About the Artists

Nicole Duennebier received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art with a major in painting. She currently lives and works in Malden, Massachusetts. Duennebier's work explores a range of interests, including the intricacies of darkness, the flora and fauna of sea and land, the aesthetic of 16th century Dutch still-life painting, and the witty and macabre throughout European art history. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Earlier this year she was featured in a sold-out solo show, Floral Hex, at 13FOREST Gallery.

Kathryn Geismar is an artist and psychologist who lives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her interest in identity and internal harmony infuses her professional life in both areas. Her work explores the complex and often fragmentary nature of identity through portraits and abstract collage. In each instance, faces, shapes, and materials are placed next to or on top of one another, asking, “what happens, who am I, what changes, when I land here?”

Catherine Graffam is a painter and educator living in Portland, Maine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2015. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, University of New Hampshire Art Museum, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the University of North Florida. In 2018, Graffam was profiled in A Big Important Art Book (Now with Women!) by Danielle Krysa, founder of the Jealous Curator. Graffam's work is almost entirely figurative, with a continuing motif of portraiture.

Jeffrey Heyne was born and raised in Bristol, Connecticut. As an architect and a photographer, Heyne is intrigued by accidental or unconscious beauty, and much of his early work focused on portraying industrial architecture in a heroic light. He finds there to be a truthful honesty demonstrated by engineers designing to resolve a physical requirement.

Joe Keinberger grew up in Hingham, Massachusetts, before attending Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He now lives in Somerville where he paints and illustrates out of his hidden studio deep below the earth's crust. Keinberger works primarily in ink and acrylic, doing loose ink drawings on top of built-up texture of acrylic and assorted dry media.

Tanya Hayes Lee is a visual artist who works primarily in oil in a modern abstract impressionist style. Her paintings convey the sublime in nature and are visual metaphors for our relationships to the world and to each other. Lee studied studio art at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Scottsdale Artist School, and Northern Arizona University. Lee lives and works in Cambridge.

Bonita LeFlore is a New England artist best known for her large paintings referencing the architecture of forgotten places. She studied at the Art Students League in New York, graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, and attended Pratt Institute's Masters program for painting. Influenced by the color field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and the vivid palette of Joan Mitchell, LeFlore finds working with acrylic paint on unprimed canvas a medium that lends itself to a transparency that gives her subject matter life.

Kenji Nakayama was born in Tomokomai on the island of Hokkaido, Japan. A mechanical engineer by education, Nakayama made a significant life change in 2005 with a move to Boston, Massachusetts to study traditional sign painting. Meditation and highly-trained craftsmanship are hallmarks of Nakayama's work, which has been shown internationally and acquired by the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. Nakayama maintains a busy commercial sign painting business in addition to his fine art practice.

Wilhelm Neusser was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. Neusser's work has been widely exhibited and he has received numerous awards and fellowships. He lives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts. In 2018, his work was featured in the exhibition The Lure of the Dark at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and in 2019 he was featured in a collaborative exhibition at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts.

Mary O'Malley earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. O'Malley's work has been exhibited widely, including in a show at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park and a solo show at Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts. Her work was acquired by the U.S. Embassy in Dubai, and she has been the recipient of several grants, including two Massachusetts Cultural Council grants and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation Artists' Resource Trust grant. She lives and works in Rochester, New Hampshire.

Colombian artist Felipe Ortiz focuses on the practice of painting, from traditional easel painting to murals and public installations. In 2009, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Ortiz has participated in numerous art exhibitions, including at the Fuller Craft Museum and the Punto Urban Art Museum, and his installations have been featured in the Knight Foundation’s Horizontes Project, Northeastern University's public art collection, Fundación Culata’s Muro al Barrio, and the Ministry of Culture in Cali, Colombia. Ortiz has been awarded Mass MoCA’s 2018 Assets for Artists Grant and the Cambridge Innovation Center’s 2016 Artist in Residence.

Deborah Peeples, born in Brooklyn, New York, is a Boston area painter who exhibits her work nationally. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Washington University School of Fine Arts and also studied at the Lake Placid School of Art. She returned to a full-time art practice after raising her family and working for many years as a community, social and political activist. Her work has been exhibited across New England, and can be found in collections throughout the United States and abroad. Peeples lives in Cambridge and works in Somerville.

Heather Pilchard is a painter, photographer, bookbinder and teacher. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Pilchard currently lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she draws inspiration from the ecology of outer Cape Cod. Her paintings are meditations on the natural world, for which she feels deep awe and respect.

Karla Quattrocchi received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University with a concentration in painting and drawing. Her paintings incorporate multiple mediums, including acrylic, pencil, plastic and tar. Each composition uses a structured amount of space and adheres to a flat picture plane. Through her abstract narratives, Quattrocchi plays with meaning, always leaving the story to the viewer's imagination.

Mike Ryczek graduated from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration. He lives and works as a painter and designer in Dedham, Massachusetts. Ryczek's work reflects his desire to deconstruct things in order to make sense of the world around him. Through this process of dismantling, he hopes to help the viewer see their own most inexplicable, intimate thoughts.

Shannon Slattery received her Bachelors of Science in Studio Art from Skidmore College and a Masters of Science in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is currently a high school art teacher in Newton. As a painter Slattery is guided by process; she applies paint by any and all means and will just as often wipe, sand or scrape the board as paint with a brush. At the intersection of drawing and painting, color, line, and texture are the means to describe what she sees and how she connects with her environment.