ARC
2026
activate, research, create
ARC (activate, research, create), A.P.E.'s curated summer residency program, is in its ninth season, continuing the investigation of a contemporary art gallery as an active space within the community. From JUNE 1 thru 28, 2026, A.P.E. will host four projects in our Main St. Gallery that include explorations of durational performance, relationality, and ethical engagement with terrain, live bilateral painting as embodied inquiry into regenerative and restorative practices, quiltmaking as a project to connect trans people to each other across identity, geography and time, and new modes of intergenerational artistic collaboration that challenge the binary between art for “kids” and “adults.” During each residency, the gallery will be open to the public through a variety of workshops, performances, showings, and interactive installations. Each project maintains a central inquiry into the relationship between the public, the work, and the space in which it is made.
The ARC 2026 projects are:
The ARC 2026 projects are:
- Bodies of Land - NiFe Lucey-Brzoza
- fires + flowers (and the meaning we make) - Pasqualina Azzarello
- Places - presented by Transmissions: Quilts for Trans People; Cordy Joan and Joey Dehais
- Imaginary Friends - Alexandra Ripp and Daniel Sack, Odradek Projects
photo credits clockwise from top: Jes Gallegos; no photo credit; Tripp Clemens; Pasqualina Azzarello
BODIES OF LAND
NiFe Lucey-BrzozaJune 1-7
SPECIAL EVENTS
SUN June 7, 10am • Collective Circle Walk
Childs Park, Northampton MA
GALLERY OPEN HOURS
WED June 3, 12-5pm
THR June 4, 12-5pm
FRI June 5, 12-8pm
SAT June 6, 12-5pm
This exhibition brings together two ongoing practices, Presence, a film series, and Circles of Here, a durational performance practice, into an immersive gallery experience that foregrounds relationality and ethical engagement with terrain. Both projects emerge from deep listening and embodied perception, exploring how bodies, memory, and land co-construct meaning in a world increasingly defined by extraction, displacement, and acceleration.
ARTIST BIO
NiFe Lucey-Brzoza is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores internal and external landscapes as interdependent sites of consciousness, memory, and belonging. Working across performance, film, photography, sound, installation, and immersive experience, she uses durational and phenomenological approaches to investigate embodied perception, affect, and the transmission of knowledge beyond language.Her work centers listening as both method and material, positioning the body as an instrument of attunement within relational fields of land and collective memory. She explores sanctuary, ritual, queer sacredness, identity, and vulnerability as pathways to resilience, creating conditions where presence becomes generative and belonging emerges through lived encounter.
Engaging site as a living archive, she works through non-extractive, site-responsive practices that attend to land, ecology, and layered histories. Through duration and restraint, her work asks how place becomes ancestral and how relational awareness might reshape belonging in a time of ecological precarity and social fragmentation.
She believes resilience is born from empathy for shared experience and the faith that we are not alone. When we cradle this knowing, we are whole, and so is the world we create.
Her work has been featured by ALCOVA Miami, Mobius Artists Group, and Gestalten. She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Alongside her art practice, she has built a two-decade career in branding design. She runs a design studio and product line in Somerville, MA, and founded Vivid Oblivion, a public art space integrating performance, community, and stewardship.
photo by Tripp Clemens
fires + flowers (and the meaning we make)
Pasqualina AzzarelloJune 8 - 14
SPECIAL EVENTS
TUE June 9, 4-5pm • Live painting
WED June 10, 4-5pm • Live painting
THR June 11, 4-5pm • Live painting
FRI June 12 • Arts Night Out Reception: 5-8pm; w/live tarantella music at 6pm
GALLERY OPEN HOURS
TUE June 9 - SAT June 13, 12-5pm
SUN June 14, 12-3pm
"flowers + fires (and the meaning we make)" is a series of paintings that demonstrate and explore the physiological practice and process of healing. Working with core imagery of volcanoes and the endemic flora that grow in the wake of eruption – also called fire followers – the paintings serve as a vital, embodied inquiry into regenerative and restorative practices.
Each piece is made either partly or entirely through bilateral painting – a process that involves the application of paint to a surface with both bare hands at the same time. The physical experience of making the paintings influences their visual presence as well, as each piece holds and embodies the ‘reverb’ of this practice. When experienced all together, the paintings create a space of quiet yet active reflection while calling the viewer into presence.
Furthermore, this body of work was made while listening to tarantella music – an ancient Sicilian and Southern Italian healing ritual that consists of earthen, rhythmic drums, flutes, and strings. Live and recorded tarantella music, along with live painting sessions, will be offered daily throughout the duration of the exhibition.
ARTIST BIOS
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
Pasqualina Azzarello is a painter, public muralist, educator, and community advocate. Working within grassroots, nonprofit, and academic channels, she works with others to cultivate generative spaces, initiatives, and partnerships that are innovative, collaborative, and inclusive of all participants. Throughout her unique professional path, each experience has been driven by core values including a profound belief in the creative potential of individuals and communities. Pasqualina serves as the Arts & Culture Program Director at Easthampton City Arts in Easthampton, Massachusetts and is a part-time faculty member at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
POTTER
Michael Medeiros is a writer, artist, and teacher living in western Massachusetts. He holds MFAs in Creative Writing and Studio Arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches art foundations and college writing. The founder of Poesia Pottery and a certified instructor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, his teaching, art and writing are grounded in mindfulness and flourishing practices that encourage community, curiosity and creative engagement.
