Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 18, from 5 – 7pm
Artist Talk:
Thursday, October 25, 6pm
Simmons University presents ethereal new photographs by Vaughn Sills. True Poems Flee will be on view from October 4 – November 9 in the Trustman Art Gallery, located on the fourth floor of the Main College Building, 300 The Fenway in Boston.
Join us in the Gallery for an opening reception on Thursday, October 18, from 5 – 7pm. The Gallery will also host Sills for an artist talk on Thursday, October 25 at 6pm.
When creating these photographs on Prince Edward Island, the place where Sills’ mother spent the last 30 years of her life, she found resonance in a poem by Emily Dickinson:
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee –
Sills’ photographs capture moments in her search for true poems – the delicate light in a stand of fog, a particularly beautiful bank of clouds, the quiet instant where gloaming turns to night. Called a ‘visual memoir’ by Sills, this series of photographs explores the power of place and how it shapes inner experience.
Sills’ work has been exhibited widely in art museums and galleries and in the galleries of botanic gardens. Her work is in the collections of the DeCordova Museum, Harvard Art Museum and the Eaton Vance Collection, among others. She has received significant awards including two Artist’s Fellowships in Photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Other grants and awards have come from the Artadia Dialogue for Art and Culture, the Polaroid Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the President’s Fund for Faculty Excellence from Simmons College. Her books, Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens (2010) and One Family (2001) earned awards from the Garden Writers Association and the Magazine Association for the Southeast.
Sills is a Visiting Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center and Associate Professor Emerita of Photography at Simmons College. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Prince Edward Island, Canada
Trustman Art Gallery hours are 10 AM – 4:30 PM, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, 10 AM – 7 PM on Wednesday and Thursday. The gallery is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible. For more information, contact Kyle Mendelsohn at (617) 521-2268 or find us on Instagram.