The Central Massachusetts Artist Initiative (CMAI) expands the Worcester Art Museum's ongoing commitment to the vibrant art community throughout the region. Launched in December 2017, CMAI showcases the extraordinary and multi-faceted talents of artists who live or work in the greater Worcester region with a solo installation in the Sidney and Rosalie Rose Gallery. Each year two artists, invited by one of the Museum's curators, will display a small grouping of works alongside significant contemporary artists, including Willie Cole, Doris Salcedo and Alice Neel.
This project is supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund.
Featured CMAI Artist
Brittany Severance
November 9, 2022 – May 7, 2023
Brittany Severance is a Worcester-based multimedia artist and an assistant professor of communication at Worcester State University. Her ongoing series Blind/Blend explores the relationship between vision and understanding motivated by her own degenerative vision impairment. Uncorrected, Severance's nearsightedness limits her visual acuity to approximately eight inches which extends to a few feet with correction. Reflective of her visual engagement with the world, she simulates her uncorrected visual experience by photographing her daily life using a soft focus and a shallow depth of field. To this end, Severance subverts the viewer's expectations of what it means for a photograph to accurately serve as a document of the world around us.
Upcoming CMAI Artist
Information coming soon…
Past CMAI Artists
Nancy Diessner
May 11 – November 6, 2022
Nancy Diessner is a Florence, MA, based printmaker who creates etchings and sculptural wall pieces. She is a dedicated environmentalist who works in low-toxic printmaking processes. Diessner taught as a professor for seventeen years before leaving academia in 2010 to create Dog's Eye Print Studio and to teach as a core faculty member at Zea Mays Printmaking in Northampton.
The artist explores the intersection between sculpture, photography, painting and printmaking in her work. Her imagery is created through various alternative photographic and printmaking processes that use UV light to expose film to plates that are developed with water, which she then prints like traditional etchings. She frequently works back into the plates after they are made, and prints the plates onto paper in multiple colored layers.
She draws inspiration from rowing and the river environment. Moving her long, thin boat over the surface of water, Diessner has stated, “…my boat becomes an extension of my studio.” In her recent work she has used paper made from invasive plant species for her artwork. That paper and the images printed on it are shaped, reworked, and adjusted over and over around the hull of a retired wooden rowing shell until the piece is completed. At that point, these paper boats rise and hang onto a wall. Inside are images of plants, human bodies, and animals, which rest and float within the cocoon of a plant-fibered boat.
Cesar Rodrigues
December 1, 2021 – May 8, 2022
Cesar Rodrigues is a Worcester-based abstract artist who responds to the material properties of acrylic paint. Though explorations in color, texture, gravity, and viscosity, his paintings are recognized for their sophisticated and vibrant palettes. Rodrigues considers his body of work a metaphysical representation of what lies outside of our perceived reality.
At an early age Rodrigues was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy which causes progressive muscle weakness. When he could no longer hold a paintbrush Easterseals Massachusetts helped engineer a custom-built assistive device that pours paint and rotates a canvas using Bluetooth technology. Today, he is a beacon of inspiration in the greater Central Massachusetts art community.
Hank von Hellion
May 12 – November 28, 2021
Hank von Hellion is a Worcester artist who works with street art, graffiti, illustration, installation, and photography. Having painted several outdoor murals in Worcester, he will create a site-specific installation at the Worcester Art Museum. It will respond to museums as places of contradiction, both empowering and at times elitist, in light of his own experiences as a developing artist. Von Hellion's work is informed by his experiences growing up in the punk subculture, and reconciling his understanding of his art and identity in light of this. He says, this experience “shaped a virulent belief that action in the face of injustice is the responsibility of each and every human being and should be something we demand from ourselves at any personal cost.”
Von Hellion is Managing Director of the Worcester PopUp at the Jean McDonough Arts Center (JMAC). He is a freelance artist and muralist, workshop instructor, and creative consultant and independent curator for businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Leslie Graff
October 1, 2020 – May 9, 2021
Sutton, MA-based artist Leslie Graff examines the fundamental human experience in her acrylic and mixed media paintings. Her portrait-based series explore individual identity as it is defined by relationships, especially within family settings. Perhaps Graff's best-known series, Domestics considers everyday household activities from a woman's point of view, negotiating personal desires with the expectations outlined by society. She focuses on objects, like desserts or vintage technology, as symbols of our existence and interactions with others. Graff says, “I frequently use repeated or cumulating elements or depict seemingly mundane activities emphasizing that much of the meaning and richness of life is actually found in small or ordinary things. There are metaphors for our larger struggles embedded in many simple daily activities.”
