Blanche e. Colman award

Finalist Exhibition

Blanche E. Colman Awards Finalist Exhibition, 2025

Piano Craft Gallery June 1-14

Piano Craft Gallery is pleased to present the work of eleven artists: Brian Chu, Roy Germon, Carly Glovinski, John Guthrie, Hilary Irons, Greer Muldowney, Meghan Murray, Maritza Ranero, Isabel Riley, Shamayam Sullivan, and Jessica Tam. All were nominated and selected as finalists for the 2025 Blanche E. Colman Awards. The exhibition is curated by Kamal Ahmad, Director, Exhibitions and Education at Piano Craft Gallery, and runs from June 1 – June 14 (gallery hours below). We hope you will join us for an opening reception on June 6 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm, First Friday.

Review of actual work has been an important component of the Colman Award jury process from its start in 1962, chaired by a succession of faculty from Boston University (including Richard Yarde, Nick Edmonds, and Richard Raiselis). This is the first time that finalist work is on view to the public. Colman Award Art Chair Dana Clancy notes, “It’s exciting to bring attention to these important New England artists and to see resonances between their practices. For a number of these artists recognizable forms or images intersect with systems of pattern and mark-making to suggest interior worlds, connections with various traditions, or devotional practices. Bodies of work in the exhibition represent or reference particular places, people, objects, and documents, calling attention to larger relationships to nature and culture. I am grateful to Kamal Ahmad for his excellent curation and to Piano Craft Gallery for such community-minded collaboration.”

Established through the bequest of designer, educator, and arts leader Blanche E. Colman, the Colman Foundation is the first fund in the nation endowed by an artist to provide funding directly to individual artists. The Foundation solicits letters of nomination every year in early Spring. For more than sixty years, this eponymous award has provided support to and recognition of many exceptional New England artists. Blanche Colman’s own professional work as an interior designer can be seen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; she was also founding Director of the first Art Department at Boston University (1919-32).