About Martin Bridge

Martin Clark Bridge was born into a lineage of artists and teachers. He is proudly carrying this family tradition forth as he lives, creates, and teaches in the hills of Western Massachusetts. His work spans a wide range of media from Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Theater Design, and Site Specific Installations to Performance. Martin’s work celebrates the sacredness inherent in nature, the consciousness in all things, and the power of place and seeks to challenge the cultural paradigms that dictate the way we relate to both the natural world and our brothers and sisters. Through his work, he hopes to inspire and cultivate a greater sense of mystery and possibility in our experience of the world.

About Jules Jones

Jules Jones is a queer disabled artist living and working in Franklin County. Jones’ “collage paintings” are maximalist mixed media works that reflect their process of repurposing old artworks into collaging material. Print media such as monotypes, screen prints, and lithographs meet scraps of newspaper, works on paper, or childhood drawings; all become affixed to a surface, to be further painted and drawn on, in a nearly endless feedback loop of layering- until a precise visual balance is achieved. Jones’s prior paintings on canvas or paper become cannibalized, cut into whimsical butterflies and flowers, or universal motifs such as body outlines and faces. Each painting becomes a multi-colored quilt, where figures dance and patterns emerge. This furious recycling of self-made materials results in mosaic-like paintings with an imaginative, otherworldly quality.

About Malaika Ross

Malaika Ross is a graduate of Hampshire College. She completed her B.A. in soil microbiology and her Div III thesis was titled “The Impact of Solar Arrays on Soil Microbial Activity”.  She studied Painting and Drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design, San Francisco Art Institute and the Marchutz School of Fine Arts. She completed intensive coursework in sustainable faming, ecological restoration and Hawaiian ethnobotany at the University of Hawai’i, Hilo.

She grew up on the very small island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and spent the vast majority of her childhood playing outdoors with soil, walking among tall grasses, feeding goats and learning about the healing qualities of plants from all the women in her family.⁠

Her grandmother was a small-scale farmer with an extensive kitchen garden packed full with every plant her grandmother would need as an ingredient in her cooking or herbal tinctures. Malaika learned from her that honoring the land was an essential part of life.

Art, soil and forest are what connect Malaika to her life force/purpose every single day. She is on a creative journey where she is taking her love of soil, forest and ecosystems and integrating it into her art, which is woven into her identity as a black woman on this planet.

I’m a Caribbean American artist living in Western Massachusetts. I integrate the shapes and patterns developed in my microbial drawings of soil microbes into contemporary botanical paintings of native and introduced flora. The act of observing and documenting nature through painting and drawing as a black woman, is a form of liberation, environmental stewardship and anti-oppression work.

Some of my work places a black figure prominently in a natural setting, even as an element of nature, to remind the viewer that nature belongs to everyone and our BIPOC ancestors and communities continue to be connected to and defend the land in a way that protects natural resources for everyone.

October 6th – November 3rd

The exhibition opens November 5th, and can be viewed Monday – Friday 10-6 pm, Thursday 10-8 pm, and Saturday 10-4 pm until November 23rd

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 10th from 5 to 7 PM

About John Krifka
John Krifka has been painting for over 40 years. He had lived and painted in NYC for 25 years, before moving permanently to the Pioneer Valley in the early 2000s. His work is either graphically colorful or intimately serene, large or small, depending upon neighboring observation or studio confines. Most subjects have centered around still life, cityscapes, or landscapes.