Rachel Gloria Adams, February - March 2026

Rachel Gloria Adams in the Split Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Rachel Gloria Adams is a multidisciplinary artist living in Portland, ME. Adams has developed a vibrant, graphic pattern-based visual language filled with references to the natural world and motherhood that posses an heirloom quality. Her work takes form by way of quilting, painting, design and murals.

She moved to to Maine in 2005 to pursue her BFA from the Maine College of Art and Design. She has gone on to exhibit artwork at the Portland Museum of Art, Space Gallery, Center for Maine Contemporary Art and Dowling Walsh. She has attended residencies at Speedwell, Pace House and is an Indigo Arts Alliance David C Driscoll Fellow. Her work has been acquired by the Farnsworth Museum and Portland Museum of Art. In addition to her studio practice, Adams has been commissioned to create murals for several institutions including the Children’s Museum of Portland, Farnsworth Museum and Worcester Art Museum.

Visit Rachel’s website here.

Olivia Berke, February - March 2026

Olivia Berke in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Olivia Berke is a New York City based artist. Her practice is centered around using everyday materials as portals to the imagination and finding wonder in the ordinary and unseen. Much of the material Olivia uses is either gifted or recovered, and so, each piece operates as a record of the time, place, and people involved in its creation. Ranging in scale, material, and process, Olivia seeks to create work that offers a moment in which an unfamiliar encounter can become something intimate. Her work has been a part of several group exhibitions, most recently at The Sheerly Touch-Ya/Shisanwu Warehouse in Glendale, Queens and Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York, NY. 

Visit Olivia’s website here.

Dream Paintings, 2024

James Eric Francis Sr., February - March 2026

James Eric Francis Sr. in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

James Eric Francis Sr., a member of the Penobscot Nation, is a multifaceted artist whose work is deeply intertwined with his roles as a historian, cultural preservationist, and tribal leader. His art, which includes painting, photography, filmmaking, and graphic design, is a powerful exploration of the relationship between Maine Native Americans and the landscape, viewed through an indigenous lens.

As a visual artist, Francis creates work that is both historical and deeply personal. He often uses his art to challenge dominant historical narratives and to assert the resilience and continued presence of the Penobscot people. A prime example is his painting "We Walk On; Eternally," where he recreates a genocidal 1755 proclamation from Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips calling for the extermination of the Penobscot people. Across this document, he stamps in blood-red letters the Penobscot word for "we walk on; eternally," a powerful statement of survival and a plea for a new, respectful relationship with the people of Maine.

Francis's painting often incorporates intricate techniques, such as his dot paintings, which he began after being inspired by the methodical process of flint knapping. These paintings, such as "Welcome Home," pay homage to the natural world and Penobscot traditions, often celebrating the return of salmon to the Penobscot River. His work also delves into Penobscot legends and cosmology, as seen in his painting "The Great Penetrating Arrow," which tells the story of how all animals and people sprang from an ash tree shot by the hero Gluskabe. This piece, like much of his art, emphasizes the Penobscot belief that humans are on the same plane as all other living creatures.

His artistic practice extends to photography, filmmaking, and graphics. He co-produced the documentary *Invisible*, which examines racism faced by Native Americans in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. His photography often takes the form of time-lapses, capturing the beauty of the Maine landscape—from the Penobscot River to Mount Katahdin—and its connection to his ancestors. Francis’s work as a graphic artist and filmmaker further supports his mission to revitalize and preserve Penobscot culture, with his oral history projects bringing to life historical pictures and community stories.

In addition to his creative work, Francis is a renowned curator. He has curated exhibits on Penobscot history at institutions such as the Bangor Museum and Center for History, the Abbe Museum, and Harvard University. His curatorial work, like his art, aims to "re-indigenize" historical landscapes and challenge the absence of Native American narratives in historical depictions.

Francis is working on a graduate degree of the University of Maine's Intermedia Masters of Fine Arts program, and his work as an artist is inextricably linked to his lifelong commitment to cultural preservation and education. He serves as the Director of Cultural and Historic Preservation and Tribal Historian for the Penobscot Nation and is a co-founder and Chair of Local Contexts, an initiative to help Indigenous communities manage their cultural heritage and intellectual property. Through his art and his many professional roles, James Eric Francis Sr. provides a unique and vital perspective on history, place, and the enduring power of Indigenous culture.

Visit Francis’s Instagram page here.

