Threads of Impressionism is a woven dialogue between contemporary textile artist Christine Jablonski and three turn-of-the-20th-century women Impressionists: Gertrude Beals Bourne (1868-1962), Beatrice Whitney Van Ness (1888-1981), and Anita Willets-Burnham (1880-1957). Jablonski translates her predecessors' painterly languages into textiles, using euroflax, cotton, and linen as her own palette. Through reimagining selected works by these three artists in a medium long tied to domestic labor, Jablonski aims to honor the lineage of women who have expanded, challenged, and transformed the boundaries of their fields.  

Threads of Impressionism is an exhibition that looks forwards and backwards at once, reinterpreting and reexamining the subjects, materials, and tools with which women artists have traditionally been associated. Jablonski sees the exhibition as an exploration of the inherent differences between the media of weaving and painting, and revels in possibilities created by both the limitations and freedoms of this juxtaposition. She further states of her work:  

'Painting is an inherently flexible medium—responsive to gesture, color, and spontaneous decision-making. Weaving, by contrast, is defined by the strict limitations of warp and weft, requires foresight and structure, and where creativity is bound by constraint. Historically, weaving has been relegated to the realm of "women's work," valued for its domestic utility as opposed to a vehicle of artistic expression. In returning to the loom to interpret the work of women painters, I explore the tension between freedom and limitation, between a medium traditionally celebrated as fine art and one historically dismissed as craft.' 

To honor each artist's vision, Jablonski has carefully selected weave structures she feels resonate with the individual styles of Bourne, Van Ness, and Willets-Burnham. For Bourne, a Boston-based watercolorist, Turned twill is used. This enabled Jablonski to work with many colors at once, allowing for hues to gather or evaporate across the surface, such that the weavings become a vibrating field of saturated threads, much like Bourne's canvases. For Van Ness, a New England painter and art educator, Jablonski chose crackle, a structure that inherently emphasizes the play of shadow and illumination, reflecting Van Ness' devotion to light and shifting tones. Overshot became the foundation for works inspired by Willets-Burnham, a world-traveling watercolorist and teacher from Chicago. Overshot amplifies grids and the geometric bias of weaving, mirroring Willets-Burnhams' exploration of form and structure. 

Pairing her weavings with paintings and watercolors, Jablonski makes visible the enduring influence of Bourne, Van Ness, and Willets-Burnham, creating a throughline bridging her reappropriation of 'craft' with the trailblazing oeuvres of early 20^th century working women artists. Translating brushstroke to thread, Jablonski sees her loom as both homage and subversion – a site where constraint reveals possibility and the overlooked becomes a vessel for reinterpreting the past.  

Christine Jablonski is an award-winning fiber artist whose work fuses traditional weaving and other techniques with contemporary interpretations of personal history, current events, and the narratives connected to women's creative labor.

Rooted in a deep respect for the structural intelligence of the loom, Jablonski's practice reflects both rigorous craft tradition and a conceptual approach to materials. She has exhibited regionally, with pieces held in private collections across the country. Jablonski lives and works in New England, where she continues to explore the expressive possibilities of thread, structure, and the stories woven between them. 

Christine Jablonski: Threads of Impressionism is on view in our upstairs gallery starting December 5, 2025. A reception with the artist will be held Sunday, December 14, 2-4pm.

John MacConnell returns to Childs Gallery with Sum of Its Parts, a new body of work exploring how identity is constructed from fragments, and meaning emerges from pieces assembled, separated, and reimagined. Rendering isolated body fragments in the style of 17th century Baroque still lifes, MacConnell's paintings read simultaneously as intimate portraits, symbolic objects, and reminders of our own impermanence. The exhibition considers what happens after fragmentation, after the rearrangement of elements, and the stories we build from what remains.

Sum of Its Parts takes its title from a phrase in Aristotle's Metaphysics, where in the philosopher asserts that 'the whole is greater than a sum of its parts,' meaning, the entirety of something contains qualities absent in its individual components. To MacConnell, whose work has long examined how identity is constructed from parsed information, the quote is a reminder that a life or story cannot be reduced to a single detail. 

