Elise Whittemore, BCA’s 2017 Barbara Smail award-winner, has made important contributions to the vibrancy and excellence of Vermont’s arts community as an artist and arts advocate. In her beautifully designed prints, Whittemore is drawn to the physical labor of art making and how it challenges her to pursue different ways hand and material can create meaning together. The artist’s use of pattern develops a narrative that explores the physicality of printmaking as well as formal constructs that are inherent to the natural world.

With an artistic career spanning more than five decades, artist and educator Ed Owre works continuously in his Grand Isle studio creating new, colorful "constructions" that explore the possibilities of drawing and the gesture through abstract sculpture. Referencing the sensibilities of the formative American art movements of the 1960s and 70s, while embracing contemporary expressions of mark-making, Owre creates work that is exciting, immediate, and most importantly formative to a generation of Vermont-based contemporary artists working today.

Dusty Boynton merges past memory and personal experience to create works that are seemingly child-like in appearance but sophisticated in gesture and expression. Drawing from her inner subconscious world, the artist’s cast of characters rejects conventional representation and inhabit a fantastic world of their own. Boynton’s expressive brushstrokes, vibrant color palette, and supernatural imagery give her compositions a carefree and imaginative innocence. Dusty Boynton’s exhibition for BCA Center will feature large-scale paintings, monoprints, and reliefs created over the past decade.