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a message from the Gallery Director
Communication and connection are major concerns today. Failures of communication lead directly to the ways that connections across difference fail, creating or exacerbating political, personal, geographic, economic, and social division. Our contentiously fractured environment grows only more so when information is not reliably conveyed, when people talk at cross-purposes, when people and institutions seemingly lack the desire to discuss, explain, even productively argue. The ability to communicate - always important - has taken on a particular urgency in the current moment.
Artwork communicates. Some projects are explicitly didactic, but even the most abstract or conceptual artwork has something to say to its viewer. Whether it’s a piece with a highly researched and extensively cited historical referent or a more intuitive work that seeks to share an ephemeral experience or evoke an intangible emotion in a viewer, the inherent communicative properties of art make it, in its best moments, a generous offering of potential connection to and among its viewers.
within reach, the 2025 Thesis and Senior Exhibition, acknowledges this need and speaks to the difficulty of achieving it. Wellesley students are not a monolith, and their work in this year’s show ranges widely across media and topics. But each piece in this show - whether made with paint or clay using techniques as old as art history itself, or built using the latest digital software and technologies - reckons with the need to communicate, and the attempt to build a connection that may seem so difficult as to be impossible.
Despite that seeming difficulty the work in this show proves, individually and in the aggregate, that this is not an impossible task. The product of way too much time in the library or computer lab or studio, the survivor of countless scrapped projects, the result of one too many sleepless nights - sure. But these artists have worked hard to build technical skills and conceptual depth while simultaneously doing the work to build community in their classes, in the art and digital studios, and with their peers here at Wellesley and beyond. All this labor feeds into the artwork on display here.
Fully steeped in the present, the work of contemporary artists often reflects their concerns and the concerns of their communities. To see this principle evident in the work in this year’s show is to see just one of the many ways that Wellesley students inhabit the role and identity of artists, and the way that they prepare to be thoughtful, empathetic, and intelligent observers and creative inhabitants of the world. Their communication with each other - and with you - is an invitation to participate in a new type of community that we have to hope and believe is just within reach.
Congratulations to the green class of 2025.
--Samara Pearlstein
Gallery Director
May 2025
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