Blanche E. Colman Awards Finalist Exhibition, 2025
Piano Craft Gallery June 1-14

Opening Reception as part of First Fridays, June 6, 2025, 6-9pm

More info here at Piano Craft Gallery

Piano Craft Gallery is pleased to present the work of eleven artists: Brian Chu, Roy Germon, Carly Glovinski, John Guthrie, Hilary Irons, Greer Muldowney, Meghan Murray, Maritza Ranero, Isabel Riley, Shamayam Sullivan, and Jessica Tam. All were nominated and selected as finalists for the 2025 Blanche E. Colman Awards. The exhibition is curated by Kamal Ahmad, Director, Exhibitions and Education at Piano Craft Gallery, and runs from June 1 – June 14 (gallery hours below). We hope you will join us for an opening reception on June 6 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm, First Friday.

Review of actual work has been an important component of the Colman Award jury process from its start in 1962, chaired by a succession of faculty from Boston University (including Richard Yarde, Nick Edmonds, and Richard Raiselis). This is the first time that finalist work is on view to the public. Colman Award Art Chair Dana Clancy notes, “It’s exciting to bring attention to these important New England artists and to see resonances between their practices. For a number of these artists recognizable forms or images intersect with systems of pattern and mark-making to suggest interior worlds, connections with various traditions, or devotional practices. Bodies of work in the exhibition represent or reference particular places, people, objects, and documents, calling attention to larger relationships to nature and culture. I am grateful to Kamal Ahmad for his excellent curation and to Piano Craft Gallery for such community-minded collaboration.”

Established through the bequest of designer, educator, and arts leader Blanche E. Colman, the Colman Foundation is the first fund in the nation endowed by an artist to provide funding directly to individual artists. The Foundation solicits letters of nomination every year in early Spring. For more than sixty years, this eponymous award has provided support to and recognition of many exceptional New England artists. Blanche Colman’s own professional work as an interior designer can be seen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; she was also founding Director of the first Art Department at Boston University (1919-32).

Time to bid! The MassArt Auction funds scholarships and academic program support for the nation's only publicly funded independent art school. Check out lot 325, Untitled (人山人海: People Sea), 2022
Ink on paper, 4" x 6" (comes a little bigger as it is already framed). Online bidding open currently open until Friday, March 31 at 12 PM EST. :

www.bidsquare.com/online-auctions/massa…

Exhibition Dates: May 23 - August 10, 2022

Oresman Gallery (located in the museum building)
Smith College
22 Elm Street
Northampton, MA

Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, 8:30am-4:30pm (closed Memorial Day and July 4th), masks required.

Opening in the wake of COVID-19, AREA CODE is New England's newest contemporary art fair that runs throughout the month of August online and onsite around Greater Boston.

Curator and art writer Octavio Zaya selected artists to feature in solo presentations in AREA CODE's Main Section, which includes five artworks by Jessica Tam. The Main Section goes live on August 1st at 1pm.

More information, including the full schedule and maps to storefront art and event tickets, is available starting August 1st at: www.areacodeartfair.com

Also, check out the Boston Globe write-up, which includes Jessica Tam's Monument Field: Grey Blue Trip, for a sneak peek.

Exhibition: June 18 - July 27, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 20th, 6-8pm


"Working It Out" features 112 artists of all disciplines who begin their creative process with preparatory drawings. This enables visual problem solving throughout the execution of an artwork that is both fluid and beautiful. Drawing can be an exploration of materials, mark making, the emotional tenor of a piece, compositional arrangements or color. Working drawings are the visual manifestation of a work in progress; a working idea. Typically, this work is not seen by the public. These are private musings that reflect thought processes. They are, by definition, incomplete. This exhibition will allow the viewer to see the private world of the artist’s creative process.

This work is about discovery. We looked for exploration rather than refinement: the beginnings of ideas rather than their execution. The pieces here show artists at their most personal ”working things out”. Happily, the forms these explorations take, are varied in both material and process. Some are 3 dimensional. Most, but not all, are works are on paper. Dimensions vary from 1 inch to 6 feet. Some use photography, printmaking and collage as well as the more traditional drawing media of pencil ink and color. Occasionally paper is added to change scale, shift perspective, or cover an earlier thought. There are erasures, corrections and emphatic marks. These represent an active field. We see artists making choices throughout these inventions. We viewers follow and contrast both thought and process.

More information can be found on The Painting Center's website here

Link to Inveroart's review here