Off the Main Drag: Ten Summer Gallery Shows Worth the Visit 

“Weaving an Address,” April 14–October 18, 2025
Umbrella Arts Center
40 Stow Street, Concord

Semiquincentennial is a mouthful of a word that lacks any celebratory verve. Rather than a cause for celebration, the word sounds like the annoying antecedent to something more whole, satisfying, and unimpeded by the clutter of specificity. But if you must ring in the nation’s 250th, “Weaving an Address,” curated by Marla L. Mcleod at the Umbrella Arts Center, presents a fitting site to do so. Based on the community of formerly enslaved people who inhabited Walden Woods decades before Thoreau, the show brings together sculptural, ceramic, woven, and mixed-media works in dialogue with location just as much as history. Inside the Allie Kussin Gallery awaits a menagerie of fabrics fashioned into quilts, canvases, and pouches with works by Ifé Franklin, Stephen Hamilton, Whitney Harris, Ekua Holmes, Perla Mabel, Marla McLeod, Kimberly Love Radcliffe, and Anthony Peyton Young. Just a three-minute drive toward the Walden Woods, the show continues along an outdoor path with ceramic and sculptural works poignantly placed around the actual site of where Brister Freeman and his family lived. Along with functioning as a memorial to the formerly enslaved man, the show puts into question what exactly these 250 years have amounted to. —Erwin Kamuene

“Just Passing Through” & “An Appeal to Heaven,” May 2–June 21, 2025
SPACE Gallery
534 Congress Street, Portland, ME

In the main gallery at SPACE in Portland, Julia Arredondo draws on her experience as a Tejana living in Maine. “Just Passing Through” blends cultural symbols—like an outline of the US and myriad rows of stars—and New England craft traditions in a bold red, white, blue, and black palette to explore American identity. Though my western Pennsylvania roots are a far cry from Arredondo’s South Texas origins, I recognize a thread: the feeling of holding past and present at the same time, of adopting new traditions while making a new place home. In the smaller project space within the gallery, Vin Caponigro’s “An Appeal to Heaven”—co-curated by SPACE and Arredondo—acts as both an extension of Arredondo’s show and a standalone meditation on resistance. Inspired by the 1772 Pine Tree Riot, Caponigro’s prints, made from fallen white pine, explore storytelling as a mode of rebellion and reclamation. If just passing through, both exhibitions are worth a visit. —Ava Mancing

“Heard,” May 3–June 22, 2025
The Parsonage
8 Elm Street, Seasport, ME

In Searsport, Maine-based artist Sal Taylor Kydd is inviting the past to speak with her show “Heard” at Parsonage Gallery. Comprised of images, paper ephemera, text and more, this series of assemblages are carefully composed to make the most of their fragmentary nature, resulting in the sort of sepia-toned talismans one expects of reliquaries or other sacred objects, offering a sense of reverence to the women depicted in the found photographs that serve as their foundation. In this town known for its sea captains and ship building, “Heard” rings out like a message in a bottle, dispatches from our mothers, sisters, aunts—our past and future selves. —Jessica Shearer

“Bright Ground,” May 3–August 31, 2025
Cade Tompkins Projects
198 Hope Street, Providence, RI

I’m writing this on a dishwater gray day in May as a Nor’easter stumbles in from the wrong season, and the fluorescent colors of Suzanne Schireson’s canvases—hot pink, fuchsia, violet, turquoise—feel downright phantasmagoric, like phosphenes seen with closed eyes after a night of interrupted sleep. Drawing on histories of artist parents like Ruth Asawa and Barbara Hepworth, as well as visits with contemporary ones, the Rhode Island–based Schireson paints a studio of sorts for each of her subjects. But some of these structures are no more stable than the library my three-year-old built from Magna-tiles yesterday. One is just scaffolding, open to the sky and trees. A shed seems too small to stand in; skylights might be holes in the ceiling. In one painting, a woman writes at a desk beneath the bare bulb of the moon. One way or another, the outside world enters these imagined makeshift spaces. The figures in these paintings are working anyway, usually at night and sometimes with a child close at hand, and I am reminded that sanctums are overrated, that caregiving and creating are not antonyms, that our work needs the world and vice versa.  —Jacqueline Houton

“Black Cherry Dreams,” May 24–July 12, 2025
HallSpace
950 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester

