbel is an artist based in Encinitas, CA after spending time in New York City, Boston, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Wrobel studied Studio Art and Art History at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She furthered her study at the Lorenzo de'Medici Institute in Florence and then the New York Studio School (NYSS). She received the NYSS Mercedes Matter Fellowship in 2012, and the Murray Art Prize in 2015. In 2017, Wrobel completed a painting residency at the Berlin Art Institute. Her work has been featured at international art fairs including Art Basel: Miami, Texas Contemporary, and Art SouthHampton and has been an official selection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and MassArt Auction. Her paintings have been featured in publications in the US and Europe, in coursework at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and are included in public and private collections around the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. Wrobel's work is represented by Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston, MA.