Bio and Exhibitions
DEBORAH READ
Instagram: @deborahreadstudio
Deborah Read received her MFA from Lesley University in 2020, and received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1986 after completing RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome Italy. In 1987 Deborah was awarded a curatorial degree from Christies Fine Art Course in London, England. During her master’s program at Lesley, Deborah was awarded a grant from Lesley’s Center for Human Arts Innovation to create the Art+Everywhere program highlighting the ethos of “art as a radical act of generosity.” Art+Everywhere is now and international foundation which awards grants and residencies to collaborative, innovative, cross-disciplinary art initiatives created by MFA alums. Deborah established Gallery RAG in 2023 as part of the Art+Everywhere foundation and is used to activate contemporary art practices in the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Massachusetts.
Along with her fine art career she has simultaneously worked in various positions as: interior designer at Decors by Bailey & Read, Boston MA; Vice President/Owner of BKE, a heavy equipment leasing company in Mohammedia Morocco; Director of New Business Development for the Design Group at Hill, Holiday Advertising Agency, Boston MA; and designer of a line of fabrics and Moroccan clothing. She has been teaching art both privately and in small school settings for over 25 years, including Morocco. Following her Massachusetts teaching licensure in 2016, she taught and developed the Upper School art program at The Carroll School in Lincoln, MA. Deborah based the Carroll School’s art program on MIT’s Media Lab ethos of cross disciplinary experimentation and collaboration. During her tenure at Carroll, she implemented a school wide art installation program, year-end exhibition, and raised money for the purchase and development of a ceramics program.
Deborah has exhibited nationally and internationally and some recent projects include: a collaborative sculpture, The Net Wrecker, with Roses’ Shipyard in Gloucester; a joint video and performance work, Procession, with L.A. based filmmaker, John Eric Steiner; a sculpture installation for Inner Gaze at The Eastover Exhibition space in Lennox MA; power figure portraits for Call Me By My Name, at The Yard in Brooklyn, NY; solo exhibitions Are You Afraid of This Happiness and Power Figures at Gallery RAG in Gloucester, and Through Lines, an art installation with Tracy Hayes at Lesley’s University Hall, Cambridge MA. Deborah is also an avid sailor, working on her captain’s license, and charters her 64-foot Sundeer sailboat, Artemis, with her husband out of Gloucester Harbor. They are planning a round-the-world trip sometime in the near future.
Artist Statement
The art that I create are about generating fields of connections that expand the possibilities of the things and people we most care about. It is all about collaboration, dialogue and not knowing the outcome. My work generally starts with a question that I wrestle/live with and I see what arises in my everyday life and materials in response to that. Certain people, objects and materials will reach out to me, or I will be drawn to them and I will be incorporated into the piece through dialogue, collaboration, deep listening, and spontaneity. The process of creating a collaborative installation is a way to think collectively about a pressing question or conflict in the heart of our particular time, place and embodied form. The generative field that is created during this process, pulls all involved, including the audience, into a net of intimacy and mutuality. The resulting art object is of less importance than this connecting process. Each contributor, sentient or insentient, is a crucial actor in the entire production. I like to think of the final product as a secretion, like the pearl of an oyster, it is an object created through the process of living, of the daily ‘rub’ of life. I am very interested in other ways of knowing and search out people, cultures, and materials that manifest non- standard, forgotten, overlooked, or discarded wisdom that might shed some light on a current conflict in the hearts and minds in our modern life.
I am also very interested in the idea of mundane, overlooked labor, especially of women and the idea of deep time. Much of my work involves labor intensive practices such as sewing. I feel the idea of repeated, everyday ‘touch’ to be important, but not the touch of a stroke of genius, but one of utter ordinariness. Furthermore, repetitive, laborious, mundane, tasks like sewing, hammering or any type of manual labor is ripe for losing one’s mind in a sense of timelessness. I hope that when one enters the space of my work there is a certain activation of this feeling of deep time, of a voyage asked to be taken, and a question that might be dangerous and liberating all at the same time.