essential workers | essential work

April 10 - June 5, 2020

Art and art making don’t stop for a pandemic. Nancy Schieffelin took to the streets with her camera and bore witness to the frontline workers in the early days of the Covid year. Kate Hanlon viewed the roof snow shovelers, dog walkers and gardening neighbors from her window in Newburyport and made luminous white line woodcuts. Laura Chasman’s concisely observed gouache portraits were done prior to the pandemic and they honor our perennial frontline workers in scrubs. These pieces plus Sachiko Akiyama’s sturdy and whimsical wood sculpture celebrate the creative human spirit, which survived this long, hard pandemic year.

about the artists

Sachiko Akiyama is a recent recipient of a Piscataqua Artist Advancement Grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Colman Award, Mass Cultural Council, a Brother Thomas Fellowship, and in 2009 she was an ICA Boston Prize nominee. She has a studio in Portsmouth and teaches at UNH. She was at Nielsen Gallery and has shown at many other galleries and museums nationwide. Life On Earth: Superweed, Superpredator, Super Bloom was a 2020 Group exhibition at Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, NC. The show statement reads,  “Like weeds, race is a classification with no basis in science. This show explores the role of language in creating insider/outsider status, and juxtaposes the inherent wisdom of nature as a counterpoint to manmade divisions.”

Laura Chasman shows at Gallery Kayafas in Boston. She was a finalist at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition twice, and a Finalist in the Boston Artadia Awards. In 2020, Laura was in We Are All Contagious at University Art Gallery, UMass Dartmouth College of Visual & Performing Arts as well as the University of Texas, 35th Annual International Exhibition. Laura says, “I am drawn to how my subjects look, feel, and express themselves, and how I have come to know them. To capture the physicality and the spirit of my subjects is what I am after. It is the experience of finding myself with others that I had never imagined knowing that soon grows to the recognition that here is an opportunity to capture my experience.”  She often works in series; nurses, social workers, kids and friends, and most recently longhaired cattle.

Master printmaker, Kate Hanlon, lives in Newburyport and shows at Paramour Fine Art in Franklin, MI. She in many collections including The Boston Athenaeum and The Indianapolis Museum of Art. She has been in recent shows at The Boston Printmakers, the Boston Athenaeum, Lamont Gallery, Exeter Academy, and the Society of Graphic Artists 83rd Member’s Exhibition, The Old Print Shop, NYC where she won the Speedball Art Materials Purchase Prize. Kate has perfected the white line woodcut technique that uses one block and many colors, painstakingly printed one color at a time.

Painter, collage, and mixed media artist Nancy Schieffelin has shown at the Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, Maine and at Soprafina in Boston. Shesays, “I love the process of making artwork. For me, this involves connecting deeply with materials, such as paint, gel mediums, pastel, ink, papers, wood, sand, and wax. I also build many of the wood painting surfaces . . . My approach is an intuitive one of trial and error: a kind of meditation.Being a street photographer is a very different process from mixed media work. I make photographs of street scenes and intimate portraits of people whom I meet. I love capturing the fleeting moment of life on the street.”