Yael Ort-Dinoor, Farming Notations
Risograph, 2022
agriCultural: A Biennial Exhibition
September 10 - November 29, 2026
The Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership (SEMAP), in partnership with the New Bedford Art Museum is pleased to present agriCultural: A Biennial Exhibition, a juried exhibition of works from artists who are also farmers, farmer who are also artists, and artist that take deep inspiration from the world of agriculture. The work in this exhibition investigates the complex and undertold stories of agriculture, farming and the contemporary stories held in the land and sea. The work highlights the intersectionality in the art of farming, the act of creating and the important cultural need agriculture holds in our communities and our culture.
The South Coast has long been fertile territory for both farming and art making. For millennia, the Wampanoag people farmed in this region, and later, colonial settlers learned agrarian practices from local peoples. Art making also flourished here, supported in part by patrons of the whaling industry.
To reflect these layered histories, our organizations issued a call for art that brought together a diverse group of artists whose work speaks to the South Coast’s natural beauty and distinctive character.
agriCultural invites us to see agriculture in new ways and reminds us of its vital role in nourishing our lives and communities.
Michael Cochran
He Was a Good Ol' Boy, 1973
Cast polyester resin, steel tacks
31" x 29.75" x 10.5"
Meghan Murray
Fans of Old Coke Say the New is Not It, June 12 1985
Oil on canvas
36" x 48"
The two sculptures that I am exhibiting at the New Bedford Art Museum’s agriCultural: A Biennial Exhibition are examples from a very early series of sculptures that reflect on my growing up on a farm in Northern California. I was born in 1943 and grew up in the 1950s, when a son worked alongside his father in the fields and learned the trades and skills that are essential in farming.
I was fortunate to have a father who patiently taught me everything from hoeing weeds efficiently to driving large and small tractors and grain harvesters. The sculptures that I am exhibiting represent the stories about the many lessons that my father taught me, which I have been able to pass on to later generations.
I was raised on a farm in Northern California and I’m now 82-years of age and have been creating sculpture professionally for over fifty years… and still going strong. I have had eighteen solo exhibitions of my sculpture in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Portland, Oregon and Newport, Rhode Island. Since 1972, I have participated in over fifty group and two-person exhibitions throughout the United States. My earliest sculptures were reflections of those days growing up on the farm but my current artworks are a synthesis of my life-long interests and creative investigations in spirituality, archaeology and cultural anthropology. I have synthesized those interests and investigations, my extensive travel experiences, academic research and writing, and currently manifest them in essential and colorful 2-D and 3-D forms.
After making visual artworks professionally for over fifty years, I am now synthesizing my extensive travel experiences, academic research and writing, interests in philosophy and spirituality, and manifesting them in the most essential way. In my recent artworks, I have been exploring that synthesis via the relationship between 2-D and 3-D form. The two-dimensional compositions of my works-on-paper pieces derive from unique patterns that I have photographed in the many cultures that I have explored in my travels over the last sixty years throughout the world: Alaska, Canada, China, Crete, Europe, Greece, Mexico, Turkey, etc. In these 2-D and 3-D artworks, I have also been striving to materialize and formalize my wonderful memories and extraordinary intercultural experiences in those countries where I have visited.
Meghan Murray (b. 1994, Massachusetts) is an artist, administrator, and educator based just outside of Boston, MA. Murray received her BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College and her MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her representational painting practice embodies and simultaneously intervenes upon historical tradition, both in process and in subject. Murray’s most recent work is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Her paintings have been on view at such spaces as Abigail Ogilvy (Boston), Morgan Lehman (NYC), Attleboro Art Museum, Boston University’s Sloane House, and virtually with newcube art through Future Fairs. Murray is featured in New American Paintings (Vol. 183) and Friend of the Artist Magazine (Vol. 21). She is a recipient of the 2022 Blanche E. Colman award for New England artists and was awarded second place in the 2023 Miami University Young Painters competition by juror John Yau.
I am a painter and collector. The research lens of my artistic practice surveys an archive sourced from functionally anonymous marketplaces including eBay. I select and categorize photographs according to the patterns evidenced in candid images from an expansive but nameless photo album: birthday parties, costumes, and domestic spaces appear in a rhythm so constant they become kitsch. By then studying, arranging, scaling, and elevating these found snapshots into oil paintings, I make work that responds to the tension between real histories and clichés of white suburbia in mid- to late-20th century America.
