Close to Home | Summer Invitational
July 29 – August 15, 2026
Reception: Thursday, July 30, 6-8pm
FIRST STREET GALLERY is pleased to present Close to Home, a summer Invitational. An exhibition of works by seven artists invited by individual Gallery members, the show will run from July 29 to August 15, 2026. A reception will be held on Thursday, July 30th, from 6 to 8 pm. Exhibiting artists include Leslie Adler, Marianne Barcellona, Ken Carbone, John Harms, Marion Held, Susan MacMurdy, and Gillian Wainwright.
“Close to Home”, open to literal and metaphorical interpretations, can certainly be a ‘place’ near to ‘home’. But those two words, themselves, embrace not only a location, but the realm of the imagined, the deeply felt, the present, the past, or future, a foundation or a search, a source of inspiration or inquiry, or several at once.
The artists, working in a variety of media, surfaces, materials and styles, offer insight into their current artistic practice and ongoing explorations in the works on view:
Leslie Adler
Intuition is my home.
I am inspired by nature, and the nature of things—the infinite organizing power, beauty, interconnectivity, and freedom expressed in the natural world. It is in the way birds fly, how trees support one another, and how we co-create. I am especially interested in the interplay between human-made constructs and natural systems. Architecture, both organic and built, becomes a metaphor for personal and shared space. These are the forms we create every day.
Currently, I am focused on form, color, and relationships. I work across several mediums, each informing the other. My process shifts between what I see and what I remember, combining deliberateness with spontaneity. This approach supports the way I work best—balancing intention with intuition.
Marianne Barcellona
A few years ago, I was deeply inspired by an exhibition of Lois Dodd’s little paintings on aluminum panels. At first, I used oil on aluminum. Then at a Pouch Cove Foundation Artist’s Residency in Newfoundland, I experimented with acrylic on Yupo (a plastic “paper” resistant to paint) and discovered that applying, scraping, and semi-dissolving the paint with alcohol yielded unanticipated results. The size of these works demands that they must be close to my body as I work on them. These little paintings feel “diary-like” to me – emotional and visual reminders of my life experiences, intimately connected to scenes that replay in my head and heart, that live “close to home.”
Ken Carbone
TERRITORIES 2026 – Inspired by aerial imagery, maps, geological surveys, photographs, and journal sketches from personal travels, these abstract compositions are rooted in place and memory. They are painted in acrylic glazes on recycled flakeboard panels.
Colors are chosen to evoke specific destinations, while their arrangement reflects the balance of order and accident, exemplified in 20th-century Modernism.
John Harms
There are things that persistently haunt us. For me, the center of the painting remains an enigma, one that exceeds definition. Each work is a response to that mystery and a grappling with the way things come into visual existence.
Marion Held
This series grew from my ongoing “dress project”, which are 3-D dresses that hang from the wall or ceiling. A few of the dresses were fabricated from paper. I decided to cut them up, update the images on them, and re imagine them as 2-D drawings.
Susan MacMurdy
Susan MacMurdy’s mixed media collages explore the idea of “Urban Nature”. By focusing on the public parks, community gardens, and urban woodlands of the Bronx, her work seeks to change the narrative about the places where natural beauty not only persists, but thrives.
Gillian Wainwright
I’ve always been drawn to working from life, especially outdoors, where changes in light, weather, and season create an endless range of possibilities. I’ve been painting almost exclusively in my relatively small urban garden for about 6 years now and this journey has been an incredibly rich experience that has evolved over time from more literal depictions into a looser approach focusing more on mark and rhythm and color.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 11am to 6pm
