Women's Studies Research Center

Upcoming Exhibitions

 

J Stoner Blackwell, Neveruses (Flex Courageous), 2024, plastic, wool, silk, acrylic fiber, paint, 34 x 24 inches

Cutaway

June 17-September 24, 2026

Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 17, 5-7 PM 

Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, Hai-Wen Lin

Cutaway considers boundaries, containers, and their relative permeability. Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin respond to and resist materiality, bodies, and consumption. Marked by vibrant color and tactility, their works convene with the sky, cast biological media, translate craft methods onto unlikely substrates, and embrace distortion.  

Eleanor Anderson harnesses play and improvisation in luminous, meticulously crafted works that combine insulation, found objects, seed beads, and fused glass. 

J Stoner Blackwell transforms discarded plastic bags through embroidery, weaving, darning, and collage into vivid “lumpish, androgynous painting-objects” that consider utility, waste and the gendered hierarchy of artistic media. 

Lucy Kim casts flounder, teeth, and people into uncanny and comedic sculptural paintings that use distortion to interrogate how personal desires interplay with how we see. 

Kirstin Lamb combines cross stitch, embroidery, collage, and digital mark making to build paintings that layer and amplify feminine lap craft and the political legacy of the decorative arts.

Hai-Wen Lin “borrows the vocabularies of garments” to fashion wearable kites from dyed silk, cyanotypes, and jewelry chain that, held by sky, “make refuge for errant bodies.”

In the divots and recesses, these works direct us to the tensions inherent in both structures that support and distances that offer protection. Cutaway withholds as it reveals.

Register here for the opening reception. 

 

Eleanor Anderson, Silver Lattice (detail), 2025. Installation image from Color Block, 2025. Photo by David Hale, 2025. 

 

ARTIST BIOS 

Eleanor Anderson (b. 1988 in Cleveland, Ohio) received a BA from Colorado College and an MFA from the Fibers Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art (’22). Anderson works predominantly in textiles but also enjoys exploring other mediums such as glass and clay. She has held a Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts and been awarded residencies at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, the Wingate Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, The Tides Institute, Eastport ME, and Pilchuck School of Glass, Stanwood, WA and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA. She taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Colorado College and College for Creative Studies. She currently bases her studio in Portland, Maine.

 

J Stoner Blackwell was born in 1977 in New Orleans, USA. They live and work in Bennington, Vermont, USA where they are a Faculty Member in Visual Arts at Bennington College. In 2016 they completed a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, New Haven, CT and, in the same year, their work was the subject of a solo exhibition, Neveruses Report Progress, at the Museum of Art and Design, New York. In 2020 Blackwell had a solo exhibition at the Bennington Museum entitled Neveruses: Beyonder. Blackwell’s work has been exhibited in public institutions, including Museum Bellerive, Zurich (2011) and Norwich Art Gallery (2007) and in solo shows at Kate MacGarry, London (2020); Salon 94, New York (2013); John Tevis gallery, Paris (2011) and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2009).  Blackwell is represented by Kate MacGarry.

 

Lucy Kim is a visual artist working across painting, sculpture and biological media. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see: the relationship between our evolved vision-centricity, constructed socio-cultural systems, and personal desires.

Kim is a recipient of the 2026 Wagner Arts Fellowship, 2024 Howard Foundation Fellowship, and the 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize. In 2022, she received the Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically-modified to produce melanin. Melanin is the main bio-pigment behind human skin, hair, and eye color. She began this project while an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and continues to develop it at Boston University, where she teaches. Through this project, Kim expands her committed study of our visual habits, which she first began in her sculptural paintings using unconventional processes in the studio. Kim is based in Cambridge, MA and is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University. She is represented by Praise Shadows. 

 

Kirstin Lamb is a painter living in Providence, Rhode Island and working in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with an MFA in 2005, and she received her AB in Visual Art and Literatures in English from Brown University in 2001. Kirstin's work has been shown in venues across the country and abroad, recently showing at the Wassaic Project in Amenia, NY, Sarah Crown Gallery in Tribeca, NY, Overlap Gallery in Newport, RI, Geary in Millerton, NY, Cade Tompkins Projects in Providence, RI, Spring Break Art Fair in NY, the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA and Providence College Galleries in Providence, RI, among others. She has attended residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, the Wassaic Project, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The Ora Lerman Trust Soaring Gardens Artist Residency, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. Kirstin recently completed a two-year contract curator position at The Yard, Williamsburg, a coworking space in Brooklyn that hosts solo and group shows quarterly, and has begun planning online and new curatorial projects in New England. Her work is in the collections of Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA, the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA, and Providence College, Providence, RI, among others. Lamb’s work is represented by Gallery NAGA in Boston.

 

Hai-Wen Lin is an artist from Elk Grove, California, currently working somewhere beneath the sky. Their work addresses autobiographical narrative and constructions of the body, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day in your favorite dress. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, received a M.Des in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from the University of California, Davis. They are a recipient of the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize, the Ellis-Beauregard Visual Arts Award, and a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow. Lin has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Ox-Bow School of Art, the Grand Canyon National Park, among many others. Recent solo exhibitions of their work have been held at the Museum of Art and Design (2026), Chinese American Museum of Chicago (2025), the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices (2025), and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2025). Lin is one half of medium-sized, a collaborative practice with the poet Margaret Wright. You can often find their work by looking up.

 

Kniznick Gallery Location and Accessibility Information 

The Kniznick Gallery is located at 515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453 in Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center, within the Epstein Building. The brick building is across the street from the Brandeis/Roberts Commuter Rail stop, and the entrance is located under the purple Women's Studies Research Center awning, visible from South Street on the right side of the building. The gallery is accessible, with an aluminum ramp of approximately 50' leading to the entrance.  Parking is readily available in front of, behind, and across the street from the Epstein Building.