Laura Chasman creates straight up gouache portraits of the people in her life, and is probably best known for her uncanny renderings of contemporary youths and pre-teens in her Boston neighborhood, for which she was awarded the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ prestigious Maud Morgan award in 2002. Lately, Chasman has turned her attention to the elderly, creating a remarkable new series paying keen, unsentimental, and celebratory attention to the population of a neighborhood nursing home in Boston. Her new exhibition at Allston Skirt Gallery, “Laura Chasman: Those Around Me,” features portraits that cut across all boundaries. In her words, “My portraits are a visual journal of my life. My subjects are the people that I have encountered as I go about living my life as a mother, artist, clinical social worker or friend. It is where I have found myself…. I am drawn to each one of my subjects because of their particular way of being in the world the way they look, dress and express themselves, and how I have come to know them.”
“Downstrokes and Feedback” a group show curated by guest curator Lisa Schiff, and featuring work by Slater Bradley, Jacob Dyrenforth, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Erik Hanson, Kevin Landers, Elizabeth Peyton, Helen Sadler, Kirsten Stoltmann, and Doug Wada.