The exhibition continues the artist's ongoing Fragments project, in which MacConnell abstracts the body into isolated parts – an ear, a hand, a head – and asks what narratives emerge absent the whole picture. In Sum of Its Parts, MacConnell has styled his fragmented bodies as Baroque still lifes, a genre of painting rife with multilayered meanings and hidden complexities. In the 17^th century, a still life was never simply an arrangement of flowers, food, or other objects, but rather an allegory – a contemplation on mortality, abundance, and/or desire. MacConnell's paintings are similarly complex - arranged as sumptuous vanitates, their interpretations are purposefully vague and endless.

MacConnell has artfully arranged his work to both stand together and apart. A portrait comprised of multiple canvases can present a complete figure or merely disparate parts of a whole. Each painting or configuration of works tells a different story and begets a different set of questions, allowing MacConnell to play with narrative building and mythmaking. What does one take away from a moment, a glimpse of something selectively curated? MacConnell's oeuvre explores this breaking and rearranging of images that reflects upon the power of a single gesture or detail to hint at a larger life beyond the confines of the frame. 

From the sculptures of antiquity, to the still lifes of the Baroque era, and social media posts of our digital age, an underlying concern of MacConnell's work is the preservation of memory, of community, and of queer identity, in particular. For MacConnell, fragmenting a portrait or body doesn't only divide, it also saves, holding onto something that might otherwise slip away or be lost. In Sum of Its Parts, the artist allows the body to be both object and allegory, channeling the Baroque tradition of the vanitas and memento mori while asking contemporary questions. How do we see ourselves in fragments? How do we assemble meaning from what remains? And what stories do these parts, when brought together, allow us to tell?

 John MacConnell: Sum of Its Parts is on view on Childs Gallery, November 21, 2025 through January 11, 2026. An opening reception with the artist will be held Friday, November 21, 6-8pm.

Intimate Structures pairs the work of partners Sean Flood and Jillian Freyer in conversation around the spaces and moments that shape and inform our lives. Flood's paintings and Freyer's photography both explore diverse environments – those we inhabit, those we create, and those we desire – and how these places reflect back upon us. The exhibition alternatively exudes both energy and quiet, juxtaposing scenes of bustling cities, cacophonous symphonies, peaceful gardens, and familial gatherings. 

By considering the work of Flood and Freyer in parallel, the exhibition reveals a unique dialogue between the two, one propelled by the sharing of space, both artistic and personal. The two artists enjoy a creative relationship, producing art alongside one another that speaks to the world they inhabit and experience both together and as individuals. While Flood and Freyer each focus on their own interpretations of their environs, both create work that feels personal and intimate, whether depicting peaceful moments or crowded scenes.

Feeling a deep connection to his environment, Flood builds his paintings and prints through layered moments of movement, pace, and sound, captured over time experienced in specific locations. The exhibition includes Flood's familiar cityscapes, alive with buzzing energy, but also features new ventures into more intimate settings, including Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsals and his family's backyard garden. The BSO provides a sort of synesthetic experience for Flood, in which music inspires his application of paint. In these sessions, the artist hears new compositions and instrumental experimentations that fill the room and, subsequently, his canvas. Flood's verdant home garden images mark a transition from city living to more suburban spaces, with room to grow for flowers, vegetables, and family. Flood notes that he sees the development between the garden and his family as intertwined – each year they flourish a little more.

Freyer is drawn to the secret moments and sacred sites that comprise our most personal worlds. Through her photographs, she creates the places in which she wants to exist – composites of experiences both lived and hoped for that become enchanting liminal spaces between the real world and her camera lens. In imagining new worlds, Freyer also examines how ours fits together, focusing on natural cycles and ephemeral moments like the bending of a back, the clasping of hands, a hazy sunrise, or the turning of autumn leaves. The mundane, the overlooked, the vulnerable, and the simple attract Freyer's eye with their richness for unexplored inspiration, and their revelation of the quiet framework of our daily lives. 

In Intimate Structures, both Flood and Freyer offer their unique perspectives on the formative influence of place. While each artist's work stands independent of the other, the exhibition allows the viewer to consider the two in tandem, revealing fascinating glimpses of a shared life and shared experiences within the artists' two bodies of work. 

Intimate Structures: Sean Flood & Jillian Freyer will be on view in our main gallery space, September 19 through November 16, 2025. Please join us for an opening reception with the artists, Friday, September 19, 6-8pm.

The Massachusetts North Shore has long been an artistic haven - a picturesque stretch of coastline from Boston to New Hampshire encompassing scenic beaches, quaint towns, and charming harbors. Impressions of the North Shore brings together four prominent artists working along the coast during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gertrude Beals Bourne, William Partridge Burpee, C.E.L. Green, and Edward A. Page, who captured the alluring beauty of the area in paintings, watercolors, and pastels. 