The family photo album preserves an element of storytelling and intimacy. When those same images are removed from their context through death, time, or commerce and mediated by painting, what shifts? Is the narrative lost, the memory dissolved? I translate the indexical mark of amateur photography - the flash-shadow-color cast - and all the “truth” that it bears into a simulated gesture. Through painting, in its immense histories and material practices, I aim to turn the ephemeral to the indelible, the vernacular to the formal. The works therefore inhabit a space of also/too; that a memory can be a precious individual and simultaneously a reflection of an uncanny monoculture. The resulting works are paintings about photographic objects and the archive, the romanticization of American myths, child socialisation, gender idealism, and the manner in which they are perpetuated into a national identity
Robert Feingold
Cart in Morning Garden, 2012
Photograph
12" x 20"
Adrien Bisson
October, 2025
Inkjet print
14" x 21"
Over time, my passion for capturing and sharing the beauty and lessons of the natural world have only grown stronger. Although I was interested in photography since my teens, it was the creative possibilities of digital photography that ignited and enabled my instincts to develop. As much as possible, I immerse myself in natural places. I have learned many lessons, especially the lessons of just being and letting life unfold in front of me; that there is so much beauty, even in unnatural places, if you are on the lookout. I derive faith from the lessons and gifts I receive and believe that the natural world teaches us that life is and unfolds as it should be, with an asterisk for humankind. In my photography, I focus on the emotional center of the image and try to deliver it in the most beautiful way.
Bob is a New Bedford native. He received degrees from Brandeis and NYU Law School and has practiced in Boston and New Bedford for more than 50 years. He and Janet have a son, David who has two teenage daughters who live in Fairfax Va. They also have a daughter Samantha who has two young sons and a brand new daughter who live in Westin Connecticut. In addition to his passion for nature photography, Bob is a gardener, growing heirloom tomatoes and dahlias for charity. Bob and Jan have 14 garden spaces on an 8 acre slice of heaven in South Dartmouth. Bob is also active at the NBSO, swims daily at the Y and has been on the boards of many other local charities.
Adrien Bisson is a fine art photographer based in Lowell, Massachusetts. His work explores the places where people live and work, and the endeavors that make them who they are. Adrien has exhibited his work in solo and two-person shows at the Arts League of Lowell Gallery, the Whistler Museum, the Loading Dock Gallery (Lowell, MA), and the Parish Center for the Arts (Westford, MA). Additionally, his photographs have been published in Shots Magazine, and juried into shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), the Plymouth Center for the Arts (Plymouth, MA), the Black Box Gallery (Portland, OR), and the Curated Fridge (Somerville, MA).
Adrien became interested in photography as a teenager but decided to follow his other passion, music, earning his Bachelor of Music from Boston's Berklee College of Music. He later spent over two decades as a software developer before returning to photography, doing commercial and editorial work. For the past six years he has concentrated exclusively on fine art photography. In 2023, he self-published his first handmade book of stories and photographs, The lawn was like a hay field, followed by a solo show of the work in Lowell.
I showed up at Clark Farm in all kinds of weather before sunrise and after dusk to get just the right light. Although it was a tough New England winter, I photographed newborn goats and lambs, and I saw sheep being sheared the old-fashioned way. I watched as thousands of plants in the greenhouse were started while winter refused to relent outside. I did this to understand Andrew and Amanda, who own and run Clark Farm, a small organic farm in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Both of them grew up in less rural areas of the state and left other careers to become farmers. My interest in photographing the farm always revolved around “why.” Why were Andrew and Amanda called to this place? To this work?
My year on the farm has brought me back to moments from my childhood, before I became a city person, and to the sounds and smells of country life that I’ve never forgotten—a summer rain or the peace of lying in bed at night listening to the crickets and the breeze. As the years progressed, I too changed careers, so before I began this project, I tried to imagine the leap of faith that Andrew and Amanda had taken and what that must have been like for them. Now I know.
