Investigating “the progressive directional flow of currents in nature — tides, air, sound, and time,” Margaret Swan’s new series of polychrome aluminum wall sculpture, “Current,” will be on view from May 7 to June 7 at Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave., Boston, Massachusetts. Her organic gestural, curvilinear forms are, “intersected and punctuated by bright swirling aluminum tubing, create counter movement, suggesting rivulets of water, creeping vines, or musical notation, and coaxing the curving leaf-like, wave-like forms into a rhythmic stream of luxurious movement.” Swan’s show shares the SoWa Boston space with Leslie Wilcox’s “Firebrands,” her third in a series of shows using found weather-beaten driftwood fortified by metal screening intended to provide a protective armament against further damage and destruction and conveying the urgency of avoiding cascading global climate catastrophe.
Five local artists — curator and mixed media artist Susan Hardy; glass artist Steven Easton; textile artist Amalia Galdona Broche; installation artist Lynne Harlow; and photographer McDonald Wright — are featured in the “On Being American | Contemporary Artworks, Echoes of the Past” exhibition that will be on view from May 13 through June 20 at the Lippitt House Museum (a property of Preserve Rhode Island), 199 Hope St. Providence, Rhode Island. The exhibition is the centerpiece of the Museum’s participation in Handwork 2026, a national Semiquincentennial initiative celebrating the lasting importance of handmade traditions in American life.
Covered in DayGlo colors, Bianca Beck’s new solo show, opening May 13 and running through September 6 at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 21 Winter St., Rockland, Maine, will feature five new works “that loom over the viewer like benign sentinels or beloved offspring grown miraculously large, this exhibition opens a new chapter in Beck’s exploration of kinship, dissent, hybridity, and the plurality of selfhood.” It joins three other mid-year CMCA shows: “Death is Expensive,” in which Mark Swanson transforms new and found materials into assemblages that “conjure a faded glamor”; “Fugue,” Abbey Williams’s five-channel video installation; and “Will Sears: The Third Field,” an “abstract visual experience” intended to generate “emotional resonance” through its assemblages, paintings, and murals.
“Mary Bablitch: Spirited Geometries” continues through May 31 at the Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., Boston. This collection of new works by the longtime interior designer features collaged works on paper that explore a dynamic, fresh approach to non-objective, geometric abstraction. “My works always emerge from color, I paint flat hues onto large sheets of paper, pairing shapes and colors according to an inner logic,” said Bablitch, whose use of interesting spatial arrangement, where color, form and negative space combine to form dynamic, spirited wholes. Also on view: Barb Cone’s large-scale “Melting Pot” works. “While encaustic paintings are usually small-scale due to the difficulty of controlling the movement of the melted paint, my goal has been to push the boundaries by working ever larger,” she said. “The work has become more physical as I work larger.”
Now in its 49th year, Available Potential Enterprises’ A.P.E. Gallery, 126 Main St., Northampton, Massachusetts continues its history of showcasing a wide variety of creative and performing arts. From June 1 through 28, its ARC (activate, research, create) curated summer residency program, will host four projects that include “NiFe Lucey-Brzoza: Bodies of Land” that will feature “explorations of durational performance, relationality, and ethical engagement with terrain;” “Pasqualina Azzarello: flowers + fires (and the meaning we make)” includes live bilateral painting as embodied inquiry into regenerative and restorative practices; “Places,” presented by Transmissions: Quilts for Trans People and Cordy Joan and Joey Dehais who use quiltmaking as a project to connect trans people to each other across identity, geography and time; and “Alexandra Ripp and Daniel Sack: Imaginary Friends,” exploring “new modes of intergenerational artistic collaboration” that challenge the binary between art for “kids” and “adults.” Visit apeltd.org for event times.
Beloved Vermont painter David Rohn passed away last December; through June 7, Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts, 181-183 Main St., Brattleboro, Vermont hosts “Retrospective,” an exhibition honoring the first artist it gave a solo show to almost a decade ago. “We felt that the clarity and freshness of Rohn’s watercolors would energize and transform the space, but he gave us more. He brought insight and humor and a novel way of approaching painting,” recalled gallery owners Petria Mitchell and Jim Giddings. “Rohn lived a simple existence close to the earth and the objects that informed his paintings. Bach, Beethoven and his hand-puppet companion Miss Tulip were as important to this visual artist as Cézanne and Matisse. As long as he could paint, he was content.”
This June, the Southern Vermont Arts Center, 860 SVAC Drive/West Road, Manchester, Vermont, opens the door to a new museum building that will display “For the Love of Vermont: The Lyman Orton Collection,” that features over 300 works that chronicle life in Vermont from the 19th and 20th centuries that were assembled by Lyman Orton, proprietor of The Vermont Country Store. “These works, often overlooked by mainstream art history, present a vital record of everyday American life, landscape, and community set in New England. For decades, much of this art was kept in private hands. With SVAC’s expansion, it will now anchor a new public dialogue about regional art’s place in the larger American narrative.” The grand opening takes place on June 7.
Solo exhibitions by Jude Griebel, Robin Crofut-Brittingham, Deirdre Hyde and Michaela Harlow, as well as “Test Plot(s),” a “living laboratory” in which five artists — Miles Huston, Minga Opazo, Esteban Ramon Perez, Bronson Smillie and Rachel Youn — examine the intersection of natural and synthetic materials, remain on view through July 5 at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 10 Vernon St., Brattleboro, Vermont. Collectively, the shows explore human relationships with the natural world, environmental impact and the interplay of organic and artificial materials. “These exhibitions engage with the complexity of how humans inhabit the natural world,” said Sarah Freeman, BMAC Director of Exhibitions. “From the ways we consume, interact with, or reshape our surroundings, each artist encourages reflection, empathy, and awareness of our place within a broader ecological system.”
“What it means to be an American has never been static,” noted Devon Zimmerman, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Ogunquit Museum of American Art, 543 Shore Road, Ogunquit, Maine, introducing “American Conversation,” on view through November 15. The show combines artists closely connected to Maine in dialogue with fellow artists that are shaping the national conversation. “Rather than trying to define it, this exhibition looks at how artists speak around the idea — through lived experience, contradiction, and imagination — capturing the texture of life in this country in all its humor, tenderness, beauty, violence, and unease,” he said. The show is complimented, through July 19, by “Looking for America,” an exhibition bringing together the work of Hank Willis Thomas and a multigenerational group of artists who are connected through years of shared studio space, conversation and collaboration, with those longtime relationships allowing for “a collective inquiry shaped by dialogue, proximity, and the exchange of ideas.”