Victoria DelValle, January - February 2026

Victoria DelValle in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Victoria “thirteenvic” DelValle (b. 2000) is a Diasporican illustrator, painter, and designer based in Boston, MA. Her practice began in spoken word poetry, performing at Louder Than a Bomb, Brave New Voices, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

She later returned to visual art, earning a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2022 and pursuing further education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her foundation in writing and performance informs her visual concepts and approach to arts education.

In 2023, she debuted her first solo exhibition, Lost Grief, at Nubian Square Open Studios for the Arts (NOSA). She continued gaining momentum through fellowships with Dunamis, Artists for Humanity and the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, and was awarded the Mass Cultural Council’s Grant for Creative Individuals in 2025.

Raised within Boston’s social justice–centered youth arts programs, she values mentorship and the transformative power of creative expression. As a consultant for the City of Boston and Boston Centers for Youth & Families (BCYF), DelValle co-facilitated BCYF Creates, a pilot initiative expanding access to arts programming across the city.

Through her work with young people and her roots in community storytelling, DelValle continues to shape an art practice that is both experimental and personal. She engages accessible, site-specific materials in response to her environment, embracing improvisation as both method and message. Her work reflects the layered realities of cultural memory, emotional inheritance, and transformation—navigated through a diasporic lens. Blending elements of street art, expressionism and surrealism, she invites viewers to confront fear, embrace absurdity, and find wonder within the unfamiliar. Through play, she softens the line between beauty and the grotesque, making difficult truths approachable and encouraging social growth.

Visit Victoria’s website here.

Kyle Downs, January - February 2026

Kyle Downs in the Split Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Kyle Downs is an artist that lives in Bowdoinham, ME. Downs received an MFA in sculpture from the Ohio State University, his BFA from Maine College of Art, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. Downs’ work has been included in exhibitions nationally including: Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), Cultural Arts Center (OH), and the Center For Maine Contemporary Art (ME). Downs has taught classes at The School of the Alternative (Black Mountain, NC), Denison University (OH), and Columbus College of Art and Design (OH).

Visit Kyle’s website here.

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos, January - February 2026

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker who uses social practice, visual art, and performance to create immersive worlds of magic and liberation. Born and raised in Borikén (Puerto Rico), Rivera has created home and set deep roots in Providence, RI, land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples. Rivera is founder of Studio Loba, a production house and consulting firm for cultural projects. They have 15 years of experience in the arts and culture sector, with a specialty on arts and culture for community development and civic engagement. Rivera is committed to art as a catalyst for social change and honoring community lived experience as the knowledge that can help us craft more just and generative futures. Last year, Rivera was selected for Providence Commemoration Lab (2024-25), a one year residency of social practice to engage residents of Providence in reimagining commemoration at the former Columbus Square. Rivera is known for their deeply rooted community engaged work that fosters cultural repair and civic imagination.

Visit Shey’s website here.

Rozalinda Borcilă - October-November 2025

Rozalinda Borcilă at Surf Point’s Wild Knoll Foundation Garden. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Rozalinda Borcilă is a Romanian artist, researcher, and activist based in Chicago. She is interested in tracing the ways colonial violences coalesce around material extractions and flows of capital, in institutional grammars and forms of possession -- but also around modes of feeling, modes of relation, and everyday experiences of being in place. Her current projects focus on glacial landscapes and wetland development sites. Borcilă has exhibited internationally in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Newberry Library Research Fellowship, 3Arts Award, Illinois Artist Fellowship, Chicago Filmmakers Grant, and Art Matters Award. She is active in migrant solidarity and border abolition struggles and is a core member of NoShelter, an activist media project exploring migrant child detention in the U.S. and the efforts to dismantle it. She works in museums, universities, art centers, community spaces, squats, and in the streets.

Visit Rozalinda’s website here.

Shona Masarin, October - November 2025

Shona Masarin in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Shona Masarin is a Pennsylvania-based Australian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores perception, abstraction, and the construction of visual worlds. Working primarily with large-format photography, moving images, and experimental analogue film processes, she creates abstracted landscapes and dimensional spaces where scale, materiality, and form remain ambiguous—inviting viewers to question what they see and how they experience it. Her work meditates on the relationship between natural and artificial environments, memory and physical presence, and the merging of inner and outer landscapes. Masarin’s films and installations have been presented at festivals and art spaces including the Melbourne International Film Festival and galleries in New York, with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and the Jerome Foundation.

Visit Shona’s website here.