Jason Fiering
Common Weed: Bromus Tectorum (Downy Brome), 2025
Colored Pencil and Graphite
10" x 8"
Susan Medyn
Shared Architecture, 2025
Mixed media, chair canning material, prisms, twigs, bees wax
20" x 16" x 4"
My studio practice reflects my sensitivity to how geometry, structure, and rational systems are both used and abused. Trained as a scientist and fascinated with the appeal of taxonomies, measurement, and numerical prediction, I am at the same time alert to how these ideals regularly falter in the muddiness of broader social, emotional, and imaginative contexts. This cycling between science’s rarified aspiration and humanity’s lived imprecision lies at the heart of all of my projects.
Currently my artwork involves the botany of urban weeds and our cultural response to them. I collect plant specimens from my own weedy studio lot and draw them immediately, before they wither, to become more intimately acquainted with them. These drawings are a launch point for sculptural and conceptual works later. Downy Brome, also called Cheat, is widely encountered on streets and human disturbed landscapes in New England, flowering in early summer. It is an introduced species in North America and can be a troublesome invasive in grazing pastures and grasslands. On the other hand, it is seductively attractive, with its long drooping florets waving in the breeze. I believe that careful observation and awareness of our everyday natural environment, even of life forms that are pests or worse, inevitably leads to a sense of responsibility to the planet.
Jason Fiering is an artist and scientist working in New Bedford and Boston. He began his art career as a painter but he now incorporates a wide range of materials and methods. He has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow, I-Park, Arts Letters and Numbers, and Wildacres, and has exhibited widely in New England including solo shows at Bromfield Gallery, Providence College, Chazan Gallery, Artspace New Haven, and as the annual Present Tense Award winner at ArtsWorcester. Jason has a Master’s Degree in physics and in a parallel life leads research projects in biomedical engineering. For more than a decade, he has been renovating and rewilding a historic building in the South End of New Bedford, which is his art studio and is home to nearly one hundred species of weeds.
After nearly 40 years as a watercolorist, my practice shifted to eco-art in 2020 while studying in the Master Beekeeper program at Cornell University. Alarmed over pollinator decline, I decided to make works in collaboration with honey bees.
As a beekeeper for over 12 years, my work explores interspecies communication as a shared process.
My sculptural forms are drawn from a long history of craft and often involve chair canning materials and embroidery which I introduce into my beehives. The works are altered through collective behavior, environmental conditions, and time. The inserted sculptures act as signals within the hive, prompting responses that reflect the colony’s internal organization, spatial logic, and decision-making.
Grounded in stewardship and informed by long-term observation of bee behavior and pollinator health, my practice engages ecology, science, and sculpture as intertwined systems. Through this work, I invite reflection on our interconnectedness with all living systems and the responsibility we share in sustaining them.
Shared Architecture
Collaborating with my own beehives, I create sculptures that explore collective intelligence, ecological adaptation, and interspecies cooperation. By placing my scaffolding directly into the hive, I allow the colony to extend, alter, and reshape the structure through natural wax construction. The final piece stands as a visible record of our interaction, revealing the hive's complex spatial choices and collective decision-making.
This work highlights the architectural ingenuity of insect life and challenges viewers to closely examine behaviors that often go unnoticed. In the face of widespread pollinator decline, these sculptures underscore the brilliant, essential role insects play in sustaining life. Our shared survival depends heavily on honoring the purpose and labor of all creatures.
John Borowicz
Numinous Among The Ten Thousand Things, 2026
Oil on canvas
60" x 48"
Jenny Peace
Snowdrift, 2024
Ceramic
11" x 18" x 18"
Through the stripped down nature of grisaille, I find that the image has the potential to achieve heightened emotional resonance, timelessness or a nostalgic dreamlike quality - something akin to the feeling we often get when looking at old family photos. The austere palette is indeed a barrier to total illusion but it can still be transportive, as we are drawn into a liminal space that is convincing in its own right and, at the same time, held at arm’s length.
John Borowicz was born in 1968 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He studied painting at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at The University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. His exploration of painting has led him to employ many different styles and approaches to the medium, including portraiture, narrative realism, comics, collage, distorted figuration, and world building through fantastic or impossible architecture.
