Joy and Tactile Echoes Reception

Joy

Solo Show by Jennifer Jean Okumura

Jennifer Jean Okumura's solo exhibition invites people to celebrate the beauty and resilience of the human spirit. Drawing inspiration from the diverse landscape and rich cultural heritage of Boston, Okumura's artwork explores themes of immigration, identity, and the power of creativity. Through her gestural marks, Okumura captures the essence of the joie de vivre and the enduring joy of human connection. 

“My work is centered around the main idea of being nowhere and everywhere, waltzing around cultural boundaries with beliefs and traveling through form and energy, attempting to incorporate conflict, balance, and harmony to shape the work's influences, thoughts, and hope for the same thing and shared moment.”

To learn more about this exhibition please email jenniferoku25@gmail.com or visit her website.

Tactile Echoes

Olivia Leigh Curtis, Claire Pellegrini, Charlene Tsai, Cheyenne Yu

This exhibition showcases the work of four emerging ceramicists whose practices explore the intersection of materials, memory, and personal narratives. Through their abstract forms and tactile surfaces, Olivia Leigh Curtis, Claire Pellegrini, Charlene Tsai, and Cheyenne Yu invite viewers to engage with the materiality of their work and contemplate the interplay between the physical and the emotional.

Olivia Leigh Curtis (she/her) is an emerging glass and ceramic artist. She holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in glass. Her process-based work is composed of glass, ceramics, and metal, and is driven by experimenting with phenomena across media. She has shown work in MassArt’s 6th Alumni Biennial, the 2023 MassArt Auction and the Glass Art Society's 2023 Member Exhibition. She was a recipient of the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship and her work has been recently published in Corning’s New Glass Review 42.

Claire Pellegrini (they/she) is a mixed-media artist and botanist from New England. They seek to highlight the small, overlooked, and impermanent details of the natural world in a permanent medium. Their practice includes slip cast ceramics, often imitating the form of bones they have found themselves (such as a seal vertebrae or an opossum skull). All of their work is treated as collage, meshing and remixing natural and human-made forms. They are interested in exploring the distance and divide that humans place between themselves and the natural world.

Charlene Tsai (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist, working with acrylic paint, fibers, and ceramics. She draws inspiration from the textures of both manmade and natural materials and is fascinated by the interplay between hard, unyielding surfaces and soft, pliable forms. Through her work, she explores various relationships, with a particular focus on the connection between the mind and body, the physical manifestation of stress. Her works invite active engagement from the viewers, evoking familiarity of everyday objects while remaining ambiguous. Charlene was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, and currently lives in Boston, MA.

Cheyenne Yu (she/her) is a San Francisco born, Boston based artist who recently graduated from a BFA in Studio Art from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her work is a tapestry of diverse influences, deeply rooted in the power of touch and sensory experiences, while harboring a profound desire to explore and reflect on family relationships, memory and Asian American identity.