Fall 2025 Frank Williams Visiting Artist

The Wellesley Art Department is pleased to welcome Venetia Dale as the Fall 2025 Frank Williams Visiting Artist in honor of M. Rachael Arauz ’91. Dale will deliver an artist talk on Friday November 14 at 11:00 am in Jewett Auditorium. Please read more about the artist below; we hope you'll join us!

Venetia Dale (b. 1981) is an artist, mother and educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. Dale pieces together fragments of mundane objects into sculptural works; these range from food leftover from her children's meals to incomplete embroidery and hooked rugs she sources online. The material histories of embroidery, pewter, and rug hooking – as well as the anonymous stewards who keep things clean, fixed, and loved—are translated through her work as intimacies of domestic life that remind us of the generative potential of the everyday.

Dale has participated in exhibitions at institutions including Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Villa Terrace Museum, and the Racine Art Museum, amongst other museums and galleries. Her work has been shown at 92nd Street Y Tribeca Gallery, Proof Gallery, and SOIL Gallery and others.

Dale was recently honored as a James and Audrey Foster Prize Finalist in 2023 and the 2019 Polly Starr Thayer Visiting Artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prior, she was a resident artist at the Kohler Factory in 2013 and at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2010. Dale exhibits nationally and her work is included in the permanent collections of the Metal Museum in Tennessee and John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin. Her most recent acquisition was by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2022.