BEST OF SOUTHCOAST JURIED EXHIBITION

Daiber

Patria O -uerte series: Pulpo

Steven Daiber, Silkscreen on the 1979 Atlas de Cuba

 

Best Of SouthCoast: Juried Exhibition 
June 12 - August 31

The New Bedford Art Museum presents the Best of SouthCoast Artists Exhibition, a juried showcase curated by Carmen Hermo, Curator of Contemporary Art, celebrating the region’s artistic excellence and heritage as part of our 30th Anniversary celebration. This exhibition honors artists of all backgrounds who thrive creatively in the SouthCoast while looking ahead to a bright and creative future.

Juror Statement: 

Open calls open up possibilities—to experience and learn about new artists, artworks, ideas, and associations among each other. If 2025 has been a wildly tumultuous year in an era of constant change, the voices and hands gathered in the People’s Gallery and throughout the Museum are a testament to the type of fortitude, belief, and hard work that artists model for us. Sculpting, stitching, printing, drawing, weaving, casting, painting, and aiming the camera make and remake our world.

The invitation to jury the Best of SouthCoast for the New Bedford Art Museum came only a few weeks into my new chapter, living and working in New England. After a few months, I reviewed the wide field of submitted work. I found myself inspired by both the connections and departures from what I expected to find. Local materials, seafaring histories, and colonial-era side jokes coalesce alongside larger questions about family and home, the body and our perception of each other, and concerns about our nation and our shared future. These entwined

experiences and ideas emerge in a luscious variety of formal choices, ways of making, scale, and intentions. I sought to select artworks that felt particularly resonant in their bridging of the past and present, as well as those that brought forward forms that seemed inventive and pushed the boundaries between mediums or expectations. Many artworks also evinced a daring sense of emotion and interiority, and the mystery and unknowing presented a kind of appealing balance to the affirming or challenging statements embedded in other works. In this special anniversary year, I hope the visitors to the New Bedford Art Museum find their own discoveries, connections, and surprises to explore.

FIRST PLACE WINNER: ANIS BEIGZADEH

Anis Beigzadeh
Anis

Anis Beigzadeh
Let It Go, 2023
Ceramic & Fiber
6'x 5'x4' 

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

As a ceramic artist, my work is rooted in personal experience, cultural heritage, and feminist ideology. Since immigrating to the USA, I have explored themes of home, identity, and the empowerment of women. My practice combines ceramics with materials like fiber and textiles, reflecting the fluidity of culture and identity through traditional crafts such as weaving and basketry. Inspired by Persian art, I reinterpret its motifs through a contemporary lens, merging tradition with innovation.

By integrating these techniques, I create sculptural forms that celebrate resilience, migration, and transformation. My work emphasizes women's empowerment, blending organic and geometric patterns to challenge societal constraints and honor feminine strength. Through maximalism and hybridity, I celebrate choice and the enduring power of craft. This exhibition allows me to honor SouthCoast's artistic legacy while contributing my perspective as an immigrant artist rooted in tradition and innovation.

SECOND PLACE WINNER: KEITH FRANCIS

Keith Francis 1
Keith Francis 2

Keith Francis
Game Over (The Only Winning Move is Not to Play)
Repurposed 1969 Gottlieb pinball machine
70" x 56" x 29"

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

In today's politically charged climate, the art of Keith Francis is more crucial than ever. His ability to intertwine commentary on societal issues with mixed media creates a powerful discourse that resonates deeply with contemporary audiences. By reflecting on themes such as war, violence, and cultural upheaval, Francis invites viewers to confront uncomfortable truths while simultaneously offering a platform for dialogue.

His work challenges us to think critically, fostering an awareness of the emotional impacts of current events. As we navigate the complexities of our time, the insights and clarity embodied in Francis's art serve as both a critique and a call to action, reminding us of the profound role art plays in shaping our understanding of the human condition and the societal context we inhabit.

Arghavan Booyeh
Taylor Baldwin SM

Arghavan Booyeh
PaislyII, 2024
Cotton & Wool Yarn
98" x 47" x 0.5"

Taylor Baldwin
Head of an Elder, 2020
Mixed Media
70" x 16" x 16"

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

My fiber art merges technical craft with storytelling, honoring my cultural heritage. With a background in law, I address social justice through textiles—particularly women's rights and equality.

I employ the Cypress and paisley motifs as metaphors for heroic women fighting for freedom. The upright Cypress symbolizes liberty in Iranian culture, while paisley's global journey represents resilience and adaptation. Inspired by Iran's freedom movement, my sculptures and tapestries capture transformation and resilience amid protest. They portray women as both mourners and strength-bearers, celebrating those who challenge established norms without depicting them as victims.

The meandering form of paisley reflects the continuous evolution of resistance and hope—threads of courage stitching narratives that transcend boundaries.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

My recent work starts with material reclaimed and salvaged from sites of failure and collapse, both personal and systemic, across the post-industrial American landscape; shuttered retail businesses, archaeological sites, national cancer imaging archives, estate sales, the consumer recycling stream, and the streets and sidewalks of the cities where I live. Using traditional sculptural funerary forms collected and catalogued from the landscape of cemeteries across the south coast—funerary busts, life masks, cenotaphs, sarcophagi—these materials are reformed in every sense of the word, into semi-figurative memorials to specific individuals who have been touched by collapsing systems in significant ways.