The wide beaches, tidal marshes, and working fisherfolk of the North Shore drew in artists Burpee, Green, and Page, who painted impressionistic renditions of coastal scenery to much acclaim. These three artists, along with Nathaniel L. Berry, Edward Burrill, T. Clark Oliver, and Charles H. Woodbury, would eventually be termed the 'Lynn Beach Painters' – a group working in the area during the last two decades of the 19^th century in a similar, regionally developed, style of impressionism. A generation later, Boston-based watercolorist Gertrude Beals Bourne would continue to produce works based upon the unique beauty of the North Shore, with depictions of marshlands, fishing towns, and tidal flats, influenced by her studies of contemporary European and American masters.

Impressions of the North Shore will be on view in our upstairs gallery, August 8 through September 28, 2025.

In Manufactured Gods, multimedia artist Don Joint reflects upon the eroticism of ancient mythology through contemporary models posed as heroes and deities from antiquity. Showcasing the artist's work in cyanotype and collage, the exhibition is an unabashed display of male sensuality framed within the context of pre-Christian mores, in which sexuality and reproductive processes were seen as a part of religious and normal secular life. Nudity and phallic symbols were frequently found in public art and positively associated with prosperity, fertility, protection, guidance, and luck. 

Manufactured Gods is Joint's second solo exhibition at Childs Gallery. His first, Narcissus, similarly looked to myth for inspiration, specifically that of the Boeotian hunter who wastes away after glimpsing his irresistible reflection in a pool of water. In Manufactured Gods, Joint expands his cast of characters to include other notables from history and legend: Hadrian's deified lover Antinous, Alexander the Great's general and companion Hephaestion, the dolphin-riding musician Arion, as well as various powerful, yet unnamed gods and other anonymous figures whose honed, disrobed bodies recall the sinuous lines of antique statuary. 

The exhibition highlights Joint's interest in cyanotype and collage. Combining found letters, objects, fabrics, handmade papers, and photographs, Joint carefully constructs his own personal deities and mythologies. Many of Joint's works make use of cyanotype, an early photographic process in which chemical solutions exposed to ultraviolet light produce images in a startling shade of blue. The cyanotype medium neatly ties Joint's Classical themes with the modern era, and its vivid hues further recall the Mediterranean's sapphire waters and lapis lazuli stones favored by ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians. Joint uses cyanotype as a modern form of apotheosis – his mere mortal models become eternal, otherworldly deities, ready-made to be worshiped by the viewer.

Joint's pantheon of nubile, young gods are frank in their sensuality, with direct gazes and brazen nakedness, but they also speak to deeper meanings and hidden stories, sometimes referenced in a cheeky or vague title, to be puzzled out by their audience of devotees. They are gods of fortune, guardians, psychopomps, and liminal deities who beckon for their due reverence through the timeless rites and rituals of observation and adoration.

Don Joint: Manufactured Gods is on view at Childs Gallery July 18 through September 14, 2015. The gallery is hosting an opening reception with the artist on Friday, July 18, 6-8pm.

Fashion communicates much as words do. It tells a story.

In this collection of fashionable art, you'll find perfectly articulated kimonos in the woodblock prints of Katsushika Hokuyo, inky dark dress folds by Letterio Calapai and Jared French, George Platt Lynes' ingenious lighting of layered taffeta, vibrant traditional Mexican garments represented by Carlos Merida, the illustrative styling of Jacek Von Henneberg, and the everlasting elegance of Robert Freeman's cocktail attired subjects. 

Peruse through Dress Up: Fashion in Art like an issue of Vogue. The exhibition is available to view on our website through July 31, 2025.

Boston Expressionist painter Jason Berger is revered for the vivid colors and startling immediacy of his vibrant works. Though best known for his paintings, Berger also worked in watercolor throughout his career, capturing, both en plein air and in the studio, brightly energetic renditions of the landscapes, houses, cities, and gardens from favored locales both near and far.                                                                      

Joie de Vivre: Jason Berger Watercolors celebrates the joyful spontaneity of the artist's works on paper. The watercolors detail scenes from Berger's life in New England and Portugal – his homes and favorite haunts in Boston and the sundrenched cities of the Algarve region. The exhibition also surveys lush and brightly colored settings in France and Mexico – areas to which Berger would return frequently in his travels. Joie de Vivre: Jason Berger Watercolors is on view in our upstairs gallery space June 6 through August 3, 2025.

