Now in its seventh year of supporting North Adams artists with a bricolage of professional development and matched savings incentives, Assets for Artists is excited to announce a new cohort of artists living and working in our amazing hometown. Comprised of both newcomers and longtime residents, this group ranges from paint to fiber and text to sculpture. We’re so glad to have these artists contributing to our community!

Galen Cheney

The creative process and the exploration and manipulation of materials are the chief drivers of Galen Cheney’s work, always with an eye toward gritty beauty. Her current project builds off of work she developed during a 2015 residency in China. She guides fragments of past paintings, old receipts, used airline tickets, and other remnants into the surface of new paintings until they become one. These remnants imbue the paintings with memory, history, and a sense of time that Galen finds both beautiful and compelling. During her time with the North Adams Project, she plans to work with a collaborator to create a short video of her artistic practice and to use the A4A trainings to learn how to best utilize the video in her marketing to donors, gallerists and collectors.

“My husband and I moved to North Adams in late 2017 because of the community of artists that we came to know during our visits to Mass MoCA. We recognized that North Adams was a place where the arts and artists were supported and honored. I am grateful for that community of artists and for the opportunities afforded to share my work with the community though various exhibition platforms.”

William Tavish Costello

William Tavish Costello’s work spans the disciplines of poetry, drawing, sculpture, masonry, photography, performance and community practice. His oil landscapes and portraits have an impressionistic connection to place and his metal and stone sculptures grow directly out of the land. To Tavish, art is crucial to being able to change the social environment into something useful, enjoyable and sustainable for a broad spectrum of people. During his time with the North Adams Project, he has set himself the goal of building his savings, as well as documenting and marketing his work. For future projects, he is thinking about the elements of language and place, both present and past, as well as population social shifts in the northeast US.

“The opportunity to work at the [MASS MoCA] museum has brought me much inspiration, from the art I handle and enjoy there and the cultural overflow it has created in the town. I intend to forge the time and resources to take advantage of these inspirations and funnel it into something productive.”

David Lachman

After a decade working in video art and installation and exhibiting broadly on six continents, David Lachman returned to his roots in drawing and painting. His new body of 2-dimensional work primarily explores the figure, portraits and landscape. Using atmosphere, mood, symbolism, allegory and humor, he looks critically at the current state of the world and humanity’s role in altering and remaking it. Recently, he expanded into book arts with a collaborative project with artist Marianne Petit. He has taught art at all levels, from after-school arts to college courses. A North Adams resident since 2002, David is looking forward to meeting more of North Adams’ more recent artist arrivals through the North Adams Project as well as developing a focused business plan around his painting and drawing practice.

“After making a shift back to drawing and painting, I started exhibiting work again locally. I want to continue growing what I have begun with that shift and to begin to show out of the area again--North Adams is a very supportive place for this endeavor.”

Chalice Mitchell

Through gestural paint strokes, Chalice Mitchell’s work explores the subjectivity of human experience. Themes that address impermanence, identity, power dynamics, eroticism, and an interrogation of gender categories weave through her different bodies of work. Although grounded in the history of western art, Chalice has been deeply influenced by ink and brush painting from China and Japan. Opposite elements are interwoven in her work to convey an underlying Zen philosophy. A native Berkshirite, Chalice recently moved back home after years abroad in Japan and the United Kingdom. With support from the North Adams project, she is looking forward to upgrading some important equipment, purchasing materials in preparation for her next body of work, and getting more involved in the North Adams community at large.

“North Adams has the perfect combination. I crave the proximity to nature, a thriving arts scene, a manageable city size, and, as a queer woman, knowledge that my rights will be respected here in Western Massachusetts. It’s not often that you find hiking trails, inclusive policies, and first-rate art all in one place.”

Katie Murphy

Ceramicist Katie Murphy relocated to North Adams with her family in August 2019 with the goal of opening a live-work space and gallery with her husband Jason Murphy. In their house just up the hill from MASS MoCA, S T / / . \ I F E (as the space will be called) will include an art gallery, studio, and risograph publishing. In Katie’s personal practice, the items of a traditional still life take on new, ceramic life. Each of her clay pieces is uniquely crafted by hand from the conceptual stages to the finished product. The work romanticizes the organic organization of forms in nature and focuses on its uncontrollable aesthetic. During her time with the North Adams Project, she will continue the renovation to turn the house she and her husband purchased into the S T / / . \ I F E gallery space, and she is looking forward to the support that will come from joining North Adams’ thriving artistic community.

“We have been searching for a place to invest in a live/studio/gallery space all across the southeast for many years, and, while we do love and appreciate the beauty of that part of the country, no place hit us with a wave of inspiration the same way that MASS MoCA and North Adams has.”