MUSICIANS
Alessandra Belloni is the Artistic Director, Founder and Lead Performer of "I Giullari di Piazza", an Italian Music, Theatre, and Dance Ensemble and is Artist-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With 45 years of fieldwork experience studying and preserving Southern Italian folk music, dance, drumming, theatre, and healing/ritual traditions, she is an internationally-renowned percussionist, singer, dancer, and author of the book ‘Healing Journeys with the Black Madonna”.
Sarah Michel’s musical journey began at the age of 4 when she started violin lessons and by the age of 6, she was introduced to fiddle music and began competing in fiddle contests all over New England, going on to win hundreds of competitions. Combining her influences of Old-Time, Irish, World and Classical music, Sarah takes her audiences on a musical journey from old-time sing-alongs, to lively polkas and rousing reels.
PLACES
presented by Transmissions: Quilts for Trans PeopleCordy Joan and Joey Dehais
June 15-21
SPECIAL EVENTS
TUE June 16, 10am-10pm • Quilt in a Day
SAT June 20, 6pm-10pm • Quilts Performance Showcase
GALLERY OPEN HOURS
WED June 17, 12-5pm
THR June 18, 12-5pm
FRI June 19, 12-8pm
Transmissions is a project that makes bespoke gift quilts for individually nominated trans people. Quilts have been used to mark life transitions across time and cultures, and this project lives in that legacy. By sharing quilts, our project connects trans people to each other across identity, geography and time.
Transmissions is a quilt-project that folds in additional art including oral history, music, writing and photography. We’re interested in how quilts can hold hands with and lift up other mediums. This exhibit will explore quilting and performance, inviting the audience in for multiple events that highlight quiltmaking and its adjacent arts.
ARTIST BIOS
Cordy Joan is the lead artist on the Transmissions Quilts Project. They support quilt-making and administrative efforts for the project. Outside of Transmissions they teach quilting, take care of kids and like to play pool. They are from New Jersey.Joey Dehais is a quilter for the Transmissions Quilts Project and has completed and delivered one quilt in Massachusetts with another in progress. In addition to quilting, Joey is a social worker.
This project is made possible with support from the Kindling Fund (SPACE Gallery, Portland ME) and the Coby Foundation.
photo by Tonal Simmons (@tonals.corner)
IMAGINARY FRIENDS
Alexandra Ripp and Daniel Sack, Odradek ProjectsJune 22 - 28
SPECIAL EVENTS
TUE June 23, 4-6pm • Opening reception
GALLERY OPEN HOURS
WED June 24 - FRI June 27, 12-6pm
SAT June 27, 10am-4pm
Imaginary Friends is a multi-day gallery installation with accompanying programming for all ages that fosters rigorous experimental arts collaboration between parents and their children. The represented projects, which span media, have been co-created by local artist-parents—and one grandparent—and their children (ages 1-12), led by child collaborators’ imagination and play.
The project seeks to challenge the binary between “kids” and “adult” art, and explore new modes of intergenerational artistic collaboration. Taking seriously the creative potential of children’s play, the artists use their children’s imagination and play as the prime source for collaborative experimental art practice. The children involved range in age from 1 to 12 years. Media represented include textile, sculpture, film, participatory art, and installation, with additional offerings still unfolding.
The inaugural cohort of artists features Hallie Bahn, Christina Balch & Nora De La Cour, Lisa Iglesias & Bodhild Iglesias, Sarah Marcus, Lucia Monge, Katie Richardson, Daniel Sack, Dante Sepúlveda & Aleksandra Ponomareva, and Marianna Dixon Williams & Amy Nicole Buckley. Additional artist participants will be announced in the coming weeks.
CURATOR/ARTIST BIOS
Alexandra Ripp is an arts administrator, dramaturg, translator, and producer. She has held positions at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Carolina Performing Arts, Theater Magazine, and Five College Dance. She has worked with performing artists such as nora chipaumire, Deborah Goffe, Culture Mill, Ant Hampton, and 600 Highwaymen, and with institutions such as the UMass Fine Arts Center, the Mount Holyoke Art Museum, and the Black Feminist Film School. She is currently an arts development consultant for Surala Consulting and producer for Spirits Go Blah, a theater company dedicated to developing the work of composer/playwright César Alvarez and visual artist Emily Orling. She holds an MFA and DFA in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.Daniel Sack is a writer and educator with a background in performance making. He has published five books on contemporary performance, including most recently, Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying, a semi-autobiographical investigation into how we cry in the theatre, and (with Bonnie Marranca) The Theatre of Drawing, which gathers drawings by forty-two performance makers and asks them to reflect on how the practice figures into their artistic process. He is the editor of the book and online journal Imagined Theatres, featuring impossible or improbable performance works by several hundred artists from around the world that test the limits of the stage. He holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of English and the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst.
Imaginary Friends is funded in part by a grant from the Northampton Arts Council, the South Hadley Cultural Council, and the Hadley Cultural Council, local agencies which are supported by Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
photo by Alexandra Ripp, Daniel Sack, and Thalia Sack