“Renewal” is the theme of this year’s “Annual Juried Members Show” that opened on February 28 at the Copley Society of Art, 158 Newbury St., Boston. The exhibition, which continues the gallery’s tradition of covering a wide variety of mediums, including painting, photography, graphite and pastel, was curated by Meg White, director of Gallery NAGA. First prize was awarded to Acadia Mezzofanti’s illusionistic photograph, “Self-Portrait: Untamed;” Carolyn Latanision’s watercolor painting of a rusted steel engine, “Powered Down, Bethlehem Steel,” took second prize while Mary Hughes earned third p rize for her abstract painting, “Ice Flow I,” which evokes winter-ice surfaces. The show runs through March 28.
Art League Rhode Island is presenting “Twisting Fibers — An Art for All Reasons,” an open juried national exhibition that opens on March 8 and continues through May 8 at the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council Gallery and adjacent Gallery 175, 175 Main St., Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The show was juried by Anastasia Azure, a contemporary art jeweler and sculptor who brings traditional textile techniques to create unique individual works, who selected whose “labor intensive and time consuming nature of handwork stands in stark contrast to the increasing rush that consumes so many of today’s industrialized societies.” This collection is showcased at a time that “fiber art has gained renewed interest and, as much as it is a remnant of the past, it is claiming its place in the future as a mindful creative process practiced by diverse communities and individuals all over the world.”
Inspired by “urban architecture, literature and her own traveling experiences to destinations such as Iran, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Turkey,” Heidi Whitman creates paper constructions, paintings and drawings of invented terrains or mental maps made from memory in “Gray Matter,” which can be explored through March 15 at the Chandler Gallery at Maud Morgan Arts, 20 Sacramento St., Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Contemporary
city grids and plans of ancient ruins are layered and edited along with references to mental networks,” explained Whitman, a faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, who added that her show title refers to both her central interest in the mind, particularly memory, and to her materials. She’s interested in “states of mind, how experience is translated into thought, how memories are layered, and how dreams jumble reality.”
Having long networked the entire New England region in building their own careers, Lisa Barthelson and Carrie Crane, asked to curate an exhibition for the Worcester Center for Crafts, and were excited to have the opportunity to broaden the Worcester arts community’s reach and invite artists to participate who were from the surrounding area but who were not necessarily familiar to the Central Massachusetts art audiences.
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