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In the spring of 2024, painter and Bristol Community College adjunct professor Kat Knutsen curated the first “Curious Figure” at the Co-Creative Center on Union Street. The well-attended exhibition included roughly two dozen artists showing work almost entirely focused on the human form. It was successful enough to warrant “Curious Figure 2” in the same location in 2025.
And earlier this month, “Curious Figure 3,” a much larger iteration of the same theme, featuring 42 artists working in a variety of two-dimensional media from 38 cities across 21 states, opened at the Star Store building.
Wait … what the what? Why not at the Co-Creative Center? And isn’t the Star Store closed to the general public?
According to Co-Creative Center Director Dena Haden, who has held that position since its opening in June 2018 as a creative hub and gallery space, the building previously owned by the Waterfront Historic Area LeaguE (WHALE) was purchased by a private developer, and the Co-Creative has taken residence in the Purchase Street campus of BCC, but without exhibition space. Haden expects the Co-Creative to move into the Star Store building in late 2026 or early 2027, depending on how far the badly needed structural renovations have come.
Without access to the previous exhibition space, Knutsen, who is the founder of the Siren Scene (which she describes as “a creative studio and media platform that highlights intriguing voices in the visual arts and music”), contacted Matt McArthur, the director of real estate and fundraising for the Arts & Business of Greater Boston. He is in charge of renovating the Star Store as an arts and cultural center after the egregious displacement of art students and faculty from the New Bedford campus by the administration of UMass Dartmouth in August 2023.
McArthur listened to Knutsen’s pitch and they worked out a way to put up the art show, but there were a few issues. Until the necessary renovations are done — which is months away — the building is not accessible to the general public with but a few exceptions. “Curious Figure 3” could be made available to visitors for an official opening, the April and May AHA! Nights, and a closing ceremony at the end of May.
The show is up for two months but only accessible to the public for a total of 10 hours, five of which have already passed. Upcoming opportunities to see the show are on the AHA! Night Reception, Thursday, May 14 from 5-8 p.m. and at the Closing Reception, May 30 from 5-7 p.m. Note those dates. It’s well worth the visit, even if the show is a little too tightly packed and not always entirely cohesive and there are the occasionally odd juxtapositions. That said, there is some truly engaging work.
Knutsen is passionate about figurative art, which she describes as “one of the most powerful ways artists explore the human experience,” continuing to note that, “At a time when so much of our lives are mediated through screens, these works (in CF3) reconnect us with the emotional and psychological presence of the human figure.”
Through the magic of the internet, Knutsen co-juried the work with Joe Vaux who, like Knutsen herself, was a contributor to the show. He is the Los Angeles based director and a longtime artist on the animated television series “Family Guy.” His goofy “Oleg” looks like something that would have been illustrated by the late cartoonist Basil Wolverton for DC Comics “Plop!” in the early ’70s. Wolverton was once described as a “Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People,” and that could certainly describe Vaux, with his seemingly dead Oleg, a bug-eyed, scaly-skinned humanoid creature with one ridiculously long leg stitched to many others, and the other leg withered away to nothing. He is surrounded by dead rats, a few still plump and many nothing but skeletons.
“Elegy for the Canary,” an oil painting by Great Falls, Virginia, painter Judith Peck is mysterious and mildly disturbing. It features a young woman in a straw-colored peasant blouse and a mesh veil. She looks downward, as if in mourning, but the bright yellow feathers adorning her locks suggest she may indeed be the cat that killed the canary.
In an illustrative painting that could be described as “old-timey,” a thickly mustached and muttonchopped man in a derby and a blood spattered butcher’s apron has a straight razor before him. He is barely able to contain his smirk in Illinois-based David Marcet’s “Check Out my Detachable Thumb Trick.”
Arend Neyhouse’s “Side Work” is an incredibly crisp work of photorealism. The Newark painter is so precise and adept in his craftsmanship that it appears to be a straightforward color photograph of a man working a restaurant gig, deeply in focus as he cleans something with a white cloth.
New Bedford favorite Milton Brightman’s “The Beach” is one of his typically joyous celebrations of life in a jampacked crowd scene. Likely inspired by Horseneck Beach, a man leaps upward and misses a ball or a Frisbee, bikini clad women run or sunbathe or flirt, small children play in the water and the sand, and seagulls swoop down to steal French fries. One can almost hear the squawking and the crashing waves. The work is not even close to photorealism. It is actually far closer to Mad magazine. But it is certainly real.