Jackie Milad - October-November 2025

Jackie Milad in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Jackie Milad (Baltimore City, 1975) is a U.S.- based artist whose mixed-media abstract paintings and collages address the history and complexities of dispersed cultural heritage and multi-ethnic identity. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Select exhibitions include The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Academy Art Museum (Easton, MD), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Charlotte, NC), The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Arthur Ross Gallery University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), and Harvey B. Gantt Center (Charlotte, NC).

In 2024 Jackie Milad became a Creative Capital Grantee and the inaugural Robert W. Deutsch Foundation's Alumni Rubys Artist Grantee. Milad is a multi-year recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from Maryland State Arts Council. In 2019 she was named a Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalist and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby Grantee. In 2022 Jackie received the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Travel Prize to conduct in-depth research on the Egyptian antiquities held at the British Museum and Petrie Museums in London. Her work is included in several public collections, including, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Academy Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Library, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and the Pizzuti Collection. Milad received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and her MFA from Towson University. She is currently represented by SOCO Gallery in Charlotte, NC. And Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Visit Jackie’s website here.

Christina Schmid - October-November 2025

Christina Schmid at the Surf Point library. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Christina Schmid is a writer who thinks with art and experiments with prose. Her arts writing unfolds at the intersection of journalism, scholarship, and creative non-fiction. Through art, her work engages with the ways cultural narratives shape experiences and encounters, delves into ethics, the politics of immigration, feminism, queer ecology, practices of belonging, and wherever else art takes her. As a writer, she is interested in the materiality of text, haptic criticism, and the ways art can embody, archive, and generate ideas. Her essays and reviews have been published online and in print, in anthologies, journals, zines, artist books, and exhibition catalogs. She works at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art in Minneapolis where she teaches contemporary art, critical practice and theory. She has been a finalist for the Rabkin Prize in Art Writing and the Andy Warhol Foundation's Award for Short Form Arts Writing. She is a recipient of a MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant for Creative Prose.

Lilian Garcia-Roig - September-October 2025

Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuban-born, Texas-raised Latinx artist living and working in Tallahassee, Florida where she is a distinguished Professor at FSU. She is most known for her perceptually based, large-scale, “all-day” cumulative paintings that formally interweave the illusionist possibilities painting with its abstract material nature. On a personal level, her on-site works have been about negotiating the complex propositions of sense of place & belonging which influence the construction of identity. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Other significant awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Blackwell Prize in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, M-AAA/NEA Fellowship, and Kimbrough Award (Dallas Museum of Art). Residencies include Skowhegan, Joan Mitchell Center, MacDowell, Art Omi, and Millay. Garcia-Roig has shown extensively across the U.S. including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and in exhibitions such as “Relational Undercurrents”, the “Florida Prize”, and the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Visit Lilian’s website here.

Efrat Klipshtein - September-October 2025

Photographer: Lena Gomon

My artistic practice spans installations, performances, and two-dimensional works. The materials I work with are diverse and include: from everyday materials ; electrical cables, brooms, aluminum foil, plasticine, paper clips to botanical materials, wood sculptures and glass castings. My work ranges from the formal formulation of shapeless physical spaces to the transformation of everyday objects, into poetic realms. The transformation that the objects undergo in my works distances them from the original form but preserves their identity. much like the transformations that heroes of journeys undergo in literary epics who set out but never return home the same person they left. In recent years, my work has traced the elements of the road; the lines of the routes, the depressions and cracks in the road, these elements that we are blind to, or simply prefer to avoid or stay away from. These take on form and substance in my work and become measurements of the desire for a destination. My work expresses the attempt to stabilize and preserve the element of movement already contained in the stopping, in memory and failure; the persistent preoccupation with the elements of the road blurs the destination until it is absorbed. I believe that there is no destination, there is only the material - a road, and the road grows bigger as its crevices accumulate.

Hosted in partnership with Artis.

Visit Efrat’s website here.

Em Rea - September-October 2025

Em Rea (they/them) transforms discarded and found materials into improvisational sculptures, assemblages, drawings, paintings, and portals to future worlds. A disabled, queer, and trans artist living in Lenapehoking (presently known as Philadelphia) their work explores themes of collapse, repair, disposability, and care. They encourage contemplation of our relationship with our environment, the transient nature of the objects we use, and the objectification of any being on this sentient earth.