Matthew Gamber
October 9, 2019 – March 29, 2020
Matthew Gamber's photographic practice explores the way meaning is constructed through photography, by isolating and confronting various elements of photography, such as color or light. Gamber created the works in his series This is (Still) the Golden Age by pressing light-sensitive photographic paper against a cathode-ray tube television as it was powering down. In doing so, Gamber captured a residual image as the heat and light of the television subsided. Despite the hazy quality of the images and black edges, indicating the shrinking and fading of the on-screen image, game show props and sitcom actors' faces remain remarkably present in Gamber's work. The photographs from This is (Still) the Golden Age create a tangible and permanent record of fleeting images from broadcast programs. Gamber is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Holy Cross.
Randy LeSage
May 15 – October 6, 2019
Randy LeSage, a resident of Lancaster, MA, has taught painting and printmaking at the Worcester Art Museum for over twenty-five years. LeSage's CMAI rotation features his four-part series Departure, which includes an innovative application of relief block ink to explore his career-long interest in the themes of labor and urban architecture. Departure is LeSage's personal response to New England's rich manufacturing and geographical history. Inspired by the changing landscape and its intersections with markers of industry, LeSage supplements his observations with family history, area research, and fictional writings. This reaction to the urbanization of the landscape is evocative and allusive, without a tangible narrative.
Toby Sisson
November 14, 2018 – May 12, 2019
American | naciremA 1 is a metaphorical mirror — a reversed and fractured image of America across the racial divide. Artist Toby Sisson created this text-based work to explore ideas about 'the other' and author W.E.B. DuBois' concept of Double Consciousness, in which black Americans see themselves reflected in, yet distorted and diminished by the dominant culture. American | naciremA 1 challenges the conventional perspective of a unified nationality.
The artist notes, “When I was young, my father was a member of the Nacirema Club in my Midwestern hometown. The 'Nac' was one of a network of black social clubs throughout the country that served our communities when many private clubs did not welcome non-white members. The reversal of the word 'American' into 'Nacirema' was intentionally political, undermining the status quo.”
Toby Sisson is Associate Professor and Director of the Studio Art Program at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Sisson's studio practice explores complex themes of race and representation through mixed media drawing, painting and printmaking with elemental materials — wax, ink, charcoal and oil on paper or wood. Her recent series engages the poetry and prose of African American writers, re-inscribing their words through an abstract visual vocabulary centered on marginalized identities and the struggle for equality.
Read more about Toby Sisson and her work
Tony King
May 9 – November 11, 2018
The current iteration of WAM's new initiative features five photographs by B.A. (Tony) King. King lived and worked as a photographer in Worcester for many years, detailing the lives of “everyday people” from varying socio-economic backgrounds. This rotation features a grouping of candid portraits taken in the late 1960s into the 1970s, illustrating the diversity of his subjects. In conjunction with the gallery rotation, an installation of 31 photographs is hung on the walls of the Museum Café, illustrating the breadth of King's subject matter which includes still-life and landscape photography. The display of his photographs in the Museum's Rose Gallery and Café commemorates one year since the artist's passing in 2017.
Support for this project was generously provided by the Stoddard Charitable Trust and the Judy and Tony King Foundation.
John Pagano
December 2017 – May 2018
The first artist chosen to debut the Central Massachusetts Artist Initiative was John Pagano, a well-known local painter whose work is often on display throughout central Massachusetts at institutions such as the Fitchburg Art Museum, ArtsWorcester, and most recently in a monographic exhibition at Worcester's contemporary art space, the Sprinkler Factory. The museum showcased John Pagano's large-format painting Infatuation. A Worcester native, John Pagano's paintings characteristically straddle the line between representation and abstraction. Pagano's use of the hard-edged acrylic paint combined with his expressive style, simultaneously conveys the appearance of fluid and frozen gestures.
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