Past Exhibitions

2022 Exhibitions

Jackie Reeves: Big Plans  May 18 – July 10

ACM@50+1: May 18 – September 4

Complex Muses: May 18 – September 4

Rotations: ACM Photo Album: May 18 – September 4

Gretchen Moran: August 7, 13, 14

Gillian Christy: Tabernacle Tableau: July 17 – September 18

September 18 – December 4, 2022

The Blue Notebooks

Artist and Guest Curator, Anne Plaisance, has assembled a group of artists who are working with what she calls, “their vision of the day after tomorrow.” Responding to contemporary issues and citing research reports from both the United Nations and Harvard University on looming problems like climate change, rising sea levels and extreme weather, Plaisance believes artists can focus on leaving the best legacy they possibly can, through art and culture, for whatever comes next.

She says, “This exhibition is a requiem for humanity, an homage to creativity and beauty, a ‘chapeau bas’ to love and generosity, an adieu to memories, a last embrace of our cherished ones.”

Artists in the exhibition include: Susan Denniston, Kelly Knight, Michel Morelli, Baudouin Mouanda, Sarah Pettitt, Anne Plaisance, Stephanie Todhunter, and Robin Whiteman.

Shown: What Lies Between, 2019, Susan Denniston, monotype

September 25 – November 27, 2022

Sarah Meyers Brent: Out Growth

Brent’s mixed media works take discarded items from her house, community, and town transfer station to create sculptures and alternative landscapes that embody the craziness of motherhood and environmental chaos.

The mix of old kids’ clothes, paint globs, toys, and rags, incorporated with dirt and other natural elements, look as if they are simultaneously growing and decaying. They express the weight of raising children in environmental disorder while juggling our lives and trying to maintain a sense of self and balance. Paintings incorporating decaying flowers and plants drip and wilt. Referencing the overuse of stuff in our lives and the mental load that women carry around, piles of trash take on a second, organic life. Brent works through the mess of life to try to find order in chaos and beauty in the reality of imperfection.

Shown: Feet, 2021, Upcycled objects and mixed media

September 18 – December 4, 2022

Rotations: That 70’s Print Show

The 1960s and 1970s were a turning point in American printmaking, with the rise of communal studios that provided creative and technical exchanges between artists. This exhibit examines printmakers working in the 1970s through works from the collection of the Art Complex Museum and artist’s contributions to the contemporary art form.

Shown: Poseidon’s Pocket, Vivian Berman, collagraph 2017.24

December 4, 2022 – February 12, 2023

Joan Collins:
Cadence – The Surf and Bark of Kauai

Duxbury photographer Joan Collins has spent the last thirty years capturing what she calls, “the dramatic rhythm, permanence, and transience,” of the water in the waves off the coast of Kauai in Hawaii. More recently she has found the island’s giant eucalyptus trees and isolated jungle groves of rainbow eucalyptus, discovering that the curves and bark textures of these ancient trees mimic the fluidity and variety of the ocean’s surf.

In this exhibition we pair what she has captured from her twin muses.

Shown: Joan Collins, Kuilau Trail Blaze, 2019, photograph

2023 Exhibitions

February 19 – May 14, 2023

Botanical Explorations:
Mosaics and Paintings by Lisa Houck

About being asked to create a mosaic for the Frieda Garcia Park in Boston in 2003, Lisa Houck says, “It was the beginning of my involvement with this wonderful, colorful, shimmering medium of mosaic. I have been working with it ever since. My heavily patterned paintings in watercolor and oil led very naturally into this new way of working with small reflective tesserae. With these irregularly shaped pieces, I create vibrant, imaginative images filled with color and pattern. I fabricate some of the ceramic pieces that are in these mosaics. These mosaic trees embody personalities: some are quiet and shy, some are dizzy and easily swayed, some are larger than life. I often use patterned, circular imagery that can evoke cells, flowers, droplets, planets, spirals and seasonal cycles in the natural world.”

Shown: Lisa Houck, It Flowers all Year Long, 2020, mosaic

May 21 – August 13, 2023

Aaron Norfolk: Audio-Visio

The Boston-based painter’s large, color-rich paintings begin with what he hears, not with what he sees.  He says, “Sight and sound run parallel in our perception, and these works do not intend to confound the two.  Rather, the interest is for the viewer to switch back and forth across subjectivity, allowing sound its visual memory.  As a word becomes a sound’s visual placeholder, so these paintings become their portrait.”

Norfolk began painting as a teenager and earned a BFA from the College of William and Mary, and received his MFA from Boston University.

Shown: Aaron Norfolk, Untitled, 2022, oil on panel