LAURA CHASMAN | The morning staff meeting, 1977-78 | AL’S OFFICE
October 26 - December 12, 2025
Portraiture has always been at the heart of my work.
In the late '70s I was hired to be the art therapist on an inpatient psychiatric unit in Boston. This was a world that was unfamiliar to me, but one that I would come to know over the course of the next 4 years. When I learned that I had been accepted to a graduate school program and would be leaving in a year, the idea came to me to capture my experience. The morning staff meeting brought everyone together - the chief of psychiatry, psychiatric residents, social workers, nurses, and students. And so, discretely, ( my drawing paper was sized to fit neatly inside my 4.5" x 6" appointment book ) I sketched the portraits of the staff. In the evenings, I developed my sketches, painting with gouache. I am excited to be showing some of these small works at 57w57 Arts in NYC.
Laura Chasman grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, and Smith College School of Social Work. After living most of her adult life in the Boston area with her artist husband and their son, she and her husband now reside in Florence, MA. Chasman has been exhibiting her work in galleries and institutions for close to 50 years. Awards and honors include: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Maud Morgan Prize and solo exhibition; recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting; an Artist Resource Trust recipient; a Boston Artadia finalist. Her portraits have been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery. Chasman’s work has been included in art fairs. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smith College Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Fidelity Investments, Simmons College, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Boston Public Library. Currently, her solo exhibition "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" is on view at the Brattleboro Museum of Art.
LAURA CHASMAN | Mourning and Melancholy | SHELF
December 8 - January 17, 2025
In this recent body of work, I have come to think of each one of my clay chimpanzees as my alter ego. They are meant to embody the collective zeitgeist, mirroring these highly fraught times. My goal was to create work that was raw and emotive, expressing vulnerability and our shared humanity.
After 50 years of working exclusively with paint, a three-hour clay workshop in Oaxaca in 2023, revealed to me the pleasures of working with this material. The experience was not unlike the feeling of sinking my fingers in soil while gardening, or immersing my hands in a mound of dough to make a piecrust. The physicality, the texture, how responsive the clay was to touch and the simplicity of working with one medium were all so appealing. The earthiness of the clay brought to mind the image of a chimpanzee, that species of ape that are our closest living relatives, sharing 98% of our DNA- although my clay chimps are not about scientific interest, but my empathic response to them. Their bodies are a lot like ours, and their facial expressions so relatable. I work with clay that remains unfired, or self- hardening clay. I am drawn to the raw texture of these forms. Once the clay is dry, I might sand or break off a part of the sculpture, or add color using paint in the familiar way that I work on a two dimensional surface. As a figurative artist, I have always worked to capture the physicality and the feeling of my subjects.