Carly Sheehan - September-October 2025

Carly Sheehan (b. 1992, Massachusetts) is a painter and educator based in Seattle. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art (2020) and a BFA in Art Education and Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2014). Sheehan is a full-time lecturer in the Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking Department at the University of Washington. Her work has been exhibited in grassroots and artist-run spaces including Triangle Projects and North Loop West in Los Angeles. And most recently, a solo show at Specialist Gallery in Seattle. In 2024, she joined the artist team at Specialist, where she contributes to organizing exhibitions.

Visit Carly website here.

Annika Earley - August 2025

Annika Earley (she/they) makes drawings and sculptures about the demands and joys of parenthood, sensuality and sexuality, gender, and pre-teen nostalgia.

Earley grew up in rural Switzerland but moved to mid-coast Maine in 2000. When she was very young, she used to play in the woods; there she found a small, shingled hut with tiny windows and a locked door. Raised on Grimm stories, Earley was absolutely certain that this must be a witch’s house and proceeded to avoid it at all costs as she had no interest in being baked into a pie. At age twenty, she returned to Switzerland for the first time after ten years and discovered that this hut was not a witch’s house but, in fact, a storage shed belonging to the forestry department of her village. This experience continues to have a profound impact on her work.

Visit Annika’s website here.

Asuka Goto- August 2025

Asuka Goto is a Philadelphia-based visual artist who works across drawing, printmaking and photography. Her artist book, To Send a Telegram, was recently acquired by the Free Library of Philadelphia and was also selected as a semi-finalist for the MCBA Prize.

Visit Asuka’s website here.

Luis Sahagún- August 2025

Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Luis is an artist and ritualist whose practice confronts the palpable inescapability of race and transforms art into an act of cultural and spiritual reclamation. He has exhibited widely at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Latchkey Gallery NYC, Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), and The National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), among others. He has held residencies at Roswell, NM; The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program (LAP), Saratoga, CA, the Chicago Artist Coalition; and was a Critical Race Studies Scholar at Michigan State University. His work has been examined in publications including Artillery Magazine, Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, Newcity, and the Chicago Tribune. His work is included in the Fidelity Collection of Boston, Alta Med Collection of Los Angeles, the Allex Ko Collection, and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, among many others. His practice has been spotlighted as having a unique voice helping to shape, shift, and touch the world on radio, podcasts, and television networks such as MundoFOX, NBC, UNIVISION and WBEZ-NPR. He received his undergraduate degree from Southern Illinois University- Carbondale, an MFA at Northern Illinois University. Luis is 3Arts awardee and a 2023 United States Artist Fellow.

Visit Luis’s website here.

Lauren Marinaro - Surf Point x NADA Gallerist-in-Residence, July/August 2025

Lauren Marinaro is a New York-based gallerist and the founder of Marinaro Gallery. Since opening the gallery in 2017, Marinaro has been committed to emerging and mid-career artists, often spotlighting work that explores identity and materiality. She had previously been a partner at Feuer/Mesler and a director at Zach Feuer Gallery. Lauren is on the board of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and previously taught Understanding Contemporary Art at New York University.

Learn more about Marinaro Gallery here.

Alex Nazari - Surf Point x NADA Gallerist-in-Residence, July/August 2025

Alex Nazari is a Los Angeles-based artist and founder of Gattopardo. A graduate of the ArtCenter MFA program, she has exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, The Aster, The Box, LAXART, No Moon and Lane Meyers Projects.

Gattopardo is an artist-run gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Since opening in 2021, we have staged experimental collaborations, first solo exhibitions, idiosyncratic group shows and one night happenings. Gattopardo is dedicated to functioning as a capacious vessel offering tangible support for discursive, artist-led programming.

Learn more about Gattopardo here.

Nicoletta Pollara - Surf Point x NADA Gallerist-in-Residence, July/August 2025

Nicoletta Pollara (b. 1993) is a accomplished art professional with over a decade of experience in gallery management, exhibition planning, and strategic leadership. Joining Night Gallery in 2017, she rose to the role of Director, spearheading significant growth across programming, staffing, and infrastructure, including the launch of three new gallery locations. She has produced exhibitions for artists such as Anne Libby, Bambou Gili, Divya Mehra, Elaine Stocki, Han Bing, Julia Haft-Candell, and Rachel Youn, and has played a key role in the gallery’s international fair presence and collaborative initiatives. Her forward-thinking approach has guided the development of the gallery’s digital platforms and the implementation of innovative strategies that have shaped its evolution over the past eight years. She holds an MA in Art Business from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in Art History from Loyola Marymount University. Through her leadership, she continues to influence the landscape of contemporary art and champion emerging voices in the field.

Learn more about Night Gallery here.