Artists We Work With

Vincent Arcilesi

Painting, Drawings, Prints

Arcilesi’s storied career takes center stage on this exhibition, with figure studies, sketches and landscapes supplementing these rich, large-scale figurative paintings. The range of human emotions are placed in the framework, in many cases, of the classical world. Allegories and mythological references abound, as do art historical references. The multiple layers of meaning embedded in the works only serve to elevate the high quality of the artworks themselves. A pleasant marriage of form and content results.

Alexis Callender

Painings, Drawings, Paper Sculpture, Installation Art

Alex Callender, b.1980 in New York City, graduated with her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. Callender works in the mediums of painting, drawing and installation, and has shown nationally and internationally and completed residencies with art institutions such as Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass in Brooklyn and DRAWinternational in France. Her work is held in the collections of the American Embassy in Kyrgyzstan and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. Alex Callender currently lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College.

Jen Dwyer

Ceramic Sculpture, Mixed Media

Jen Dwyer grew up in the Bay Area, California. Dwyer attended University of Washington in Seattle, WA, and received dual degrees in Ceramics and Environmental Science. She has been awarded numerous grants, scholarships and fellowships, including the Pottery Center in Jingdezhen, China; Salem Art Works, in upstate New York; Trestle Gallery Residency program in Brooklyn; and Kala Arts Center in Berkeley, CA. Prior to starting graduate school, Dwyer was based in Brooklyn. She recently completed her master’s degree program at University of Notre Dame, where she received a Full Fellowship and graduated in May 2019. She has received numerous interviews and publications, including Create Magazine, Vogue, Hyperallergic, Newsweek, Vice, and I-D magazine, among others. Dwyer is one of the featured artists in the book The New Age of Ceramics published by Hannah Stouffer. Dwyer's work asks questions about the commodification of women's body through an art historical lens fused with in our current digital age, as well as drawing on inspiration from her lived experiences. When she is not making art she is dancing, running or doing hot yoga.

John Defeo

Painting, Drawings, Tapestries

“At any time, I could head to the middle of the forest, strip off my clothes, and dive into a river to wash off the sins of contemporary society in the primordial essence of nature. Knowing I have this freedom is how I get through my day.”
Johnny Defeo’s work belongs to the concept of souvenir, attempting to capture the experiences he has in the natural world, where he feels free and most at home. His paintings and rugs focus on the physical margins between unmitigated wilderness and human construction in an attempt to represent the psychological division between egocentric and holistic thought. He makes work with the earnest goal of minimizing the perceived divide between the natural world and the manmade and illuminating the connections between beauty both quintessential and manufactured. Merging his explorations of the sublime with the process of making functional works that address the barriers between nature and culture, inside and outside.
Johnny earned his MFA in painting from CU Boulder in 2017. During his time at CU he exhibited in national juried MFA exhibitions in New York and Chicago.

India Evans

Mixed Media, Painting

When I use objects I see them as a vocabulary of feelings. My work explores intuitively my various stages of feminine awareness. It examines the female form, gender roles, relationships, sexuality and interconnectedness. Through the
recycling and juxtaposition of various objects (forgotten, discarded and seemingly worthless), I am attempting a transformation towards a precious recollection. Resurrecting memories, collective yet intimate, visceral yet
tender....piecing together beauty as if telling a story.
I am inviting the viewer to explore their childhood innocence and fantasies through their adult nostalgia and
sensuality. I hope to create a romantic and playful portrait of the female identity with the possibility of entering
dreams: my own or someone else's, as when a child plays dress up....full of the yearning for beauty and mystery.

Nola Romano

Paintings, Drawings

Continuing to paint on both large and small scale canvases (and wood panels), Romano depicts herself as the model cast in many roles: playful, sultry, wide-eyed, erotic, innocent and active. Nola Romano uses the four seasons to represent man's life cycle, as we grow and return to the earth. Her paintings brim with symbolism and characters almost always accompanied by intricately articulated
animals. Twin girls frolic in the background representing our multifaceted personalities, while polar bears, pigeons, furry tails and mud move us through the cold toward love, lust and rebirth. Flowers, fresh soil and wet cement in the backdrop evoke our urban senses. The message in all of these paintings is fraught with ambiguity. Romano shows us at our most basic, prehistoric and primal. Our shared blue print, our internal systems, our animal states.

Arlene Rush

Sculpture, Mixed Media

My practice is united by a common exploration of social and humanistic ideas that I execute through the mediums of sculpture, new media, installations, and photo-based works.
Beginning with an inquiry into our social and political environment, my interdisciplinary work investigates the development of an individual’s sense of self and the evolution of a shared consciousness. Here I explore issues surrounding women’s rights, gender and identity, and a concerted reaction to the changing political and social climate of our era.
One of my recent series of work Evidence of Being was created when I embarked on archiving my career. Out of reflecting on my own history and the challenges of sustaining oneself as a career woman artist in an atmosphere of commercialism this began to raise questions for me about the nature and importance of being an artist.
My most current series Current Affairs explores the political state and how it challenges gender identity, me too era, racism and our human rights as a whole.  Reflecting on the challenges of being a woman artist in an atmosphere of consumerism I interrogate the patriarchal lens through which my work is viewed.  What is important to me as an artist is to continue to explore and create a dialogue with others through my art.

Rachel Grobstein

painted cut paper, miniature sculpture

I create miniature sculptures and paintings, filtering real world objects through a meticulous handmade
process and using a radical scale shift to invite close scrutiny. Current work takes the form of accumulations
and visual inventories in both real and imagined categories.

Rachel Grobstein is currently a 2017-2018 fellow at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in Roswell,
NM. She received her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and her BA in
Philosophy and Visual Arts from Bowdoin College in 2006. Other selected awards and fellowships include a
Jentel Foundation Artist in Residence Fellowship, a Hammersley Foundation Grant, a Studios of Key West
residency, a Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship and Residency supported by the Joan Mitchell
Foundation, Graduate Fellowship and Honors from RISD, and the Sitings Prize for a site-specific installation
at the RISD Museum. She has exhibited widely, most recently in a two-person show at Ulterior Gallery in
New York, NY and a solo show at the Roswell Museum of Art and Design in Roswell, NM.