BRATTLEBORO-The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) will open six new exhibits Saturday, Nov. 14, at a 5 p.m. reception at 10 Vernon St.
The new exhibitions include large-scale paintings by Hayal Pozanti; an installation by Sara Jimenez; and photographs by Genesis Báez, Farah Al Qasimi, and Pia Paulina Guilmoth.
Pozanti’s “The World Sang Through Me” will bring together the artist’s vibrantly colored paintings and sculptures of abstract, fluid forms that often resemble flowers, waving foliage, or sea creatures.
The painter applies pigment directly to the canvas, then blends and smooths the colors with her hands. “Through this intensely tactile process,” Pozanti “seeks to embody human creativity in an age of artificial intelligence,” according to a news release.
Jimenez’s site-specific installation, “the story never stops beginning or ending,” honors women and nonbinary people who lived through the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines between 1898 and 1946.
Using handmade textiles, carved ceramic, and collage, the installation includes 80 images, some pressed into clay, from the 1899 American textbook Our Islands and Their People as seen with Camera and Pencil. The exhibit transforms the gallery, a former train-station bathroom, into “a place of remembrance, reflection, and tenderness,” the news release said.
“Teach Me How To Hold” brings together photographs that explore familial, social, and natural connections.
Báez’s photos feature “familial relationships and hair braiding,” according to the release, while to Al Qasimi’s show “carefully staged domestic scenes examining ownership,” and Guilmoth’s nighttime photos “reveal interdependence in the natural world.”
The other three exhibits feature artists from near and far working in a variety of media at various scales.
“Our Listening Hands: Recent Prints by the Mokuhanga Sisters” presents work by nine artists who use traditional Japanese woodblock-printing techniques to “explore water, patterns, place, time, and the cosmos,” the release said.
The museum’s large window bays will display “An Invitation to Notice,” by Margaret Shipman, who calls her intricate paintings of roots, stems, leaves, and flowers arranged in circular formations “chaos mandalas,” according to the release.
“Becorns” is an exhibition of photographs, videos, and tiny sculptures by artist David M. Bird, a former Lego toy designer who now uses sticks, acorns, and other natural materials to create “small, expressive characters,” according to the release.
Bird then stages scenes in natural settings to make photographs and films of his Becorns.
“There’s a sense of discovery in each of these exhibitions,” said Sarah Freeman, BMAC’s director of exhibitions, in a news release. “Together, they explore how we perceive, remember, and relate to the world around us.”
The opening reception will include a DJ, food, and a cash bar.
For more information, visit brattleboromuseum.org.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.