Other particular works of note include Don Weaver’s “Landscape Interrupted,” Erin Dixon’s “Rorschach Test,” Ben Goldman’s “Overboard,” and Tatsuki Hakoyama’s “Between Two Worlds.”
A few blocks away, the New Bedford Art Museum is hosting one-third of the UMass Dartmouth 2026 Thesis Exhibition until May 14, with a closing AHA! Night Reception with ArtTALKS. Hatch Street Studio (Studio 215), 88 Hatch Street, is the second leg of the Thesis Exhibition tripod. A reception was held on April 18 and the space will be accessible to the public during Hatch Street Open Studios, on Saturday, May 9, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. The third and final segment of the exhibition will be at the UMD’s Art and Design Studios (formerly the Bed Bath & Beyond store) at Dartmouth Towne Center Plaza, 488 State Rd., North Dartmouth, open daily until May 9, from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. and hosting a closing reception on Thursday, May 7, 4-6 p.m.
All three locations will feature works by all nine MFA graduates. They are multidisciplinary artist Ali Masoumzadeh, ceramicist Alison Bergman, theatre designer / textile artist and puppeteer Allison Morones, fiber artist Arghavan Booyeh, ceramist and sculptor Immer Cook, painter Maya August Palmer, multimedia artist MITRAAVRS, painter Sarah Valinezhad and ceramicist Yaren Yildiz.
Of course, had UMD not shuttered the Star Store they would have not needed to farm out grad student exhibitions to other locations … but I digress. As of this writing, the Hatch Street space and the UMass Dartmouth Art and Design Studios are not yet open to the public. Once I have visited all the locations and talked with the MFA artists, I will offer a more comprehensive assessment of the triad of exhibitions.
But for now, here’s a quick take on some of the work now on display in the Art Museum.
Born in Iran, Valinezhad’s painting “There, you are shot. Here, I die.” features three women, or perhaps three versions of the same woman, perhaps all the artist herself, sitting elegantly and slouching and curled up on the floor in a vividly pink room. The title and the quiet sense of despair (my take) may indeed be a commentary on the horrors being visited upon Iran, even as I tap at my keyboard.
“All of this anger used to be love” is one of four digital prints by Indian multimedia artist MITRAAVRS. Two lengths of chain form an X blocking entrance to a lush jungle of sorts, a space too bright, too intense, and too uncomfortable, as can happen when affection becomes wrath.
The smallest work among them is Maya August Palmer’s “[dandelion],” a delicate life-size painted two-dimensional version of the flower that everyone seems to love to hate. I had to lay on my belly to get close enough to photograph it. What’s not to like about someone championing the underdog? Even if it’s a weed?
And Masoumzadeh, Bergman, Morones, Booyeh, Cook and Yildiz? Be patient. I’ll be at Hatch Street and at your Dartmouth studio space soon.
During the last AHA!, after visiting the Star Store and the Art Museum, I meandered down to the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park Visitor’s Center to see “Ash: Drawings by Elena Peteva.” The UMD associate art professor exhibited four charcoal drawings and all were created with a delicate touch and a skill level that is nearly impossible to fathom. After all, what is charcoal but black dust? And yet, her work is pristine.
Rendered in subtle shades of gray, “Material and Immaterial” is a charcoal drawing of a lump of a charcoal. It’s almost too meta. Peteva has noted that “charcoal, or ash, becomes a metaphor as a subject and material — it is what is left at the end of all things and something essential to new life, in the form of carbon. It is the beginning and the end. What I try to do in my work is define, present, and illuminate things which are, perhaps, unrepresentable.” Alpha and omega.
“Of Smoke and Ash ll” features black smoke billowing out of a corrugated cardboard box. One sees no flicker of flame but it’s there. It is difficult to not be reminded of the imminent collapse of the World Trade Center, all those years ago.
“Turmoil and Silence” depicts two hands, perhaps Peteva’s own, reaching into an abyss of blackness. It presents the known and the unfathomable, and it’s damned near perfect.
Reflecting on that second Thursday of April, and the social event that AHA! Night constitutes, I thought of the “Curious Figure 3” as a big party, and to borrow a term from the Jamaican singer Shaggy, a boisterous and “boombastic” siren call (pun intended), while the MFA show was a celebration of colleagues and friends who’ve spent years together, a comfortable space where all are welcome. And “Ash” was the intimate quiet end to the evening, a secret revealed, a nightcap for the soul.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
