Summer Exhibition:
To Move A Mountain
Curated by artist Coady Brown
On view: June 6 – August 22, 2025
Opening night: Friday, June 6, 2025
6-8 PM
Hudson D. Walker Gallery
The Fine Arts Work Center is pleased to present To Move a Mountain, the 2025 summer exhibition in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery. To Move a Mountain is a group exhibition of past Fine Arts Work Center Visual Arts Fellows, selected by curator Coady Brown. Proceeds from the exhibition go to benefiting artists at the Fine Arts Work Center.
Participating Artists:
Anina Major
Raul de Lara
Dani Levine
Lamar Peterson
Cheyenne Julian
Alina Perez
Widline Cadet
Pat Phillips
Coady Brown
Please note: The gallery is available to visit from Tuesday through Saturday 12 – 5 PM. Please visit the administrative offices to be shown to the gallery. The gallery is also open by appointment and during all public events. Parking is restricted to students and faculty staying on site.
Curatorial Statement
To Move A Mountain seeks to explore the contemporary artists’ relationship to nature, both symbolically and conceptually.
There is often an inherent romanticism in the depiction of nature. Flowers, with both literary meanings and symbolic representations, are often seen as stand-ins for love and courtship. Along with flowers, paintings of still lives historically depict food, particularly fruit as a representation of a memento mori, a reminder that we all will die, that what nourishes us now will also rot. These lemons, grapes, oranges, and apples, now contemporaneously evoke the farming industry, for today we exist in a world where there are thousands of varieties of apples alone. The grafting and crossbreeding of this fruit exist in a feverish capacity, illustrating humans’ insatiable appetite to intervene in nature’s order. Simultaneously, the division and acquisition of land has a long and dark history, laden with violence and destruction in the interests of colonialism and domination. The domestication of animals, plants, and other wild creatures inhabit our homes, bringing the outside world in, sometimes to a comical degree. Each artist in the exhibition takes an individual approach to this unwieldy topic, metabolizing their personal and cultural experiences and understandings to the development of their practice.
The work in To Move A Mountain covers a variety of territories. For example, using nature as a source of personal symbology, a case study for capitalism as seen through the suburbanization of neighborhoods, or as a site of fantasy and escapism, just to name a few. We live alongside nature, but now more than ever we are forced to watch how the repercussions of our actions and existence have thrown our biosphere off balance to the point of catastrophe. There is grief, nostalgia, humor and sorrow in this symbiosis. The artists in To Move A Mountain seek to investigate all of these avenues of our shared experiences of our delicate and fraught ecosystem.
Coady Brown
Visual Arts Fellow
2018-2019, 2019-2020
About our Curator
Coady Brown, Visual Arts Fellow 2018-2019, 2019-2020
Coady Brown’s figures inhabit tightly framed, intimate spaces in paintings that explore the vulnerability of our connections and relationships. Engaging in acts of self-presentation and self-preservation, they delicately juggle their public and private lives. Figures become reflections of their environments, mirroring these heightened, surreal, frenetic, sexy, and sorrowful states.
According to Brown, her figures are “specifically dressed. The emphasis on fashion is a celebratory declaration of the body… fashion becomes a site of freedom, a place to explore self-expression and presentation.” Figures tend to be androgynous, understanding gender fluidly and that femininity can be a site of both strength and extreme vulnerability. Caught in various states of harmony, anxiety, ecstasy, and anguish, figures navigate the world and uncertainty of the everyday, from intimate boundaries in bars and bedrooms to the unknown that awaits outdoors. It is a world fraught with the instability and paranoia of contemporary life.
Brown received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2012 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally at Stems Gallery, Brussels, BE; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Taymour Grahne, London, UK; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Recent group exhibitions include Carlye Packer, Palm Springs, CA; Morgan Presents, New York, NY; The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Carl Kostyal, Stockholm, SE; Monya Rowe, New York, NY; Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin, DE; Taymour Grahne, London, UK; Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Harper’s Book, East Hampton, NY; Stems Gallery, Brussels, BE; Koenig and Clinton, Brooklyn, NY; Angell Gallery, Toronto, CA; NAM Project, Milan, Italy; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Lyles and Kind, NY; among others.
She is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies including The Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Fountainhead, Vermont Studio Center, and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Awards for her work include the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting, the Richard Cramer Color Award in Painting, and the Gianni Caproni Art Prize in Painting. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and New American Painting. Brown’s works are included in public collections such as X Museum in Beijing, Colombus Museum of Art and ICA Miami.
The Fine Arts Work Center is committed to making its facilities inclusive and accessible for everyone. The Stanley Kunitz Common Room and the Hudson D. Walker Gallery meet ADA accessibility standards.
If you need any accommodations to fully participate, please contact our Accessibility Coordinator, Susan Blood, at 508-487-9960, extension 106.
With the exception of service animals, pets are not allowed in the Fine Arts Work Center’s indoor public spaces. While we recognize the important role pets play in our lives, our priority is maintaining a safe and inclusive environment for all participants and approved animals. These policies are based on feedback from staff and the community. For more details, please visit our Service and Emotional Support Animal Policy.
Thank you to our Sponsors
Sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Gavin Kennedy, Founder of Emergent Art Advisory
