Gallery 263 is pleased to announce our regional juried exhibition, Sensation, Feeling: Texture. This show features the work of 23 New England artists⁠ who explore the theme of texture and is juried by Vivian Poey, a faculty member in the College of Art and Design at Lesley University.

In Sensation, Feeling: Texture, the theme of texture is revealed through painting, drawing, embroidery, photography, sculpture, tapestry, monotype, and mixed media. Although nature and landscape serve as the inspiration for many of the works, concepts of decay, identity, and displacement are also present. In “Seeing Red,” Erica Licea-Kane draws upon a background in textiles and the materials of acrylic medium and pigment to evoke an aerial perspective of a cityscape. Rebecca Skinner is an urban explorer who visits abandoned spaces; in the photograph “West Passage,” Skinner captures peeling paint and rust. “Sunder,” an intimate and detailed hand-built ceramic by Jennifer Langhammer, serves as a specimen sample for a future world.

About the Juror

Vivian Poey is a faculty member in the College of Art and Design at Lesley University. Before joining Lesley, Vivian was a mentor in a photography apprenticeship program for high school students at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and was an artist in residence in Pittsburgh public high schools. She then became an artist teacher at the Children’s Studio Public Charter School for the Arts and Architecture in Washington DC.

As an artist and educator, Vivian engages the arts as a process of investigation both in and out of the classroom. Her photographic work examines a number of issues ranging from history, migration and cultural assimilation to the passing of time. She is American, born in Mexico of Cuban parents and lived in Guatemala and Colombia before moving to the U.S. This complicated trajectory informs all of her work. Read about her family’s history.

Vivian is the 2017 recipient of the Massachusetts Art Education Association’s Massachusetts Higher Education Art Educator of the Year award.

Bio courtesy of Lesley University.