January Barn Door Gallery 2026

Convergence: A Celebration of Community

NCFA’s 2025 Curritotial Committee

January 7 - January 30

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Opening Reception on Arts Night Out

Convergence: A Celebration of Community marks the third annual showcase of talented artists and creative thinkers who formed the Barn Door Gallery Curatorial Committee (2024). Each July, a new collective of creative minds convenes, sparking thoughtful dialogue and shaping a yearlong series of exhibitions hosted by the Northampton Center for the Arts from February through December of the coming year. This curatorial process ensures equitable opportunities for local artists, championing equity, offering a platform for diverse voices, perspectives, and artistic mediums to shine. This fresh collective builds on the solid foundation laid by previous groups, consistently infusing new energy, perspectives, and talent into the Center's commitment to accessibility and inclusion.

In January, we honor this collaborative spirit with a special exhibition spotlighting the work of Curatorial Committee members or artists they have personally selected. Join us in celebrating this year's dynamic convergence of the local arts community, as these creative minds unite to showcase their work and reinforce the spirit of collaboration and support within the local art scene. Don’t miss the chance to experience the vibrant expressions of our community!

• Heather Geoffrey

  Heather Geoffrey (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose body of work includes acrylic painting, digital photography, analog collage, mixed media, written word and performance. She experiences creating art as an ongoing dialogue with the worlds that she inhabits and those that inhabit her. She believes that the seen and unseen worlds of the physical, imaginary, emotional, and spiritual are constantly in conversation. It is this ongoing conversation that she finds magical and is the most curious about, interested in, and where her artistic creations rise out of.

  IG@ouroboros_studios

  www.heathergeoffrey.com

• James Lipshaw

  James (he/him) began working with marker portraits while decorating his classroom as a MA public school teacher. These ‘cheap’ materials fade quickly with time in hot fluorescent light, draining both legibility and value from the work. Black lines go green, color washes out, and something that seemed so permanent when you marked it is gone forever.

  IG@jameslipshaw

• Jeannie Donovan

  Jeannie Donovan (she/her) creates intricate watercolors and unique “pulp paintings” that reflect her search for places of quiet beauty and healing. Painting and pulp painting are the processes by which she conveys her vivid memories from dreams and travels to different cultural landscapes, that intersect in the compositions she calls ’semi-abstract realism.’ Her art is a respite from the daily barrage of breaking news, and the endless streaming words and voices on electronic devices.

  Born on an egg and fruit farm in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Jeannie started drawing and painting at around age four. The apple trees, fields, and barn became her subject matter, inspiring her reverence for nature and unspoiled land. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Art Education from Emmanuel College, and an MFA in Visual Design from UMass Dartmouth. She has taught painting and drawing on the college, high school, and continuing education level for many years, and is a lifetime member of the Artists Association of Nantucket. She’s exhibited her work in Boston, New England, western Massachusetts, and New York, in galleries, museums, and universities.

  jeanniedonovan.com

• Stacey Phillips

  Stacey Phillips (she/they)

  Originally from Central CT and living in Western MA

  Largely a self-educated artist, the intention of her practice is to use art as a divination and spiritual process, as a way of self-discovery and challenging supremacist spaces. 

  She is the creator of Divination of the Undiscovered Self—a unique, always evolving, intuitive system (based upon tarot) used in creating art for personal introspection.

  Currently, their position as a gallery assistant within an art museum, provides a fertile environment for; love and distrust as well as admiration and discomfort. Institutional art spaces contain their own energy, magic and spells. They possess the power to transform. In order to address the hierarchy and oppression felt within these spaces, they have learned to recognize their identity as a diviner within the artist, while centering Blackness within white space. Using the art museum as subject—they divine its ideology through artistic practice in order to comprehend and then often counteract its colonialist tendencies. 

  Working with collage, painting and other media, the work seeks to ask questions concerning the complexities of cultural and racial integration that do not omit the energetic, psychic, social, political, as well as ancestral connotations. The collages attempt to function as interrogations of power, while providing acts of resilience, resistance, and understanding. 

  IG@sphillipsartdivination