ShowUp/Beacon Gallery is committed to producing thoughtfully curated exhibitions that showcase original conceptual art and share compelling messages and unique perspectives that underscore social impact. It is our intention to provide a platform that celebrates art and creativity, while advocating for those issues that affect us all in our shared society. Community is at the heart of what we do and we’re pleased to be able to partner with many important organizations working hard to create a better today and tomorrow. Below are some featured events that we hope you will find interesting and encourage you to support.
Read Beacon Gallery's Land, Neighborhood, and Art Community Acknowledgement
We would invite visitors looking to offer support to turn to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center
Beacon Gallery's nonprofit, ShowUp, is sponsored by Mass Cultural Council and the Teuber Family Foundation. We are so grateful for their support.
Please reach out if you wish to donate and support our nonprofit programming. ShowUp is a registered 501c3.
November 3, 2022 - January 8, 2023
Nedret Andre's solo exhibition focuses on the importance of seagrass for our ecosystem and how seagrass (also known as eelgrass) preservation is tied to our everyday decisions, through abstract painting and sculpture.
June 3, 2022 - July 17, 2022
A group exhibition focusing on the challenges that everyone faces – mentally, emotionally, and even physically – especially in such difficult or uncertain times as we are experiencing now, and seeks to highlight the commonality in this struggle.
November 5, 2021 - January 17, 2022
One of the questions that looms large in Caron Tabb’s solo show, Humanity Is Not a Spectator Sport, is how exactly one goes about taking action on the inspirational concepts presented.
Tabb felt it important to lead by action rather than simply by words. As part of her exhibition, Tabb offered gallery wall space to curator Meclina in order to feature a series of local artists. Entitled What Now; Making Space and curated by artist and participant Meclina in dialogue with Caron Tabb, this exhibition-within-an-exhibition featured a rotating series of artworks. Each of these artists has a unique vision of the world and a message they present through their artwork. Enjoy the works of each artist via Beacon Gallery’s blog such as Nayana LaFond's "Shayla in Red" featured above.
November 5, 2021 - January 13, 2022
Humanity is Not a Spectator Sport
In Humanity is Not a Spectator Sport, Tabb unflinchingly invites the viewer to both experience her own struggles with race, racism, and white privilege while also providing tools for others to take a similar look into their own lives. Tabb found herself spending significant time engaging in difficult conversations where she questioned her role, responsibilities, and culpability as a white woman. The people with whom she had these conversations inspired and pushed her to the point of profound awakening and introspection.
Featuring all original never-before-seen works, Tabb aims to shed light on white privilege, systemic racism, and inequality, as well as our shared humanity. Even more important than the awareness she hopes to bring, Tabb seeks to challenge viewers and inspire difficult conversations. In addition, examples of successful community-building leadership from her Be The Change series demonstrate that while words and visuals can bring awareness to an issue, true progress requires action.
November 6 - December 13, 2020
Nedret Andre’s second solo exhibition, City By The Sea was Inspired by Sienese frescoes and particularly Amborgio Lorenzetti’s “City by the Sea” (1340). Andre’s work explores the social contract we humans create between urban environments, our government and nature. Andre's priority continues to be environmental activism within her artwork. “Globally we are losing two football fields of seagrass habitation every hour,” Andre says. “I am concerned with our relationship to our natural and man-made environment, how it has changed over time and how it will continue to change in the future. Our actions now impact our future for clean air, clean water, and keeping our CO2 levels low. Seagrass ecosystems play a vital role in human well-being. Rather than focusing on the rich biodiversity and ecosystem benefits seagrass provides us, I want to have a different type of conversation about seagrass within a historical context.”
July 17 - August 30, 2020
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Mixed Messages is a group show bringing together multiple artists and their work around the concept of sexual violence. Our intention is for visitors to get a sense of the pervasive and insidious nature of sexual violence in our culture. According to the CDC, over 1 in 3 women undergo physical sexual violence in their lifetimes, as do nearly 1 in 4 men. From what some experience at home or in the street to the words of our current president, this is a subject that impacts everyone.
While the works included in Mixed Messages can only hope to scratch the surface of such a broad and emotionally fraught topic, we at Beacon Gallery wish – most of all - to bring an increased awareness to sexual violence to foster discussion. Often a hidden crime, sexual assault, violence, and even harassment are too easily concealed. It’s time to bring that which is often kept in secrecy and darkness, out into the open.
