MASH Gallery presents By Hand & By Heart, a summer group exhibition bringing together eight artists working across painting, mixed media, fiber, and sculptural installation. United not by style but by process, each artist treats material not as a vehicle for image, but as the site where meaning is made. Their practices differ formally and conceptually, yet each understands that the act of making is inseparable from the work itself.
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In the mid-twentieth century, influential art critic Clement Greenberg argued that painting should pursue the qualities unique to its medium. Its defining condition was flatness: the canvas should acknowledge itself as a surface rather than aspire to sculpture or illusion. Those ideas reshaped the course of modern art, establishing medium specificity as one of its central principles.
By Hand & By Heart belongs to a different moment. Here, painting extends into relief, fiber occupies space with the authority of sculpture, and material is no longer confined by disciplinary boundaries. The question is no longer what a medium ought to be, but what it is capable of becoming.
“Texture is never decorative. Color is never incidental. Every mark, stitch, layer, and gesture records the presence of the hand, making the process inseparable from the finished work.”
The exhibition arrives at a moment increasingly shaped by frictionless digital production and automated image-making. Against that backdrop, the handmade asserts a different set of values that reward sustained attention. These artists ask viewers to encounter not only what has been made, but the labor, discipline, and intuition embedded within it.
Spanning local, national, and international artists, By Hand & By Heart proposes that the future of material practice lies not in preserving historical distinctions between mediums, but in allowing those boundaries to remain fluid. What emerges is an exhibition grounded in touch, process, and physical presence, affirming that the hand remains one of the most expressive instruments available to contemporary art.
