VISIT US | FALL 2024 SEASON ANNOUNCE

Project Art, Cummington, MA

ON VIEW AT FERRIN CONTEMPORARY
FALL 2024

A year ago, Ferrin Contemporary left behind our white-box gallery on the MASS MoCA campus to co-locate the gallery with our offices, library and archives all in one location. Well into our fifth decade working with contemporary ceramic art, Ferrin Contemporary is building on a foundation of curated exhibitions and ongoing projects that were incubated during the nine years we were embedded in the Northern Berkshire museum community. We are now settled in and open to the public at Project Art in Cummington, MA for regularly scheduled events and by appointment. When we left North Adams we turned our attention to focus on projects involving  artists, collectors and collections using our new found flexibility to travel and work remotely, something we could not do only a few short years ago.  

Established in 2006, Project Art began as a live-work center for ceramic arts in a renovated 19th century former Mill building.

Our offices have coexisted with the studios where resident and visiting artists produce work, offer in person and virtual workshops and private instruction. Grant funding from the Cummington Cultural District, Massachusetts Cultural Council and Hilltown CDC provided financial and technical support to expand our programs and create public sculpture visible to all from Main Street. Our community classes are offered to the general public as well as master level workshops offered to artists and educators. Short term residencies are available for artists, scholars, authors, curators, and critics focused on ceramics.

Located in a rural small town on the banks of the Westfield River, Project Art is also home to gallery director Leslie Ferrin and Project Art co-founders and artists Sergei Isupov and Kadri Pärnaments. In 2024, June Ferrin’s cozy house and artist studio was added to the compound and made available for short term projects. Now combined, the buildings are surrounded by beautiful gardens June designed and home to eight chickens and active wildlife along the river. 

The decision to leave the satellite gallery provided Ferrin Contemporary with newfound flexibility to adapt and focus on our primary mission and priority: to support artists to make new works. Without a traditional gallery space to manage, Ferrin Contemporary extended its reach to the wider world through curated exhibitions and specific projects on behalf of a core group of artists. Not only could our team attend and support more events and openings for our represented artists, but we were also able to offer and update the many curated group exhibitions in collaboration with institutions and commercial galleries. This past March, we brought our 2022 exhibition, Our America/Whose America?, to the Valentine Museum in Richmond, VA. The exhibition, installed in the Museum’s historic Wickham House on period furniture, overlapped with the NCECA Conference, ushering in a new wave of support and context for our gallery artists on view. Paul Scott’s New American Scenery traveled north to Shelburne Museum in Vermont where Paul was commissioned to create a new work. This piece was based on ideas developed during on-site research in the first of Shelburne Museum’s artist-activated “interventions” series. 

We look forward to the opportunities currently in development at institutions in the USA and abroad, and invite you to visit us to see selected works from various projects. On view in our Summer gallery, we currently have Mara Superior’s newest works addressing pressing social and environmental issues, Jacqueline Bishop’s The Narratives of Migration and The Keeper of All The Secrets, and new work from Sergei Isupov’s recent solo exhibition, Alliances. 

As you make your Fall plans, we invite you to visit Ferrin Contemporary at Project Art to tour our exhibition spaces and gardens, plan an itinerary to visit nearby studios, attend a workshop at Project Art, and explore possibilities for ceramic based projects. Email info@ferrincontemporary.com to schedule a day/time to tour, and read on to learn more about our artists currently on view.

We look forward to seeing you soon,

The Ferrin Contemporary Team

Current installations from Ferrin Contemporary at Project Art

ARTIST NEWS

Ferrin Contemporary’s newsletters connect artists, collectors, art professionals and the media with exhibitions and opportunities to learn more about artist practices, works on view and new work taking place in the studios.