In “Black Cherry Dreams,” Rixy continues building the surreal world of Cúcala—where club aesthetics, Caribbean iconography, and street ephemera converge in vibrant, layered storytelling. Through paintings, sculptures, and found-object assemblage, Rixy reflects on dreams, death, and diasporic memory. Many of the works on view in the Dorchester gallery were also on view as part of Rixy’s solo exhibition at Essex Art Center in Lawrence last December where pieces like Them Rowdyruff Boyz and Too Fast and Too Furious toyed with masculinity, glamor, and grit. Born from materials like faux fur, tire scraps, and plátano boxes, the pieces honor the lived texture of places like Roxbury, Lawrence, and Lynn. “Black Cherry Dreams” is both fantasy and autobiography—an altar to the beauty growing from concrete, and an invitation to linger in the shadows of joy, resistance, and becoming. —Jameson Johnson

“Tory Fair: Protest Flowers,” June 1–September 7, 2025
ODD-KIN
89 Valley Street, East Providence, RI

With charm and wit, Tory Fair’s “Protest Flowers” turns the gallery into a field of unexpected contradictions. Fair’s kinetic sculptures are rubber-cast sunflowers laced with dirt that perform a series of strange choreographies. Peeking out from boots, towering over ten feet high, or attached to tiny carts, the silicone flower sculptures protest their own obscure artificiality while performing their floral ornament duties. Some tremble on the floor in slow spirals, some are cheeky and mobile, others respond to remote controls guided by visitors. Fair situates her work within a canon of ecofeminist artists who employ abstraction, land interventions, and performance to call attention to the state of the planet while fostering moments of connection, humor, and reflection.  —Jameson Johnson

“Creativity Explored,” June 6–July 19, 2025
Outer Space
35 Pleasant Street, Concord, NH

I’ve always loved collaboration—especially the kind that stretches across regions—because it creates a mesh of perspectives that sparks something uniquely alive. This summer at Outer Space in Concord, NH—a contemporary gallery situated in an old Victorian mansion that usually pairs two artists to have their work in dialogue together—the space will turn itself over to the San Francisco-based organization Creativity Explored. Creativity Explored has spent decades nurturing the artistic voices of people with developmental disabilities, not as an act of charity, but as a belief in the inherent power and importance of their creative expression. Part one of the exhibition will be on view through July and part two will be on view August 1–September 6, 2025. —Emmy Liu

“Tangible Memories,” June 6–July 20, 2025
Abakus Projects
450 Harrison Ave. #309A, Boston, MA 02118

At Abakus Projects—a SoWa gallery known for its diverse photography programming—Judith Black’s “Tangible Memories” captures over forty years of black-and-white photographs that transform ordinary domestic moments into profound reflections on memory and lived experience. In raising her children as a single mother, Black slowly transformed her Cambridge home into her “studio.” Her images—of herself, her family, and intimate moments set against everyday New England backdrops—are minimalist yet evocative and often marked by a quiet seriousness. Black was unobtrusive in her photographic approach, allowing her to capture candid glances that feel like passing encounters. What began as a practical decision—photographing what was closest—became a powerful exploration of identity, motherhood, and the passage of time. In “Tangible Memories,” Black reflects on the ways photographs function not just as documentation, but as physical memory-holders of love, labor, and time. —Ava Mancing

“A Certain Form of Hell,” June 20–September 1, 2025
Karma Gallery
70 Main Street, Thomaston, ME 

It’s hard to imagine one could put on a bad show at Ann Craven’s deconsecrated Catholic Church in Thomaston, Maine; it’s a gallerist’s dream, offering all the high-ceilinged, snow-walled, sun-diffused ambience one might hope to find in a white cube, but instead of sterility, one has swapped in sanctity. Still, since NYC Karma Gallery has taken to mounting summer shows in the space, they’ve yet to phone one in. This year’s exhibition, “A Certain Form of Hell,” is the answer to last year’s “A Particular Kind of Heaven,” and like last summer’s show it will be chock-full of greats from the nineteenth century to today—around 100 of them. The works explore the more fiendish aspects of our existence—from the realms beneath our feet to those we harbor within us—tracking investigations that feel especially timely in a space uniquely suited to the task. —Jessica Shearer

“American Faggot Party,” June 27–September 28, 2025
Presented by Twenty Summers at The Schoolhouse Gallery
494 Commercial Street, Provincetown

Twenty Summers is one of those special Provincetown organizations that somehow shapeshifts to continuously welcome more people and ideas into their fold, while staying true to their mission and impact. This summer, the organization is moving beyond the Hawthorne Barn (where their annual event series has lived for the past twelve years), to plant year-round roots in a space they’re calling Stanley after the poet Stanley Kunitz whose line “twenty summers roll by” is the source of the organization’s name. For the inaugural exhibition inside the space shared by Schoolhouse Gallery, photographer Quil Lemons has gathered work by queer luminaries including Ocean Vuong, Ryan McGinley, Lyle Ashton Harris, and the late Félix González-Torres. Both a provocation and celebration, “American Faggot Party” showcases work that revels in life after the AIDS epidemic while challenging representation and liberation. —Jameson Johnson