Newport Mansions

Through January 12: Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age. During the Gilded Age (1865–1914), Americans’ relationship with animals transformed in lasting ways. Wild Imagination explores how this exciting, tumultuous era shaped our modern attitudes towards animals, from pampered pups to wondrous sea creatures. A broad range of artworks, photographs, scientific specimens, and other objects reflect vital period developments including the dawn of the animal rights movement, the surge in pet keeping, the popularization of natural history pursuits like birdwatching, and the golden era of zoos and circuses. They also reveal the stories and experiences of individual creatures who continue to capture our imagination.

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AVA Gallery and Art Center

January 17–March 1: Scaffolding: This unique group exhibition will feature a variety of artwork installed throughout all three levels of AVA’s beautiful historic textile mill building. The exhibition is themed around the term “scaffold” or “scaffolding” implicating lifting or providing support. Unique programming details are to be announced, visit the website for information. Opening reception, Friday, January 24, 5–7 p.m.

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The Mercy Gallery at The Loomis Chaffee School

The Mercy Gallery invites groundbreaking artists working in a variety of media, representing diverse endeavors and cultural + geographic perspectives to share their art with the community. Open to the public. Through January 24: Destiny Palmer: Spoken in a Language You Can’t Ignore. Opening February 6: Khae Haskell: From Rot to Ravish. Haskell constructs luminous installations that combine intricate graphic drawings of botanical life with acrylic and neon light.

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Fuller Craft Museum

Opening January 25: Everybody’s Bolos. Opening February 1: Cicely Carew: BeLOVEd Ongoing: Waste Not, Want Not: Craft in the Anthropocene. Ongoing: Maria Molteni: Soft Score. Ongoing: Beau McCall: Buttons On! Ongoing: Hand in Hand: Works from the Fleur S. Bresler Collection. Ongoing: Small Wonders: Beauty, Alchemy, and the Art of Enameling. Fuller Craft Museum’s wide-ranging exhibitions and outdoor sculpture showcase the finest contemporary craft in a spectacular organic modernist building and woodland setting. All are welcome, completely free of charge.

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Fitchburg Art Museum

Opening January 18: Tara Sellios | Ask Now the Beasts. Sellios is a Boston-based artist whose monumental photographs highlight the beauty of the grotesque. Opening February 1: Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs is a career retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Stephen DiRado, the leading contemporary artist and fine art photographer in Central Massachusetts. DiRado has taught photography at Clark University in Worcester since 1982, and his work has been exhibited, collected, and published internationally for over forty years.

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Davis Museum at Wellesley College

Opening February 6. The Davis and Wellesley College Library Special Collections join together to celebrate acquisitions of works on paper from the last decade that represent Wellesley’s commitment to inclusive excellence. The artworks in Better on Paper hail from around the world, span diverse makers and approaches, and date to many periods. Free and open to the public.

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Montserrat College of Art Gallery

Montserrat Gallery, January 27–March 5: Jay Critchley, Democracy of the Land, Inc.—FLAGrancy. Reception and performance: Tuesday, January 28, 6–8 p.m. Extending his decades-long critique of patriotism, democracy and corporatism, Provincetown artist Jay Critchley’s exhibition features his compelling uses of the American flag, drawing on his research and work around American symbolism, mythology, history, settler occupation, Native Nations and ecological concerns through various media. See Spotlight Review.

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Armenian Museum of America

Ongoing: Filtered Identity: The Art of Tigran Tsitoghdzyan. Tigran is a New York-based artist whose photo-realistic paintings merge an interest in classical and modern art with an emphasis on his own experiences as a father and an immigrant. He has exhibited widely including Art Basel Miami, Cube Art Fair in Times Square, and globally in cities such as Dubai, Singapore, Zurich, and Brussels.

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Atlantic Works Gallery

January 4–25: Dark and Light, group exhibition by gallery members exploring concept of dark and light within any medium. Opening reception: Saturday, January 4, 3–6 p.m. Third Thursday reception: January 16, 6–9 p.m. February 1–22: New Members Exhibition, Duygu Aytaç, Jean M Bernstein, Jeff Briggs, Elsa Campbell, Nick Di Stefano, Daniel Gaviani, Katie Kimbrell. Opening reception: Saturday, February 1, 3–6 p.m. Third Thursday reception: February 20, 6–9 p.m.

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Boston Sculptors Gallery

Through January 26: Cori Champagne, Water Mgmt and Christina Zwart, La Pucelle. First Friday reception: January 3, 5–8:30 p.m. January 30–February 23: Ravel: Associate Artists Group Exhibition. First Friday reception: February 7, 5–8:30 p.m. Artists’ reception: Saturday, February 15, 2–5 p.m. Closing reception: Sunday, February 23, 3–5 p.m. Opening February 27: Mags Harries, An Artist’s Chair and Jonathan Latiano, Scaling A Pyramid.