Mixed Messages includes bodies of works that intend to spark discussion and contemplation. The show will include the complete Dress in Water series by Jean Sbarra Jones, works on paper by Ibrahim Ali-Salaam, mixed media pieces by Raleigh Strott, selections from Invisible Fractures by Rachel Tine, and works from The Tiny Pricks Project. In order to ensure support for visitors to Mixed Messages Beacon Gallery is working with The Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC). It is our intention to have resources available in the gallery for those who may require them as a result of a visit. We will also support the important work of BARCC through this exhibition with fundraising.
December, 2019, 2020
Every December Beacon Gallery produces a one-night-only event to directly provide support to visual artists from sales of their work. All works in this exhibition are priced at $100 and exhibiting artists will receive 100% of the proceeds from their sales. This is a true pop-up event from with a preview during the day so gallery visitors can plan their purchases. Patrons will take work off the walls as sales are made and their newly purchased art can go home with them that night.
October 4 – 27, 2019
Photocredit: Lauren Sutter Photography
Beacon Gallery presented Caron Tabb’s solo show, Of Two Places in partnership with the Jewish Arts Collaborative. The exhibition examined Tabb’s most recent body of work, encompassing her transition from her life in Israel to her life in America. In particular, she examined the struggle of leaving her country of origin and family as well as her deep sense of cultural heritage.
Tabb’s artwork tends to occupy a space between painting and sculpture, while also embracing the practices of drawing, collage, and environmental processes to create contemplative pieces combining texture, color, and tension between her inventive forms.
Of Two Places addressed both Tabb’s personal struggle with her long-term expatriation as well as the universal challenges that immigrants face leaving their homeland and assimilating into a new culture. It examined the pain of what one leaves behind and the feelings surrounding the assumption of a new or hybrid identity.
Tabb’s work posed questions about self-perception and the acceptance or rejection by others, and tackled many concepts of multiculturalism, including cultural obstacles, memory, longing and belonging, otherness, and community. Viewers were encouraged and challenged to reflect upon their own sense of self and the stories that have helped to shape their own identity.
Catalogue sales and events throughout the exhibition supported the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network.
April 5, 2019 - June 2, 2019
Photocredit: Malene Anthony
Curated by Sarah Hoilund, Photographing The Female is a global project and exhibition that explores female identity and representation in photography through the insight of contemporary lens-based artists. Formed to reflect on the diverse state, condition and role of the female around the world today; it uses the power of photography to start conversation and inspire new ways of seeing.
Photographing The Female brings together the work of empowering voices from all around the world whose photographic practices all explore a contemporary female experience via historically central themes like the body, sense of self, conformity and stigmatization. The photographers speak to us from a myriad of vantage points uncovering social and personal realities that challenge perceptions of what it means to be female and forces the viewer to consider the consequences of society’s prescribed roles. Despite radical differences in style and approach an inescapable universality permeates the exhibition reminding us that the female is intrinsically connected to all of us and our very existence.
October 5, 2018 - October 28, 2018
Nedret Andre, Green Crab Cove
Seagrass, green crabs, invaders, ecosystems and lots of paint... Our environment is a precious resource and even the most unassuming of organisims play important roles.
Nedret Andres show presented what happens when eelgrass habitats have unexpected guests that eat through everything. Green crabs themselves have been uprooted - but what happens when this stranger arrived on “our” shores? This show combined video footage from seagrass field work, paintings inspired by this research and an intriguing discussion on seagrass habitats by the scientists.
January 5, 2018 - January 28, 2018
Lives in Limbo: Refugees at the Gates of Europe
This fundraising show was presented in partnership with Leslie Meral Schick. The show aimed to shed light on the plight of refugees once they arrived in Europe.
Consisting of text and photographs by Leslie Meral Schick and her fellow aid workers during their multiple trips to the Greek islands, this work was supplemented by work of New York Times and Wall Street Journal photographer Eirini Vourloumis, as well as individual portraits and biographies of refugees collected by Schick. Videos reporting on the refugee situation in Greece, by Suma Hussien and Ellie Williams of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism also rounded out the coverage.
“Lives in Limbo” also featured work by artists Shakiba A. of Afghanistan; Salam Noah and Youssef Abou Kashef of Syria; as well as local artists such as Anne Peretz and Bill Gillitt. Proceeds from any artwork by local artists that was sold benefitted Leslie Meral Schick’s refugee work. Refugee artists received 100% of the profit from sales.
The US-based artist Mohamad Hafez also collaborated with Schick and Beacon Gallery to create a limited-edition print from one of his sculptures, available for purchase, with all proceeds benefitting Schick’s humanitarian work. Ai Wei Wei’s film Human Flow was also screened multiple weekends as part of the exhibition.
And don't forget our local homeless shelter, Pine Street Inn, which we try to support when we can as well, such as during shows like Body Language.