Featured Artists

Lisa Elmaleh
Nine works from “Promised Land/Tierra Prometida” 

Lisa Elmaleh is an American photographer, artist, and humanitarian. She specializes in large-format photography. Nine works will be shown from her most recent body of work, “Promised Land/Tierra Prometida,” which engages with and challenges mainstream media immigration images and narratives. She traveled the U.S.-Mexican border to document and volunteer with humanitarian aid organizations; her borderland perspective is told through images which focus on the humanity and experiences of asylum seekers and those providing food, shelter, health care, and support.

Sidival Fila
Seven new works (two “paintings” and five sculptures)

Sidival Fila is a Brazilian born Franciscan friar, artist,
and President of the eponymous Philanthropic Foundation. He lives and works in Rome, at the Convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino. His artistic research is grounded in disused materials, particularly textiles such as linen, cotton, silk, hemp and brocades. His poetics lie in redeeming the object from its condition as a mere “thing,” restoring to it the possibility of telling its own story. Through measured interventions—stitching, tension, and folds—fragments become living matter, carrying memory, history, and dignity, transforming the lived experience of the fabric into poetic narrative. The constant element throughout his aesthetic journey is his
contact with matter, to which the artwork gives back a voice, often accumulatedover centuries.

Jeremy Frey
Baskets, flatweave, video “Ash, 2023”

Jeremy Frey, a basket maker, is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation. He harvests materials and weaves baskets using ancestral techniques. His 2025 retrospective, Jeremy Frey: Woven, toured museums around the country. The video “Ash, 2023” will be presented. Frey will also speak at BC on September 30 as part of the University’s Lowell Humanities Series. (Free; registration required: www.bc.edu/lowell)

Sónia Gomes
11 fabric works (including new works)

Sonia Gomes lives and works in São Paulo.Brazil.  Born in the interior of Minas Gerais, Gomes developed her relationship with art out of a need to transform discarded and previously worn textiles into abstract forms where the language of sewing is extended into the realms of drawing and sculpture. Rooted in domestic practices of making and care, Gomes’s work starts with the intimacy of the body, clothing, and home and explores how personal histories can be embedded within materials and transformed through physical acts like knotting, twisting, and stretching.

Sr. Corita Kent (1918-1986)
Documentary

Sister Corita Kent ( b.1918-d. 1986) was born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Iowa. An artist, educator, and activist, Sister Corita’s work brought the visual language of Pop art into dialogue with spirituality, politics, literature, and daily life. She entered the Immaculate Heart of Mary order in Los Angeles in 1936 and was an inspiring teacher in the art department at Immaculate Heart College from 1947 to 1968. Working primarily with serigraphs, Kent drew from the visual language of advertising and popular culture which she put in conversation with poetry and scripture to address faith and social justice. After leaving the order in 1968, she moved to Boston where she continued to work until her death in 1986. A prolific artist, over the course of her career, she produced more than 800 serigraph editions, as well as numerous public and commercial commissions, including US postal stamps and the iconic Boston Gas tank which continues to enliven Route 93 outside of the city.

Lucky Pierre
Video (artist collaborative)

Lucky Pierre is a Chicago-based collaborative group founded in 1996, working across performance, writing, and visual art. Emphasizing duration, process, and participation, the group creates open structures for engaging diverse publics around political and social questions. Current members working on Final Meals include Holly Abney, Kevin Kaempf, Michael Thomas, and Mary Zerkel.

Final Meals, begun in 2003, is an ongoing community-based performance and video installation that reconstructs final meal requests made by people executed on Texas death row. Through meals, recordings, communal gatherings, and conversation, Final Meals considers mortality, state power, memory, bodily care, and collective responsibility.

Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
Video

Bárbara Wagner (b. 1980, Brasília) & Benjamin de Burca (b. 1975, Munich) have developed a collaborative practice across cinema, visual arts, and performance for over a decade. Their videos and installations combine documentary strategies with narrative layers of fantasy and allegory, where direction, script, costume, and soundtrack are collectively conceived with participants. This horizontal methodology challenges dominant representational forms by revealing tensions between popular cultural practices and hegemonic structures of visibility, offering a critical reflection on the performative gesture and its social, aesthetic, and political reverberations.

Deb Todd Wheeler

Deb Todd Wheeler is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses installation, sculpture, photography, video, sound, and collaborative performance. Creating temporary communities through gathering, grief work, and holding commemorative space, Wheeler’s projects generate intimate experiences through participatory interactive installations. On November 2, she will lead a community-sung medication of remembrance to celebrate All Souls Day in the Memorial Labyrinth outside of Burns Library.

Manthia Diawara
Film

Manthia Diawara is a Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, and scholar. Diawara’s 2009 film “Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation” follows the French writer, poet, and philosopher on a transatlantic journey as he discusses his philosophies of creolization, relation, and history.