Artist Bios:

Alena Ahrens’ studio practice is influenced by her cross-cultural upbringing, training in mindfulness, and fieldwork in painting and modern dance. She holds a PhD in psychology and transitioned into an interdisciplinary studio practice after completing residency work with Marina Abramović (MoMA PS1). Alena completed her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she expanded her performance practice to include visual and sculptural works. She has presented work at the Zhou B. Art Center (Chicago, IL), the Tipi Project (Brooklyn, NY), the Bruno David Projects (St. Louis), the DAMU Theatre (Prague, Czech Republic), Rathaus Stuttgart (Germany), and has work in the permanent collection of the Encaustic Art Institute (Sante Fe, NM). Alena's work will be featured this Fall in British Vogue and she will be in residency at Hangar Arts Portugal this Winter.

Elizabeth Awalt lives in Concord, Massachusetts and Swans Island, Maine. She received her BA from Boston College and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to Boston College to teach and was awarded tenure as an Associate Professor. The artist currently teaches workshops in painting and drawing. Elizabeth Awalt’s work is rooted in the natural world, particularly landscapes of raw beauty or those affected by environmental change. The artist’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Millay Colonies. Elizabeth’s work has been shown in Boston area group exhibitions including the Museum of Fine Arts, DeCordova Museum, Rose Art Museum, and McMullen Museum. Solo shows include the Danforth Museum, Matter and Light Fine Art, Clark Gallery, Soprafina Gallery, Thomas Segal Gallery, GW Einstein Gallery, Caldbeck Gallery, and Cove Street Arts. In April 2019 the artist was invited to exhibit in the Thirteenth Havana Biennale in Mantanzas, Cuba.

Beverly Marya Bajek (Chicopee and North Truro, Massachusetts) has a lifelong interest  In how we experience and react to the unknown. The natural world  offers the artist tools to reimagine its processes of life and death… we are curious of the magic in growth and the  state of dying. Art is driven by how wonder can be realized and how symbols can be interpreted through experience. Bajek makes use of “leftovers, some things, still of value and retention of meaning….used cloths, twine, bark, scraps of paper, torn paintings and paint shreds to make collages. While painting is  foremost in her mind, she affixes these varied materials to imbue a canvas that  may be  layered in glazes, only to be stripped again to  reveal what is yet to be seen. Bajek attended MassArt, Boston, has a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard University where she studied World Religions and printmaking at the Carpenter Center with Michael Mazur and Peik Larsen.

Born in Boston, a fiber artist most of her life, Edith Beatty turns her attention now to painting. Brushing and pouring wax, inks, paints, and dyes, she abstracts landscape and figure from her mind’s eye. Beatty earned a Doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Indiana University and enjoyed an extensive career designing learning opportunities to promote social justice and equity. She now shifts her work to making art that conveys that same struggle and hope.  A member of the Yellow Chair Salon, Beatty also participates in New England Wax and the Cambridge Art Association. Over the last 30 years, she has shown her work through curated and juried shows nationally. This past spring her work was shown at Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine, Southern Vermont Arts Center, and Truro Center for the Arts, and now at MDavid&Co here in Brooklyn, NY.

Marcy Bergeron-Noa is a self-taught artist who embarked on a journey of artistic expression while simultaneously forging a career as a nurse practitioner and innovative healthcare executive. Her artwork has been featured in several exhibitions, including the Cove Street Arts Wax Hot & Cold: Telling our Stories exhibition, Portland, ME., 2023, the Rockport Artist Association & Museum's Emerging Member Artists Show in 2022, Rockport, MA, and the Berta Walker Gallery's Painting Out Loud exhibition in 2021 in Provincetown, MA. She has also contributed to and curated exhibitions, such as the Porter Mill Gallery's A Common Thread: 4 Artists: 1 Connection. An active member of the Yellow Chair Salon and the Cold Wax Academy, Marcy maintains a strong presence within the art community. She is a juried member of the Marblehead Arts Association, Cambridge Arts Association, and Rockport Art Association and Museum. Drawing from her background in healthcare and her unbridled creative spirit as an artist, Bergeron-Noa infuses her artistic pursuits with a distinct perspective and profound depth. Her works resonate with power and evoke deep emotions as she explores the intricate connections  between the physiology of the human body and the universality of the lived human experience.

