The exhibition features recent works by landscape artist James Rayen, a founding member of the Wellesley College studio art program and celebrates the artist’s contributions to the college and retirement from the Wellesley faculty.

The show features more than twenty of his recent paintings, drawings and prints. Rayen’s art presents the abstract in reality. His surfaces poignantly reflect the aesthetic in the natural order. In his work he seeks to find a balance between perception and conception, between the real and imagined. This exhibition is not a retrospective — these works focus on a moment in his career, when Rayen turned to his art making full-time.

A teacher and artist who spent his 40-year teaching career at Wellesley, Rayen built the studio art department from an ancillary to the teaching of art history, into its current status as a popular major with generations of devoted students, many of who have pursued careers as artists.

Lucy Flint-Gohlke
Former Curator