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Norman Rockwell Museum

Home of American Illustration. Ongoing: Anita Kunz: Original Sisters, Portraits of Tenacity & Courage; Illustrators of Light: Rockwell, Wyeth, and Parrish from the Edison Mazda Collection. Through February 23: Norman Rockwell: Home for the Holidays. Guided tours of Rockwell’s Studio and galleries by reservation. Museum Store (and online store). Save time with online tickets. More at NRM.org.

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Worcester Art Museum

Through January 20: Im/Perfect Modernisms: Asian Art and Identity Since 1945. Experience the range and originality of modernist styles across Asia, and learn how artists worked within this Western art-historical construct to explore cultural identity, resistance, and transformation. Through March 9: Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate. Explore more than two dozen iconic paintings traveling from Tate in London, and discover how these boundary-pushing artists used the nude to challenge preconceptions about age, race, gender, and sexuality.

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The Umbrella Arts Center

Opening January 13 in the Allie Kussin Main Gallery: Kat O’Connor, Twice the Speed of Bliss. Opening February 28 in the Black Box Theater: Where We Belong, a New England premiere by Madeline Sayet, directed by Tara Moses. An indigenous theatre-maker journeys across geographic borders, personal history, and cultural legacies in search of a place to belong. In 2015, Mohegan theatre-maker Madeline Sayet traveled to England to pursue a PhD in Shakespeare, echoing the path her ancestors took in the 1700s, leading to a remarkable journey of self-discovery. This ground-breaking, one-woman event weaves together humor, searing insight, and the timeless power of story-telling, to explore the importance of honoring our roots and the universal quest for belonging/where we belong.

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Three Stones Gallery

September 11–October 20: Edge of Dreams. Patricia Ganek’s paintings radiate with an impasto style. Natasha Dikareva’s surreal sculptures are conduits to contemplation. Lyca Blume’s paintings, inspired by kintsugi (mending with gold), evoke healing the psyche through dreams. Reception: Saturday, September 21, 6–8 p.m. Opening: October 23: Belle Terre. Jonathan MacAdam’s paintings capture the tranquility of New England landscapes. Jennifer Johnston’s abstract photographs highlight elements that shape the land. Colleen Pearce’s paintings interpret geological formations and plants. Reception: Saturday, November 2, 6–8 p.m.

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Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University

The Museum has a permanent collection focusing on American art, rotating exhibitions of contemporary, regional artists, and a gallery focused on the artist Meta Fuller. Through January 26: Ileana Doble Hernandez: My Dear Americans, It’s Not Enough; DM Witman: Ecologies of Restoration; Suzanne Révy: A Murmur in the Trees. Opening February 15: Tina Feingold, Tim McDonald, Kathryn Geismar, Alice Dillon, Lisa Tang Liu, Scott Foster. See website for hours.

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Brickbottom Gallery

January 3–28: AWAKE—An Exhibition of Mindfulness & Presence in Art. Opening reception: Friday, January 3, 6–8 p.m. Curated by Jack Energy. February 6–28: Paint, Cut, Fold, Stitch. Opening reception: Sunday, February 9, 3–5 p.m. Closing event: Sunday, February 23, 3–5 p.m. Curated by Diane Novetsky, this show explores the ideas and creative process of four abstract artists—Denise Bergman, Yildiz Grodowski, Novetsky and On Kyeong Seong—all are expressive colorists who have
thoughtfully invented ways of reinvigorating modern abstraction. 

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Kingston Gallery

January 2–February 2, Main, Center and Project Spaces galleries: Phyllis Famiglietti and Debra Samdperil: We Are Not the Stories We Tell Ourselves: Intersecting Thoughts—Parallel Play. Opening reception: Friday January 3, 5–8 p.m. February 5–March 2, Main and Center galleries: Cree Bruins in collaboration with Martin and Erik Demaine: (In)Secure. Project Space Gallery: Brian Littlefield: Again. Opening reception: Friday, February 7, 5–8 p.m.

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Mattatuck Museum

The museum showcases American art and cultural history through its collection of over 15,000 objects, provides access to a research library and archives, hosts lectures, workshops, and community events, and offers spaces for corporate, wedding, and holiday rentals. Through January 5: Poskas, Father and Son. Through January 12: Federico Uribe’s Menagerie. Ongoing: O’Keeffe in Conversation. Opening January 12: Mixmaster 2025: Juried Members’ Exhibition. Opening January 19: Gordon Parks, Homeward to the Prairie I Come. Opening celebrations: Sunday, January 19.

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Colby College Museum of Art

Ongoing: Some American Stories is the newly installed thematic presentation of works from Colby’s collection in the museum’s Lunder Wing that leads visitors on a journey from before the founding of the United States to the present day. Galleries represent a different topic within the broader narrative of American art and history, reflecting a great diversity of experiences.

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The Current

Opening January 16: Timothy Curtis: Two Hundred Years of Painting. Curtis will explore the relationships between Pennsylvania Dutch Stoneware of the 1860s in Philadelphia, 1960s graffiti writing in the same area, and his own artwork, highlighting the thread of influence in one region over 200 years. View original stoneware and new paintings by Curtis, along with a special area dedicated to celebrating the lives and work of 1960s African American Philadelphia graffiti writers.

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