Jenny Peace is a ceramic artist living in Westport, MA. Her love of clay began in a YMCA class when she was 8. Currently she is pursuing her MFA in ceramics at UMass Dartmouth. Along with her husband and fellow artist, Joel Howe, she is the co-founder, co-owner and creative director of Longbarn Studios, in Westport, MA
Generous in volume, contemplative yet dynamic, Jenny creates large coil-built vessels that invite touch. Conveying both resilience and beauty, Jenny’s work draws inspiration from New England landscapes; ocean waves, clouds at dusk, snow-draped fields. Her decades-long relationship to her husband’s family farm, connects her to seasonal rhythms; maintaining a small orchard, keeping bees, tending aging blueberry bushes, and harvesting vegetables. In the winter, when snowdrifts pile high and cold temperatures peak, she spends quiet hours in the studio with her clay.
Kristen Tool
Pollinator Garden, 2016 - 2018
Scrimshaw, ink, on Reclaimed Ivory
11" x 34" x 2"
Kara Dunne
Shopping Cart Shepherds, 2018
Offset litho artist book
7.5" x 8.5"
After a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, and visiting The Scrimshaw Workshop there I was inspired to try a new technique. I purchased ink, a scrimshank and a few pieces of polished antler to practice on and got to work. The reclaimed ivory Estey organ keyboard, best guessed from the late 1800’s, that I etched my pollinator garden on was salvaged from the dump by my dad after he heard I was trying my hand at scrimshaw. The Estey Organ Company operated from 1846-1960 in Brattleboro, Vermont, not far from where I grew up.
Kristen Tool co-owns and operates Olsen Farm in Lanesborough, and is the founder/ Director of Heart & Soil Collective, a nonprofit working to connect people to the land where their food grows across Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Kristen and her husband, Chris, worked tirelessly to purchase and rebuild Olsen Farm following a death in the family that left the land in jeopardy of being sold and developed. Along with stewarding 30 acres of the original family farmland where the couple raises chickens, honeybees, grows fruit trees, berries, vegetables and herbs, Kristen founded Heart & Soil Collective in 2020 as a way to support small farms and get free, fresh food to local homes. The organization provides food access programming through direct-to-home delivery of free, fresh produce shares purchased from local farms, and educational programming through building community gardens, hosting farm tours, farm-to-table cooking classes and hands-on workshops.
Kristen earned a BFA in Fashion/ Textile Design from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2008 and when she isn’t doing farm and nonprofit work she is creating nature-inspired watercolor illustrations, jewelry made of turkeytail mushrooms, fiber arts and found, recycled/ repurposed art.
Kara Dunne is a printmaker and performance artist who also dabbles in video and installation. She studied printmaking and glass blowing at Alfred University, performance at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and earned her master’s degree in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her creative drive is fueled by her dual background in both the visual arts and theater; the combination of the two enable her to explore the opportunities of the live, the staged and the recorded. Dunne believes art should be an active experience, not a passive event, and should be encountered in other places besides the confines of a museum or gallery. She strives to find new ways in which her work may interact with the public in their natural habitat. Her videos, performances and prints serve as a social commentary on what we forget about the past, deny in the present and dream about in the future.
My book, Shopping Cart Shepherds connects the agrarian and urban versions of 'shepherd.' The book was printed on an offset printing press, with drawings and screen prints; text and images from my interviews and research from 2012 until 2016.
A traditional shepherd would spend all his time with his flock; his sole purpose was to keep them together and not let them stray, even for an instant. Moments where the flock was completely still were rare, as one or two were always sneaking off into the distance, ready to be rounded up again.
The shopping cart attendant at the grocery store thanklessly keeps the carts in line, retrieves and collects stragglers, and regroups their wheeled flock into a sturdy corral nestled in a concrete pasture. These attendants are shopping cart shepherds.
This book didn’t happen all at once.
I wasn’t sitting down at my drawing table for months pushing this concept out on paper. The idea of a shopping cart shepherd had been percolating for some time. The link I made between a shepherd and a shopping cart attendant happened a while ago. I have wanted to bring this idea into the world since 2010. It has finally come to be; it happened gradually though, and at times excruciatingly slow. When it dawned on me that a ‘shepherd’ could herd both sheep as well as carts and that the shopping cart attendant at the grocery store was in fact the urban version of the traditional agrarian shepherd, I didn’t exactly know what to do with this revelation. So it remained in the back of my mind. All I knew was that I needed to do some research, and whatever that research was, it was bound to take me a while to complete. What I realize now after six years, was that this seemingly snail-like pace my project was taking, was a timeline that was meant to happen. I couldn’t have gone any faster with this whole thing. I was being led on a distinct and meaningful journey, and I was completely unaware of it. I ended up in places I never thought I would be, and developed close relationships with people I never thought I would meet.
