Framingham State's Danforth Art Museum Opens Fall Exhibition

FRAMINGHAM, MA — Framingham State University's Danforth Art Museum will open its fall exhibition on Sept. 19 featuring work by three New England artists.

The Danforth reopened in late July following a coronavirus shutdown. Because of new safety precautions, patrons must reserve a spot before arriving at the museum. The museum is open noon to 5 p.m. Thursday to Sunday.

Here's a preview from Framingham State of the fall exhibition, which runs through Feb. 28:

Katherine Gulla "Passage"

Gulla’s work has long been about the natural world and how we move through it. Passage presents work from three series—Path, Falling, and Fossil—whose names imply the process, travails, and remnants of the journey the artist envisions through her work.

There is an inherently meditative quality to all of Katherine Gulla’s works, something that is felt across media. In her studies of how the natural world responds to climate change, she translates the apprehension that permeates our daily lives into a coolly mysterious journey through the everyday landscape. Walks through places like the Arnold Arboretum, contemplative in their own right, become abstracted forms that transcend the natural world. Funerary monuments are juxtaposed with natural patterns, and the imprints that appear to float on these largely androgynous and stoic figures evoke ways in which the man-made and natural collide. Subtle, neutral, glacial tones remind us of absence, loss, and forces of nature beyond our control.

Catherine Smith "A Cabinet of Curiosities"

Smith is an installation artist, sculptor, and collector, viewing three- dimensional art objects not only as sculptures, but as souvenirs, memorials, relics, and icons. Smith uses unique materials to shape context, with the expectation that the meaning embedded in the work will shift with each viewer’s experience. A Cabinet of Curiosities visualizes Smith’s definition of both an artist and collector through an exploration of objects that evoke both history and remembrance. This exhibition includes her sculptural series Dread Running: A Memorial to Lost Dogs, pieces from the Whale Project, and selections from her personal collection of nineteenth-century photographs, the basis for her book Women in Pants, which will be hung in conversation with contemporary works from the museum’s permanent collection. Smith’s work is rooted in history yet relevant for our times, as we mark 100 years since the passage of the 19th Amendment, face the ever-increasing effects of climate change, and reconcile the meanings behind monuments and public mourning. Smith explores how forgotten objects and narratives can be used to tell contemporary stories.

Rebecca Hutchinson "Midnight Blooms"

Midnight Blooms is work for a time in which we are turning to nature for the solace it can provide but remain filled with uncertainty for the future. Hutchinson describes her work as “speaking to the depth and complexity of living with the hopes of revealing the human condition in sculptural form,” and her installation balances human fragility with resilience and strength. Rebecca Hutchinson’s work is a unique response to the natural world. The blooms that she creates from handmade paper, ceramics, and recycled materials fill spaces, are abundant and slightly overwhelming, and tower around and above the viewer. These are works about survival, and how nature adapts to its circumstances. But taken together, the overall experience of Hutchinson’s forest of blooms is quiet, muted, and calming.