The Moon Visits is a new group exhibition of paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, and art objects, celebrating Pride Month through trans, queer female, and other gender identities, guest curated by longtime Childs Gallery artist, Hannah Barrett. The exhibition gathers the artist's friends and compatriots in a delightfully discordant grouping of enigmatic liaisons, tender moments, quiet scenes, and curious oddities. 

Barrett describes the exhibition as such: 

'The Moon Visits' presents the work of eighteen artists of varying degrees of connectedness and weirdness, including artists affiliated with Childs Gallery, based in Boston or nearby, and/or within shared artistic circles. The title is taken from Nancy McCarthy's painting 'The Moon Visits the Fortune Tellers,' a mysterious image in which two flamingos at a table with a crystal ball are joined by a yellow orb. There is a story here as there is behind each object in the show, or in some cases it's a riddle, a trace, an enigma, a cypher, or a surprise. There are vintage cars, prudes, perverts, ornate and derelict interiors, geometry, astrology, gay constructions, mixed media brews, printed flowers, and of course, flamingos. The moon is a big personality, and it can be a pain, but it's also a feminist, a witch magnet, the menstrual cycle, all things crazy, a beautiful nightlight, lesbian, queer, and trans. 

Once you peek beneath the hood of 'The Moon Visits,' some common currents assert themselves by theme or media. In the esoteric realm: Natalie Hays Hammond's needlepointed astrological signs, Xylor Jane's pyramid of nested primes, and Laurel Spark's 'Beaver Moon.' There are lots of people, including Helen of Troy by Louise Nevelson, out of bounds tourists at the Doris Duke Foundation by Tony Bluestone, Gabrielle D'Estrées and her sister by Catherine Kehoe, the altered Kewpie and his bad boy alter ego after Christian Schad by Caleb Cole, the classic Butch mechanics by Lizi Brown, scenes of counterculture domestic bliss by Opal Ecker DeRuvo, and the typical family portrait (yours truly). Deborah Bright's 'Dorian' is in a class of its own, headless with leather jacket and channeling Betty Parsons. Spooky rooms are represented by an elegant staircase and ethereal chair by Mara Baldwin, as well as formal interiors reclaimed by nature in Shellburne Thurber's '9 Wellington' photographs. Along abstract and constructed lines: a cubic valentine by RJ Messineo; a wire, toothpick, and scrap wood wall sculpture by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung; small raft like objects made of sticks and other things also by Mara Baldwin; and Laurel Spark's cookies dangling from garlands. Two artists reinterpret flora: Nancy Haselbacher presents two photographs of plant matter from the forest floor reverse printed to suggest old negatives, and E. Lombardo collects multitudes of flowers, then inks and directly stamps them onto paper to create iconic symbols of LGBTQ resistance.  

Childs Gallery takes the long as well as the immediate view of history, which is really the moment we are in this annual Pride, as we acknowledge the brutal assault on human rights by the Trump Administration, and at the same time continue our individual and collective art making. While the emphasis is on living artists, our show is enriched by the work of Natalie Hays Hammond (1904- 1985) and Louise Nevelson (1899 - 1988) who left historic legacies in their work, philanthropy, and personas. Both Hays Hammond and Nevelson spent considerable periods of their lives with female companions and otherwise expanded expectations for the private lives of women in the arts. As gender has evolved, the group of living artists here belongs to a spectrum of alternative identities that has the 'female' as the original – the ever-present deviant and outcast - and rapturously embraces trans people of various genders. By banding together and showing our work, we present a unique and varied salad of aesthetics flourishing in the cracks and subcultures. 

The Moon Visits is on view at Childs Gallery in our main space, May 23 through July 13, 2025. The exhibition includes works by Mara Baldwin, Hannah Barrett, Tony Bluestone, Deborah Bright, Lizi Brown, Caleb Cole, Opal Ecker DeRuvo, Natalie Hays Hammond, Nancy Haselbacher, Xylor Jane, Catherine Kehoe, E. Lombardo, Nancy McCarthy, Louise Nevelson, RJ Messineo, Laurel Sparks, Shellburne Thurber, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. Please join us for a reception with many of the artists in attendance, Friday, May 23, 5-7pm.