Let me break it down for you. Here’s that timeline I was talking about. I only recently realized how strange this all is; how everything fell into place.
2010 I started thinking about sheep and shopping carts. I am at a residency at the Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria, Illinois. I met Kelsi Dawn Venada, she’s the poet in residence and we became good friends. Kelsi wrote the poem for this book in 2011. Kindred spirit.
2011 Idea on the back burner, bubbling. Upon request, Kelsi writes a poem about shopping cart shepherds for this book.
2012 Summertime. I’m at an artist residency in Ballyvaughan, Ireland. There are sheep everywhere. This is the first time in my life I am surrounded by sheep. I thought to myself,
well, I better get started and find some shepherds to talk to. I wander around, gathering information in the village pubs about people that raise sheep. I am pointed in several different directions, and one of them leads me to Tom Tarpey- the retired priest of the town and present day sheep farmer. I also met his lovely wife, Mary.
I come home, telling my tales of Tom and his sheep. A friend gave me a newspaper article about a man named Henry Etcheverry who raises sheep in Idaho. Apparently, out west there are still shepherds working the land. Immigrants from the Basque region of Spain and France who came to this country in the early 1900s to make money herding sheep. Henry’s father was one of these immigrants. Henry is still raising and herding sheep in Eastern Idaho today.
Before reading this article, I had no idea there were actual shepherds in this country. I needed to meet this Henry-person. But I don’t know how to get to Idaho without breaking the bank; I can’t find any artist residencies in Idaho to support my stay. So, I tack the article up on my bedroom wall to remind myself to keep looking.
2013 I learned about an artist residency in Boise, Idaho, called Surel’s Place. Surel Mitchell was an amazing painter and a big time positive presence in the Boise art scene. When she passed away, her daughter Becky decided to transform her mother’s home and studio into a place for artists to live and work. I applied right away and was accepted, however, there is no room until the summer of 2015.
2014 Someone drops out of the summer line up for Surel’s Place, and I am suddenly booking a plane ticket to Boise for the month of August. I cold call Henry Etcheverry asking him if, I, random artist from Providence, Rhode Island, can come out to Idaho and interview him. In my head it all sounded pretty weird, but much to my surprise, Henry said simply- sounds good. But you see, Henry wasn’t near Boise. He and his family lived nearly four hours east in Lava Hot Springs. If I was going to drive all the way out there from Boise, I would need a place to stay. So I asked another random question. Can I, random artist you’ve never met before in your life, stay the night at your house when I visit. Without hesitation, he said- sure thing. In total, our conversation lasted five minutes. All set; no hurdles to jump through. I go out to Idaho, drive to visit Henry and his family on two separate occasions, see his sheep outfit (not his clothing- his sheep operation) and the events of the shipping time, in the picturesque mountains of eastern Idaho. I see him work alongside his daughters. I met his wife. I met his adorable grandkids. All kindred spirits, and all a part of my life now. Like my very own sheep-wrangling western family. I went back the next summer to visit and I brought my future husband Kris so that he could meet all the wonderful people I got to know out there. Naturally, we were welcomed with open arms, with a place to stay and delicious lamb to eat.
This project has blessed me with people I hold dear to my heart; without the consistent pursuit of seeing my idea to the finish, I would not have met all these amazing folks. So besides my creation of drawings, prints, and videos based on this idea, my greatest creations were the friendships I made.
I am so thankful for all those who helped me along the way. Tom and Mary Tarpey, for embracing some crazy artist from the states who showed up at their door one afternoon. Amy, who gave me that NY Times article. Surel and Becky Mitchell for giving me the time and space to work. Henry and Kathy Etcheverry and their daughters Dominique and Nicole, for opening their door to welcome an east coast stranger, for feeding her delicious lamb and taking her on early morning sheep adventures. Dave and Jeannie Eiguren for dragging their sheep wagon at dusk to the parking lot of Albertsons so I could make my shopping cart shepherd video, then sitting down in lawn chairs to watch the whole thing for hours. Suzie, Carmen and Dena, for being my pisces sisters in the city, sharing with me lots of love and laughter. And of course to Kelsi Dawn Vanada, for writing me the poem.
