A new art experience is coming to Somerville! Discover art in Bow Market’s beautiful space where you can explore, ask questions, and connect with local artists. Starting in June, four one-night Studio Showcases will run at Upstairs at Bow Market, culminating in a December art fair featuring all participating artists.
The July Showcase will feature two artists:
Maggie Cedarstrom | I received my BFA in 2007 from the University of New Hampshire. After moving to Boston in 2008, I took a job at a donut shop and began bartending at a much beloved Cambridge pub. After working in bakeries for about 6 years, I decided not to go to pastry school and returned to UNH in 2013, at age 29, to complete my MFA. At 40, I have now been practicing at Washington Street Arts Collective in Somerville for nearly a decade. I enjoy showing my work at local food and beverage businesses, and love working within the industry realm, as I have spent so much of my working life there. Art making for me has always been about bearing witness. I work from life and from photos, and the heart of what I do is to see as truthfully and deeply as possible. I consider myself to be a figurative painter at my very core, meaning people are my primary images. Throughout my early thirties, I painted myself in various states of coping (following the death of my sister in 2014) as a form of catharsis. My large-scale figurative work has always been about myself, my shifting state, and how my body has held and betrayed me throughout my grief and aging. In my later thirties, I began to look outward, and I began painting portraits. My portrait subjects are primarily friends I have made through the service industry. I harvest source material through snapshots at social events and just hanging out casually. I delight in seeing them relaxed and enjoying themselves in my work, since they work to hard to perform in their labor.
Larisa Ovalles | As an architect and urban designer, I have always been drawn to the interplay between structure and landscape, form and transformation. My handmade pottery, Los Objetos, is a natural extension of this passion—an exploration of materiality, memory, and place. Each piece is informed by my fascination with maps, textures, geological layers and territorial transformations. I see clay as a vessel for storytelling, much like the land itself—marked by time, movement, and change. Through hand-built techniques and textured surfaces, Los Objetos is a reflection of both personal and collective geographies. Whether through the imprints of topographic lines and layers or the interplay between different clays, my work invites a deeper connection to the landscapes that shape us.