Connie Brown (b.1955, Norwalk, CT) lives and works in Connecticut. Her artwork includes sculptural cut-outs and paintings. Deeply moved by the rhythm and emotion of music, Brown orchestrates voluminous shapes that are both sensual and humorous, striving to balance the pain and the beauty of the world we inhabit daily. Painting with acrylics on unprimed wood, her use of transparent and saturated colors holds no bounds, much like the often-hyperreal pigmentation of living forms. Brown received a BFA with a concentration in sculpture from the University of Arizona.

Phyllis Famiglietti finds magic in found objects…"they contain a certain type of energy from a previous life". Wires, springs, hinges, switches, homeless pieces that once belonged to something or someone, somewhere at sometime, have filled many of her drawers and cabinets for years. With both pathos and humor, she combines and assembles these objects to create small 3D pieces. Her work speaks to aging, decay and abandonment, but at the same time reveals an optimism and an ulterior beauty. An award wining video editor, filmmaker and collagist, Phyllis has exhibited in numerous galleries in New York and New England. After forty years in NYC, she now lives and works in Boston.

Katherine Filice is an American abstract artist based in Northern California. Her work is known for its exploration of environmental topics, particularly the forest. She uses linear mark-making and searching lines to capture the energy, memories, and stories that vibrate through the ancient trees. Filice's training is built on traditional art education, and she has studied with top-tier artists, critics, and educators through New York based residency programs. She has also received well over 100 design awards for her commercial work. Additionally, Filice holds a BS degree from the University of San Francisco. Her extensive education and work experience have driven much of her exploration in human relationships and the reflection within our environment. Filice's paintings and drawings are held in private and corporate collections worldwide. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her most recent solo exhibitions include "Lost in the Woods" at the Pacific Art League in California and "The Secret Language of the Forest" at Gallery 1202 in California.

Marianne Hall (b. 1950, Detroit, MI) who normally manipulates natural materials such as linen and silk has made a foray into the mess of foam and latex with this new work. Suspended gestures evoke unthunk thoughts and shifting emotions. Hall grew up in Detroit in the shadow of the auto industry and was exposed to Detroit’s Cass Corridor art movement of the 60’s and 70’s. She attended the Center for Creative Studies and earned her BFA in Fibers from Wayne State University. Hall works and lives in Albuquerque, NM.

Kathryn Hart (b. 1961) plumbs the depths of love, loss, and the threshold of transformation. Themes manifest in airy hanging sculpture, installation, photography, and monoprints incorporating a personal diary of objects and symbols. Shadow, light, and reflection expand and distill the artwork’s presence. Recent solo shows include Cultural Department of Gandia, Spain; European Cultural Centre, coinciding with the 58th Venice Biennale; Polytechnika Krakowska, Krakow; School of Visual Arts, NY, NY; Galeria SD Szucha 8, Warsaw; Andre Zarre, NY, NY; Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY; and New Century Artists, NY, NY. Select group venues include the Ateneo de Madrid; Chelsea Art Museum, NY, NY; Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo; Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo; Novi Hram Gallery, Sarajevo; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; M. David & Co., Brooklyn, NY; Archeological Museum, Gandia, Spain; Dar Al-Kalima Gallery, Bethlehem, Palestine; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan; Galerie Arytmia, Krakow, PL; and Nevada Museum of Art + Environment, Museum of the Invisible, Bogota’, Colombia. Hart exhibits in and supports humanitarian projects worldwide. Sponsorships span Ajuntament de Gandia, European Cultural Center, European Cultural Academy, Council of Europe, the Ministries of Art and Culture of France and Poland, and the US Embassies. Hart has received awards from the United Nations, among others. The artist and her work have been critically featured in media and public TV (USA and Spain).

Cate Holt (b1970) playfully pairs a bluntness of objects with the conventions of painting and gesture. Her work reveals both somatic and performative aspects — paintings collaged with materials like fake eyelashes, jump ropes, or a potato masher invite the viewer to linger in deadpan moments that raise questions about behaving, gender expectations, ambivalence and aging. Holt holds a BFA in painting from the Hartford Art School and has been a Pollock-Krasner fellowship recipient. Her work has recently been exhibited both in the US and internationally at the Frost Art Museum in Miami, The LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University and Galerija Umjetnina in Split, Croatia. She recently relocated back to NYC after living and working in Paris for several years.