Kara Eileen Dunne
JP Powel
Panic Grasses, 1972
Oil on panel
27" x 18"
Stephen Althouse
Rake 1, 2003
Archival pigment print
48" x 36" x 1"
I want to create images that have people seeing the world differently: more radiantly, observation mixed with visionary experience, executed with passion and bemusement, to see miracle and enigma in the mundane. I call it imaginative realism. I want to engage the viewers and pull them into the painting, sensing a delightful reality beneath daily perceptions. I use distorted perspective and selective fine detail to create the illusions. I have spent most of my painting and drawing time on the marsh, Allens Pond, in Dartmouth, Massachusetts and on Kezar Lake in Maine. I work from direct observation, sketching and painting on site, from photographic notes, and from my memory and imagination. I see everything as alive and in motion. I know the world is full of human misery and have experienced it up close in the Peace Corps, yet there is an irrepressible song in my heart, and I hope that shows up in my paintings.
I was born in April 1942 in New Bedford. My earliest memories are living in a cottage near a beach and a salt marsh where we had no electricity, phone or running water but acres of farm fields and wildness to run around in. In the winter we moved into my grandparents’ house which was full of antiques, and art and doting aunts and uncles. I liked raw quahogs, sips of beer and linguiça in my scrambled eggs. I graduated from Harvard in English Lit. 1964. I completed my sophomore year at RISD 1965 majoring in sculpture. I served in the Peace Corps, Ecuador, 1966 -1968, where I met Betsy. We married, (have been married to that funny lady for fifty-six years now), built our home and started the Salt Marsh Pottery on the edge of the Allens Pond salt marsh in Dartmouth, MA. I painted for about ten years then turned my energies to helping Betsy build the pottery business for thirty-five years. This included completely renovating our four-story wooden schoolhouse. About fifteen years ago I returned to painting. Salt Marsh Pottery and my Yellow Boat Studio operate in our renovated schoolhouse in Russells Mills village, Dartmouth, MA. I have had a few shows locally, Gallery X, Dartmouth Cultural Center, and have participated in Shattuck Gallery shows. My work is seen on the South Coast Artist Studio Tours and by visitors to my studio which is open to the public and on my website, www.yellowboatstudio.com.
Contemporary sculptor-photographer Stephen Althouse's varied life experiences serve as inspiration for his visual expressions. He creates simple conceptual assemblages of artifacts relating to human activity and utilizes large-format black and white analog film photography combined with large-format digital printing to transmute his common subjects into minimalist monuments to our species.
Raised on a Pennsylvania farm, Althouse’s work experiences during his youth fostered a heightened sensitivity to people facing the daily trials of a life of toil, which became a touchstone for his future artistic practice. While young he also lived in Mexico and Argentina where he developed an appreciation for the similarities and diversities of cultures, leading him to future living and working on three continents. As an artist he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium as an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Liège, and he received additional grants from Epson printers and Hahnemühle papers of Germany in support of his fine art digital printing.
Althouse received his Master of Fine Art degree in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, his BFA in Sculpture from the University of Miami, and holds a lifetime position of Distinguished Professor of Fine Art at Barry University, Miami, Florida. In addition to being widely exhibited, his artwork has been collected by museums throughout North America, South America, and Europe.
Having a keen interest in humanity’s diversity and the culture of labor, Althouse currently resides and works creatively in rural central Pennsylvania, surrounded and inspired by an Amish farming community.
“Like so many artists across time, I feel compelled to portray aspects of humankind. I utilize old tools and implements as depictions of ourselves instead of making literal portrayals of people.
In Rake I, a common farm tool that has been utilized around the globe for thousands of years is anthropomorphically combined with a swatch of white linen. Perhaps this image alludes to our own private challenges, or may deal with the fruitful labor of farming, or goes deeper implying the valor, faith, and suffering of ordinary individuals who have, and continue to face relentless uncertainty. By using metaphors and symbolization rather than overt storytelling, my artwork is open to many personal interpretations.
It is an expression of mystery that I feel about humanity; a blending of our strengths and weaknesses, our perseverance, sacrifice, and perhaps a degree of nobleness to which I’m alluding in my artwork.”
-Stephen Althouse