2025 begins with a unique fiber art exhibition: “Baylee Schmitt: we settle into corners with the dust and mites” which opens January 3 and continues through February 16 at LaiSun Keane, 460C Harrison Ave. C8A, Boston, Massachusetts. In this show, Baylee Schmitt, who is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, used a series of crocheted objects to recreate her childhood bedroom space that she shared with her twin sister, transforming the gallery, “into a nostalgic and surreal environment, meticulously handcrafting every detail from crochet yarn, including beds, dressers, windows, doors, pillows, a TV, and even a trophy mug. The result is a tactile exploration of memory, family, and the comfort found in familiar physical spaces.”
Continuing its long-running tradition, the Copley Society of Art’s New Members Show 2025, which has its opening reception on Thursday, January 9, introduces new artists Jennifer Amadeo-Holl, Margaret Farrell Bruno, Elizabeth Cohen, Rose Cook, David Dickinson, Julia S. Powell, Kelly Russo, and Daniel Zampino to its roster while emerging artists Andrew Eckhardt, David Skirkey, Timothy Lee, John Jameson, and Adam Vinson, awarded membership from their participation in last year’s “Art from the MFA Staff” show will also be in attendance. “The artists whose work is represented in this exhibition engage in a breadth of mediums ranging from pastel, pencil, and oil, to slate stone reliefs.” The exhibition runs through February 8 at CoSo, 158 Newbury St., Boston, Massachusetts.
Open to all Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont resident artists 18 years and over, this year’s “Mixmaster Juried Member Exhibition,” which opens on January 12 and runs through February 6 at the Mattatuck Museum, 144 West Main St., Waterbury, Connecticut, had a record-breaking number of applicants with 153 artists submitting a total of 353 works. The show was juried by Kalia Brooks, Ph.D., Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN, a New Haven-based, new national arts model intended to empower artists, curators, and the community through education and access to a vibrant ecosystem. “MIXMASTER provides an opportunity for established and emerging artists to debut their most recent work, done in the last three years.”
“Social Fabric,” a solo exhibition of works by Julia Csekö, runs from January 13 through 31 at the Salem Old Town Hall, 32 Derby Sq, Salem, Massachusetts. The show is the culmination of the visual artist’s eight-month stint in the Salem Public Artist-in-Residency program and will include newly created textile work that responds to and engages with dozens of migration stories collected from residents through its participatory public art installation, “Transcending Borders Immigrant Experiences and Dreams,” on which participants left a ribbon sharing their personal histories. Two video pieces created in collaboration with Salem Access TV — one featuring interviews with area immigrants, the other, “Welcome Dresses,” documents a presentation by dancers outfitted with thousands of satin ribbons declaring, “YOU ARE WELCOME HERE” — is also on view.
“One Future: Life in the Age of Climate Change: Aspirations, Loss, Challenges — and Hope,” the next presentation by Shared Habitat Earth, is a group exhibition by 23 artists “who remind us that all life on our planet is connected and that we are in this moment together” that takes place from January 17 through February 2 at the Mosesian Center for the Arts, 321 Arsenal St., Watertown, Massachusetts. “Through painting, sculpture and photography they celebrate the beauty of a world which humanity has enjoyed for thousands of years, showcase the danger it is facing now, and present efforts to save it.” The exhibit will include educational material and provide information on how to become active in the response to climate change and engage in the fight for life on our planet.
With their stated goal of deconstructing “trash and capitalism,” Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, in collaboration with curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries, is presenting “Waste Scenes” from January 17 through March 29 at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, 551 Tremont St., Boston, Massachusetts. Using video, print and performance, they offer “a creative exploration of trash, value, and desire within the context of corporate culture and neoliberal capitalism.” Created during their time in the Philadelphia- based Recycled Artist-in-Residency (RAIR) program, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales gathered discarded materials from construction and demolition sites throughout the Tri-state region, using their collected objects, film, and audio from trash piles to create a new two-channel video installation.
Using mixed media mosaics, Mary Topogna, who became a Vermont resident three years ago after living on the West Coast, started her series of “Black Lives Matter” mosaic portraits during the pandemic. It’s a project she intends to continue. “It seems that as a society, we lose the intense interest in news stories when something else comes along,” she said. “Creating these tributes to the Black individuals that we have lost is my way of saying ‘never forget.’ The portraits have impact individually, but the idea of the expanding number of completed portraits is a statement within itself. As the series grows, I want the exhibit to travel to different venues across the country, and especially to places where these people once lived.” Her exhibition runs from January 22 through March 1 at Studio Place Arts, 201 North Main St., Barre, Vermont.
“The Circe Effect: Women’s Creative Power Reclaims the Narrative,” an exhibition featuring sculpture, painting, photography, performance, installation, printmaking, and drawing by Madeleine Conover, Katiushka Melo, Dana Robinson, Chelsea Steinberg Gay and Donna Dodson inspired by Madeline Miller’s best-selling novel, “Circe,” continues through January 25 at the Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Art Gallery, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, Connecticut. “The Western cultural imagination has habitually presented Circe one-dimensionally as a dangerous, seductive witch, known for casting a spell that turned Odysseus’s crew of sailors into swine. In Miller’s novel, Circe takes ownership of her story and tells it on her own terms, releasing herself from these narrow constraints.” The show is part of a year-round celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first class of girls to be enrolled at Hotchkiss.
“List Projects 31: Kite,” a solo exhibition of New-Media Work by the Oglála Lakȟóta artist, Kite, opens January 30 and continued through May 18 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, Massachusetts. The show explores machine learning, artificial intelligence, anddream interpretation as means of expressing Oglála Lakȟóta ontology and epistemology.“For over a decade, Kite has worked with digital interfaces for music and live performance while developing scholarship on what she calls, ‘Indigenous protocols for AI.’ Her musical compositions, installations, graphical scores, videos, and live performances often visualize the artist’s collaborations with human and nonhuman entities, like stones and the components of computers, and reveal her intricate process of investigation and iteration.”
“Printing Icons: Modern Process, Medieval Image,” on view through March 30 at the Icon Museum and Study Center, 203 Union St., Clinton, Massachusetts, which evolved from the Museum of Russian Icons in October 2023, is “a rare opportunity to view more than 60 works from six institutions and private collections that explore the impact of printing on Orthodox iconography.” It follows the revolutionary impact of print technology from the 17th to the 20th century on the production and distribution of Orthodox icons and in the process, it transformed the way people interacted with and experienced sacred images. The museum’s new curator, Justin Willson, a specialist in the art of Byzantium and the early Slavic world, showcases works from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Russia that illuminate how Western techniques transformed icon painting.
“Haplomatics,” an exhibition that “explores the wild realm of pseudo-scientific fantasy in the visual textual and musical collaboration between the artist David Hockney and the composer James Sellars,” can been seen through October 5 at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., New Britain, Connecticut. “Their work together in the late 1980s became a synergy of art, technology, and music that resulted in a multi-media animated film masterpiece. The film introduces a genus of abstract beings called Haplomes, which come to life through Hockney’s prints and Sellars’s narration and innovative musical score.” The show features Hockney’s innovations in printmaking with the 35 xerographic prints that were used to create the film’s visual effects, which are being displayed publicly for the first time.