This fall, the Fine Arts Center celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with a bold lineup of exhibitions and residencies that spotlight the region’s thriving artistic community and reaffirm the legacy of the Fine Arts Center as a hub for contemporary art.
Across our three visual arts spaces — the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Hampden Gallery, and Augusta Savage Gallery — the fall season features groundbreaking exhibitions and research-driven projects by both emerging talents and established innovators.
From immersive installations to deeply researched new works, the Fine Arts Center’s visual arts programming invites the community to imagine the next fifty years of artistic innovation.
Hampden Gallery
This fall marks the debut of the landmark Hampden Gallery Triennial, a new juried exhibition showcasing contemporary works of art submitted by artists living within fifty miles of UMass. The inaugural show, Reflecting on the Past/Dreaming the Future, opens September 12 and will run through December 3, with a special installation in the Incubator Project Space on view through May 8.
Juried by Nick Capasso, director of the Fitchburg Art Museum, the exhibition offers a vivid snapshot of the region’s creative energy.
“I understand the power of such a show and its role as a locus for creativity in the community,” writes Nick Capasso in his juror’s statement. “I endeavored to put together a set of artworks that would, both obviously and subtly, create a mental and aesthetic space for visitors to consider what has come before and what is yet to be.”
University Museum of Contemporary Art
Across campus, the University Museum of Contemporary Art opens on September 12 with two exceptional group exhibitions, both running until December 5.
Nodding to the museum’s very first exhibition in 1975, Artist & Fabricator, a new exhibition Artist/Fabricator reimagines the artist's relationship to creating. It shifts the focus from artist-and-fabricator to artist-as-fabricator, emphasizing handcraft, tactility, and a rejection of industrialized production.
Featuring eleven artists who integrate textiles into their studio practice, Artist/Fabricator positions fabric as a disruptive, experimental medium.
In the spirit of anniversaries, over in the East Gallery the museum celebrates the twenty-five-year legacy of a local treasure and force in the world of printmaking: the Florence-based Zea Mays Printmaking.
Artistic Journey: Zea Mays Printmaking at 25 Years recognizes the studio’s history of workshops, education, research, and artist residencies committed to safer printmaking and artistic growth.
The exhibition is organized around eight themes: language, sense perception, emotion, reason, imagination, intuition, memory, and belief.
“People often come to Zea Mays thinking that they’re going to see a Zea Mays style, and it doesn’t exist. We really are a close group of very individual artists,” says Liz Chalfin, director of Zea Mays Printmaking. “There’s a standard of quality that runs through and there’s a standard of commitment to each artist’s practice, but the voices are so diverse.”
Opening October 17 and running through the spring, Tammy Nguyen’s exhibition, Dialogue with a Collection: The Political Uses of Madness, showcases a new series of paintings responding to the Ellsberg Papers housed at UMass.
Augusta Savage Gallery
From October 3 through October 31, tattoo artist Alex Leon Sherker transforms Augusta Savage Gallery into an immersive installation that fuses tattoo imagery, digital culture, corporate logos, and spiritual iconography.
In Who Are You? Who Am AI?, mirrors, screens, and symbols fill the space, inviting reflection on how identity is shaped, influenced, or surrendered.
Later, Augusta Savage Gallery honors the beloved late UMass professor and artist, Richard Yarde, and his former student Susan Montgomery in an exhibition celebrating watercolor painting.
Reserved Passages: Watercolors by Susan Montgomery and Richard Yarde muses on the untouched spaces in watercolor and reflects on the exchange of knowledge and relationship between a teacher and student. The exhibition runs November 14 through February 26.
“He [Yarde] was a master of weaving connections and threads of ideas and encouraging his students to think critically and contribute to this larger tapestry of ideas,” says Montgomery. “To this day, when I meet someone who also studied with Richard, there is an instant shared bond followed by inspiring stories.”
“When all is said and done, I see the most important thing I have to offer is my art, which is an act of meditation between myself and the awesome mystery of creation.” — Richard Yarde (1939-2011)
Residencies
As a feature of the Fine Arts Center’s fiftieth anniversary season, all three visual arts spaces will host artists in residence.
Artists will spend the fall semester researching with UMass faculty in various departments, — including environmental studies, the library collections, and the UMass research institute Slavery North — studying works in the museum’s permanent collection, and engaging with students and the community.
Each residency will culminate in a solo exhibition this spring, blending academic inquiry with personal studio practice. More details will be shared about each exhibition closer to their openings in the spring.
Story by Maddie Fabian.