Hideyo Okamura

Painter Hideyo Okamura has lived in North Adams for 25 years and has worked as an artist for even longer. Taking the opportunity to retire early from a museum career in 2016, Hideyo shifted his art practice to a full-time occupation. Today, he creates his paintings using basic materials and simple marks. Having grown up in Japan but working now in the US, he finds that non-imagery-based artwork provides a global interaction free of ingrained ideologies, aesthetics and regional frames of reference. Going forward, Hideyo hopes to make his work more physically accessible by exploring public art opportunities, such as North Adams’ DownStreet Art (in which he participated this past summer) or the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s recent Sakura Matsuri Festival. He is also exploring printmaking, and hopes for these new directions to move his art out of the more limited audience of a traditional gallery space. To this end, he plans to use the North Adams Project grant to invest in printmaking opportunities and digital software.

“I see North Adams as an ideal community that possesses the space, openness and creative development to be a laboratory for new art alternatives to the status quo.”

Francesca Olsen

A quilter and seamstress, Francesca Olsen has thread in her blood. Her great-great-grandfather was a tailor in Naples, Italy, and her great-grandmother worked in a shirt factory in New York. Now Francesca has taken this heritage into a modern quilting and alterations practice. Even when working with a sewing pattern, every choice she makes results in a product that is a unique reflection of herself and the person the work is for, from the colors, to the substrate, to the seam-finishing technique, to the custom tag. Her online shop, No Aesthetic Quilts and Vintage, has additionally traveled to craft shows around the region, including Picnic Portland, a juried show in Portland, ME. During her time with the North Adams Project, Francesca hopes to sharpen her financial and accounting skills and put to work the marketing acumen from her day job for her own creative practice. With the grant funds she will invest in new and better equipment, such as an industrial sewing machine or longarm quilting machine.

“I believe sewing and tailoring are viable services in the Berkshires, a land full of people who buck trends, reject capitalist tendencies, and seek to live a slower life…A handmade garment is, just by existing, an act of protest against the production systems that would prefer we worship the new and never look behind the curtain.”

Eric Reinemann

Eric Reinemann designs his paintings to capture a sense of time and place. His process has two main parts: research and invention. The former is done on location and involves careful observation of the world. The latter is accomplished in the studio and is a mix of memory, expression and his research. He paints subjects he can access on a daily basis, such as nearby Clarksburg State Forest or the interior of his home up Notch Rd. Working with subjects in close proximity allows Eric to constantly gather new information. Video has become an important medium for his research as well, in order to capture movement, time, and a roving point-of-view. Since becoming a father, Eric’s work has changed as he watches his child discover and observe the world from a completely new perspective. He has shifted away from painting in series to single, large-form assemblages. This, he says, is a turning point for his practice, and he is excited to join the North Adams Project at such a pivotal moment in his work, when he most needs support to develop his business.

“North Adams is a great little spot for us to call home…The artistic opportunities, creative community, and wilderness make this little city ideal for artistic and professional growth.”

Molly Rideout

Writer and bookmaker Molly Rideout creates stories and essays inspired by the deep history of place and the people who inhabit those places. She thinks often about how few people actually read the contemporary modes of short story publication—literary journals—and explores instead how to connect with her rural neighbors, the people attached to the places about which she writes, through zines or fine art bookmaking and letter press printing or vinyl public art installations in empty storefronts. In transitioning her writing to these physical forms, Molly has found she suddenly needs to contend with the selling and distribution of objects when before she only needed to consider a digital file. She is looking forward to A4A’s business and sales workshops to help her with this new aspect of her work.

“Collaboration is a core part of my practice, and I look forward to the opportunity to provide my skills to the projects of others in the area and vice versa.”

WALLASAUCE / ANDREW CASTEEL

Andrew Casteel first developed the fashion label WallaSauce with his partner Sarah DeFusco by sewing pockets onto t-shirts. They have since broadened their practice to upcycling second-hand materials and giving clothes and fabrics that have been thrifted a second life through sewing, screen printing, hand and machine embroidery and heat press alterations. Today, using secondhand materials is core to WallaSauce’s mission to promote awareness of the unethical practices and environmental damage caused by the second biggest polluting industry after oil—including the dyes used, the microplastics washed out of polyester clothing, and the labor inequality in the garment industry. Andrew’s goal while in the North Adams Project is to invest in heavier duty sewing equipment and to grow a cohort of community members interested in altering or sewing their own clothes.

“Within the five years we lived [in North Adams] through MCLA, we loved it so much we decided to stay and pursue our careers as artists.”

CIARRA FRAGALE

In December 2019, Singer-songwriter Ciarra Fragale joined our 2020 North Adams Project cohort, a belated, but welcome addition. Originally from the Hudson Valley, Ciarra played her first concert here in North Adams in early 2019 as part of Common Folk’s Shut The Folk Up. About this first show, Ciarra says, “I was immediately taken with the community and compassion that North Adams has to offer. Since then, I have been coming back regularly playing shows and spending time with the amazing friends I have made there. I truly fell in love with the community, and consider myself to be a part of it now.”

With her indie-pop sound dripping in neon, Ciarra released her second full-length album Call It What You Will this summer. Her work is heavily influenced by her surroundings – and now that she’s relocated to North Adams, we can’t wait to see how her work will change and grow.

Our work in Massachusetts is made possible by our wonderful funders and partners, specifically the Barr Foundation, Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation, and the United States Department of Agriculture.