David Meyers SM
Lawrence Cuelenaere

David Meyers
Colonial Tombstone ( # 2), 2022
Mixed Media
1' x 1' x 1" 

Laurence Cuelenaere
International Bridge, 2021
Pigment Print, Stitches
24” x 24” x 1"

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

In my artwork I am interested in the boundary between lowbrow and highbrow culture, the semiotics of visual language and revisionist mythology. Emerging from a sardonic mire of humor, I look toward finding wonder in the mundane surroundings, a created narrative and a hair-brained idea somewhere between smart, silly and stupid.

I love the visual language, the history and conversation that art creates, silly jokes, overthinking, under thinking and the dialogue in-between. I make the work that I want to see in the world. Art isn't always about high notions of beauty and what ails the world, it can be about the screws in your pocket, about drinking a beer, about sitting in your underwear, about a piece of trash at the beach. Art's power is its endurance, and I find it best fitting next to a joke.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

The idea of these photographs started with a couple of personal notes on the violence of photography as I was photographing migrants at the borders of Mexico/Guatemala and US/Mexico, but also while seeing photographs in various media. In the hope that there is a "good" way of doing photography, it made me reflect about how we could do a photography without simplifying, transforming, or misrepresenting. It is perhaps a way of turning the gaze inward, even when we know of the world's atrocity.

Thinking the power-from-within involves a change of perception but also a reversal of the structural violence that we are used to recognize in photography, a defiance of every structure that maintains it. So, rather than looking and underscoring the unwanted power that institutions have over us, my work offers a way of taking care of modes of making photographs by enlarging the imagination by adding stitches, tape, written text, or paint to my photographs.

Stephanie Roberts SM
Paula Stebbins Becker SM

Stephanie Roberts-Camello
Labyrinth Encaustic Relief, 1975
Suminagashi Prints & Water Soluble Graphite
22.25" x 21.5" x 2.75"

Paula Stebbins Becker
Double Exposure Weaving
Cut and Unraveled Silk Ikat
Textile, Vintage Photo

12”x 14”

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

Stephanie incorporates old family letters and eco-printing below the surface of her encaustic relief paintings. The letters are written in the 1920s–1940s out west and reference the Dust Bowl and difficulty keeping cattle alive, as well as the ongoing drought. Their stains, information, and wear reflect and inform hard times.

Through experimenting with encaustic forms, she found a relationship in the writing within the stress marks and layers. These stress marks in the wax develop as it is being manipulated, and she saw this as a metaphor for the struggles in the letters and the endurance needed to survive the times. The artist has recently added natural elements to her work such as found artist conk mushrooms. Being a mushroom forager for years, these natural recyclers add another element to the passing of time found in the letters.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

Memory is like a thread that is woven, unraveled, frayed, knotted and entangled, connecting with the passage of time, while forming endless patterns and layers of experience.

I am drawn to textiles, photographs and objects that hold a physical story. Through the process of unraveling, stitching and weaving, the cloth takes the shape of a gesture, revealing the essence of the mood and spirit found in the photograph. Together, the photograph and textile recall a memory, offer a tactile impression, and a snapshot of a moment in time.

Brown SM
TIO-Man

Maren Brown
Sacred Bones: Breathe, 2022
Acrlyic on Board
21.62" x 17.62" x 2"

Adrian Tio
Tio-Man, 2024
Woodcut on Masa
70" x 30"

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

My experience as an egg tempera artist profoundly influences my painting style. It allows for highly detailed surfaces using small brush strokes and cross-hatching that create distinctive textures I call "forms within forms." I apply this technique to my acrylic work as well.

I typically create in series to explore themes from multiple angles. Each has a unique intent, united by my reverence for life. This submission includes selections from two series: Tribute and Sacred Bones. Tribute honors my mother and former wife, who passed within 1½ years. Sacred Bones reflects my fascination with skeletal remains in art and ritual.

My paintings celebrate color for its vibrational qualities. Wisdom traditions have long understood the power of color to express the spiritual, while Western medicine recognizes the healing properties of color on our bodies and emotion. I allow viewers to immerse themselves in the feeling of a color by emphasizing one color in each painting.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement

I have always felt torn between two cultures - the suburban middle-class objectivity of my American birth, and the passionate sensitivity of my Latino heritage. I am of Puerto Rican decent, though born in the Mid-West. Most of my life has been spent studying and teaching in middle America; the suburbs are my barrio, English is my primary language. My use of expressive figurative imagery offers an opportunity to look back into family history while looking forward through ongoing studio developments. Printmaking offers a visual format that seeks to communicate to a broader, bilingual audience. Through these works, I reach out to my Latino heritage in a concerted effort to expand and enrich my mainstream identity, navigating a balance between these two worlds.