The Stephen D. Paine Scholarship 2024 Exhibition
Juror: Kate Gilbert, Executive DIrector of Now + There
Recipients:
Julie Francois, Fallon Lavertue, Guadaloupe Najar, Carter Powers, Keith Truong , Leon Vicaire
Julie Francois
Julie Francois is a Haitian-American born interdisciplinary artist working out of New England. She is currently pursuing her BFA at the School of the Museum Fine Arts at Tufts University where she is best known for her printmaking works. Julie continues to make work using painting, drawing, and photography, oftentimes creating pieces of compiling mediums. Driven by the African diaspora, Julie uses history as it relates to the present to power the narratives behind her art. Through the use of vibrant colors, textile details, and medium choices, Julie draws attention to expressions of Black joy and culture as well as her own history and ethnicity. Julie's work has been published and showcased regionally from Boston, to New York, and Pittsburgh. She’s brought together Tufts University Archive Center and The Africana Center to lead community workshops engaging with collectional images and promote archival engagement. She has been celebrated in her community from being a part of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Archive and Autobiography Artists Panel, speaking at the Fletcher School at Tufts University’s Latinx Night, and being a part of Boston’s Youth in Charge, Speaker Series. In 2023, she was a recipient of the Anne E. Borghesani Grant for her project exploring, “Haiti’s History Through Art and the Diaspora” and the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship from the Boston Art Dealers Association.
Julie Francois Artist Statement:
I grapple with the intersecting aspects of my own identity while expanding the visual vocabulary of race and space. Driven by the Black community, I use history as it relates to our present to power my narratives. I take inspiration from the world around me, my experiences as a first generation American female, and my reflections surrounding the African diaspora in the world we live in. I’m most interested in advocating for a new visual dialogue concerning the Black experience. I expand the visual vocabulary in which Black people occupy by telling our stories in new modes and mediums that are otherwise untraditional for our representation. I’m deeply interested in not only showcasing and uplifting people of color in my subjectivity, but also confronting viewers' gaze to create a visual experience and interaction with my work. I do this rough a variety of methods such as employing rhinestones that accent and dazzle imagery big and small, within collaged works or stand alone images. Flocking glitter onto original photographs adds a layer of complexity to an otherwise 2D image surface, creating shimmer and transforming my images through a viewer's distance and space. Hand printed photolithographonto fabric creates a setting of delicacy that contributes to the themes of nostalgia, archive, and memory with images and the stories they tell.
Fallon Lavertue
Fallon Lavertue is a New England artist whose mediums include traditional oil painting, drawing, sculptural weaving, and printmaking. Her subjects include the figure, animals, abstraction, mythology, textile, and color. Lavertue has shown her work in New Hampshire, at Claremont Opera House, Lebanon AVA Gallery; in Massachusetts, at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and The Kathryn Schulz Gallery for Cambridge Art Association. Most recently, Lavertue was selected to participate in the Abigail Ogilvy Fresh Faces 2024 show of emerging talent in the Northeast. Additionally, in 2024 she was selected as one of the recipients for the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship by the Boston Art Dealers Association. Lavertue also received the Russel P. Coleman Jr. Award from Massachusetts College of Art and Design Fine Art 2D Department for their yearly Juried Open House, and Emerging Artist Award from the Cambridge Art Association at their Exhibition Red; both in 2023. In 2022 she received the Foundation Painting Award as one of three selected sophomores, again from their yearly Juried Open House. Lavertue is currently pursuing her final year of a bachelor’s fine arts degree in painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She works professionally as the Art Educator for the Fenway Community Center in Boston, offering art workshops to the Fenway neighborhood residence and guests. She also continues to work as an independent artist, currently making pieces for her 2024 Thesis Show. Lavertue has resided in Boston for the past four years.
Fallon Lavertue Artist Statement
Artist Statement Through painting I create a visual feast, giving the viewer an intimate entry into my life, encapsulating a response to my consciousness through a mythological lens. I am intellectualizing, sheltering my own experiences and circumstances thus far. My work has perched on a landing between academic painting and allegory, fiction, and memoir. Making use of animals, objects, and environments through metamorphic action allows me to work within aliases. The figures, glowing and vibrating, engulf their environment by filling up the margins of the canvas creating a disorienting experience through color relationships and interaction. As a young creative I was drawn to many books, images, and lore about Greek mythology. The creative quality of the stories inspired me to think of my own life through a narrative optic. I am a firm believer that for so many readers, creators, watchers, and listeners, mythology has been a tool to project themselves into writing from centuries ago and question what they would mean now. Artist Sofia Mitsola spoke on the magnetic quality of myths: “What I love about mythology is the way it engages and controls the viewer and how the story can take them on an emotional roller coaster. But in my paintings, the figures are the ones in charge(Rees)”. Surrounding myself with storytellers has been a forever constant in the impact and imagination of my work; artists like Colleen Barry, creating testaments to her Manhattan influences by creating “unique blends of classical and contemporary elements(Barry)” of Greek and Roman art; Carrie Mae Weems: The Kitchen Table Series of 1990 that created conversations on interiors and interactions; and Sascha Schneider’s manifestations of men and monsters to apply motifs of open and shame-free living of true self to his created and foggy worlds. My paintings are mainly large in dimensions, sometimes life-size, to envelop the viewer into a created environment; an unreal or untrue spiritual quality of our world. Scale can be used in unconventional ways, with the use of shaped canvases or sizes that loom over the onlooker in order to explore a range of emotive responses my viewers experience. Color in turn is essential to the influence of my work and creating a point of connection through my pieces. Working with color studies, in respect to my intuitive draw to particular tones, hues, shades. Looking, what am I seeing in my surrounding environments? What can I do with what my intuition is telling me? Through all, I am able to craft color into a tool; a thematic connector. Monarchs such as Hans Emmengger and Maxfield Parrish perfected the combination of earthly existence and delight within their color use. Emmengger’s style of color is iconic, the use of dark forests, glowing reflections and refractions of light are nothing less than completely spark-making in artistic inspiration. Originating just within a couple of miles of Parrish’s Cornish Colonies and Saint Gaudens, the landscapes within his work deeply resonates with the future of my creations; the magnificent mountains and deep caverns of the valleys. With use of enlarged scales, unconventionally shaped canvases and subjects, the psychology of my work is about a transferable narrative. Just as myths can be internalized circumstantially and perspectively, as can my paintings.
Guadaloupe Najar
Carter Powers
Keith Truong