Barry Katz has been making art for nearly half a century. Born in Baltimore in 1951, he received his BFA from MICA (the Maryland Institute College of Art) and spent the next decade working as an art director. Later, he devoted his attention to landscape painting, and studied privately with Wolf Kahn. His current body of work, which has been in development for the last decade, comprises abstract wall sculptures, undulating and curvilinear forms made of plaster and finished with multiple layers of encaustic in saturated colors, and has been shown in numerous galleries around the country. His work in photography also reflects this interest in layering, as in his extreme close-ups of torn, layered advertising posters on urban walls, and images of light falling on beach pebbles in shallow water along the beaches of Cape Cod. The latter of these were featured in a one-person exhibit in Provincetown, Mass. In 2016. Hybrid Histories marks his first major show in New York. Katz currently lives and works in Harlem.

Kharis Kennedy (b. 1976, Los Angeles, CA) creates to reconnect with a once cherished and whole world; by mourning loss and processing destruction she is ultimately attempting to reconstruct an unfragmented self. She approaches the body, animals, and objects as sites of awareness that can be resourced to reveal inner truths. Her themes are broad but interlaced: the depiction of animals who reflect the spirit of their owners; a satiric incorporation of fashion as a signifier of individual and social identities; the tension between self-indulgence, glamorous rot and the struggle for reparation and healing. Following her 2011 relocation to the Caribbean tendencies towards animism and a dark vein of spiritual intuition became even more pronounced in her practice; she identifies with the region’s enduring tradition of performative catharsis in which painful personal and collective events are exorcised through enactment and exposition, always relying on costuming as a tool of resistance.  Kennedy paints using a process of layering; she uncovers the internal state of her subject by building and shifting layers of glue, pigment, and oil to create finished surfaces that often carry the visceral allure of encaustics or glazed ceramic.  Her work is psychologically revealing, deeply felt, and routinely provides cause for the artist to turn a cracked mirror on herself.  Kennedy holds a B.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA).   She lives and works on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Largely self-taught, Barbara Laube has studied in Italy, France, and Germany. She also had the good fortune to study in New York with Joop Sanders, a founding member, along with Willem de Kooning and Milton Resnick, of the American Abstract Expressionist group.  She has studied at Pratt Institute, New York Studio School, and the School of Visual Arts. Laube’s paintings have been featured in shows in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Washington State. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections across the country.

Janette Maxey is an American artist.  Born in California, she grew up in Connecticut, and lived in Singapore 2009 to 2012 and Tokyo 2017- 2022 where her work was greatly influenced by the people, places, and things within reach. She holds a BFA from the Hartford Art School in Hartford, CT and has studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in New York, NY.  She has had artist residencies at The League Residency at Vyt, Vermont Studio Center, and Arte Studio Ginestrelle in Assisi, Italy. Her work has been exhibited in USA, Singapore, Italy and Japan. Her work is held in public and private collections worldwide.

Mimi Moncier is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is influenced by the muscle memory of her activities, their associated materiality and histories. She is particularly interested in the communal experiences of having a body, of having memories and of being conditioned by a history that may not really be true while being faced with a future that is predictably disturbing.  She is amazed and shocked at how many of the materials lying around her studio are plastic: acrylics, mylar, borco/Marley flooring, bubble wrap/air pockets, colorful polyester saris, yoga mats, and yupo “paper”. Rather than store the materials until needed otherwise, Mimi decided to use them in her artwork and has reluctantly acknowledged how much she finds them to be beautiful especially when paired with more natural materials such as burlap, silk, canvas, oil paints and cardboard. She recalled making blimps and hot air balloons while studying architecture at RMIT in Melbourne Australia in 1984, reading about the myofascial world’s perspective of the body as bags in bags of water while studying anatomy and Tim Hawkinson’s self-portrait as a plastic body that she saw in the late 1990’s. The Star Trek episode where the alien calls humans “ugly bags of mostly water” also came to mind. She pondered that the reason why so many people enjoy popping the packing bubbles is that it makes them feel present.

Susan Newmark had solo exhibits at Figureworks Gallery, bluetablepost, Grand Army Plaza Library, Garrison Art Center, and the galleries of Long Island, John Jay and St. John’s universities; her work was selected for  group shows at  the Brooklyn Museum, the Parrish Museum, the Center for Book Arts, the Cummings Foundation, and Southampton Arts Center. She had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Lower East Side Printshop‚ Women’s Studio Workshop, and Byrdcliffe Arts Center. She curated The Book As Art for Lehman College Gallery, The Storyteller, a solo exhibit by Olivia Beens at El Barrio Art Space, and many exhibitions at Henry Street Settlement Abrons Arts Center where she directed the visual arts and art education programs. Ms Newmark coordinated Dialogues in the Visual Arts, a series of artists’ conversations at Tribeca Performing Arts Center and the Brooklyn Public Library, and was a member of the board and advisory committees of the  Center for Book Arts and Kentler International Drawing Space.

