Photographs by Kate Hur ’22
The 2022 Studio Honors Show is an Amherst tradition, an occasion to display the work of graduating seniors who’ve devoted four years to becoming artists. Using charcoal and chicken wire, plaster, cardboard and acrylic paints, the works on display this spring—by five members of the class of ’22—grappled with identity and belonging and the elasticity of the world around us.
Kate Hur ’22 presented photographs that evoke the temporal nature of life in changing spaces. Mixed- media works by Grace LeCates ’22 make use of light and its “partner in crime,” shadow.
Brenna Kaplan ’22 considered the malleability of trauma and memory, in murky pieces that appear like scenes suspended in space. They are the artist’s attempt to communicate memories that can’t be put into words.
Maeve Brammer ’22, meanwhile, revisited childhood, using watercolors and penciled-in text to rewrite the narrative of growing up queer in a landscape unfamiliar with queerness.
And Lauren Bell ’22 observed and interpreted how the pandemic caused the worlds of the privileged and the underserved to collide in New York City, as feelings of separation and safety began to erode in 2020. She created a mural whose striking figures represent our conceptualizations of marginalized people. Its backdrop, representing a brick wall of upscale Midtown Manhattan, shows there is “little to no separation between idealized society and the kind of existence we condemn,” Bell writes.
These up-and-coming creators prove they have much to offer the art world, and they’ve only just begun.
Studio Honors Show
Eli Marsh Gallery, Amherst College
Photographs by Stephen Petegorsky ’75
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Grace LeCates
Grace LeCates ’22 presented Crochet Skeleton in plaster, acrylic, yarn and paint
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Lauren Bell
Lauren Bell ’22 made a mixed-media collage, Harlem Underground: As Below, So Above, which is about the pandemic.
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Brenna Kaplan
Brenna Kaplan ’22 used the pentimento layering technique to create this work, titled I helped raise my younger siblings, so I’m really protective of them. I’m not sure they remember.
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Maeve Brammer
Charmed is a watercolor by Maeve Brammer ’22 from the series Sprite.