Patricia O’Maille (b. 1958, Scranton, Pa.) is a painter and photographer who lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Early influences include Early American portrait and embroidery by girls and women whose work became visual diaries of their lives. Her work on paper (particularly Japanese paper), has been a continuous conversation about her life’s story and her intuitive love for automatic drawing and painting with ink to tell that story. The autobiographical nature of the works includes self portraits, portraits of remembered and anonymous faces, her relationships with creatures of the natural and domestic world, and landscapes as memory maps all influenced by emotion and music and idiosyncratic storytelling. O’Maille’s solo exhibitions include “Between Dreams”, at The Noyes Museum of Art, NJ, and “Wars and Weddings” at E-3 Gallery in NYC. She was included in many group exhibitions which included “Let There Be Light” at Umbrella Arts, NYC, “Four Americans', an exhibition of paintings at the Museum of Rochefort-en-terre in Brittany, France. She was represented by The Works Gallery in Philadelphia, and Sailor’s Valentine Gallery in Nantucket. Patricia has received numerous awards which include a Critic’s Residency award at MAP in Baltimore, Md, a Yaddo Fellowship in Saratoga Springs , NY, and painting fellowship/exhibition at Rochefort-en-Terre, Malansac, France. She received a BFA from Binghamton University, and attended Graduate studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

At the heart of the work of Susan Poirier (b. 1952, Boston, MA) is her belief that we are all part of something larger than ourselves, a belief she attributes to her experiences as a former critical care nurse. In her monochromatic paintings she unifies the spiritual with the material. Beginning with black, she pours layers of color which have been carefully tuned through extensive experimentation. In the process she creates a color field of light and space. Minimal in their appearance, her paintings invite the viewer to slow down and linger to fully appreciate them.

With a background as an art therapist, international exhibiting artist and curator for such institutions as the World Bank, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Art Works for Change, Randy Jayne Rosenberg has more recently made a shift to full-time practicing artist. Her provisional, mixed-media artwork incorporates painting, photography, and assemblage. It explores materiality, texture, and layering to reflect stories of a post-natural world where human intervention has blurred the boundaries between natural and artificial. Within the work, we question whether objects are in the process of formation or decay. We see a world where plastics, toxic materials and other human detritus become part of the landscape, and the idea of nature as something “natural” is called into question. Materials such as straw, earth, bamboo, clay and plant roots become a reference for the temporality and cycles of life, death, decay and rebirth. Lead and rubber are incorporated for their malleability, strength and resilience. They are dense materials, heavy enough to bear the burden of life yet pliable enough to adapt. Line is seen throughout her work reflecting the belief that when we lose our connection to nature, we lose the connection to ourselves.She holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Art Therapy from George Washington University, Washington, DC.

Brandon C. Smith has presented work in over 70 solo and group exhibitions nationwide.  Born on a small farm in eastern Kentucky in 1976, Smith earned a BA in art from Eastern Kentucky University and a Masters of Fine Art from the University of Cincinnati in 2004.  Over his career, Smith has worked with a variety of subject matter and ideas.  Most recently, after a return to living on a farm, Smith’s work is engaged with the beauty and brutality associated with living and working on the land.  Brandon C. Smith is currently a Senior Lecturer of Painting and Drawing at the University of Kentucky. Selected solo exhibitions include the Gadsden Museum of Art (AL), Fontbonne University in St. Louis (MO), Frostburg State University (MD), Illinois Central College in Peoria (IL), Heike Pickett Gallery (KY), University of Redlands (CA), Southern Oregon University (OR), Indiana University, (IN), Pittsburg State University (KS), Perry Nicole Fine Art (TN), Tennessee Tech University (TN) and the Pedro Moncayo Foundation Ibarra Ecuador).   

Carolyn Wenning (b. 1967, Pittsburgh, PA) is a painter who exhibits nationally and internationally; most recently at The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, and The Spinning Plate Gallery in Pittsburgh PA. Her work has been included in exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory and The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and is held in private and corporate collections. Her academic training includes an MFA in painting and print media from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She lives and works in Pittsburgh.