We recently connected with Marjorie Kaye and have shared our conversation below.

Marjorie , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Besides my personal art practice, forming the large collective artist-run Galatea Fine Art is the most meaningful project I have worked on. And I really feel that it is closely related to my personal practice, as being exposed to the work of hundreds of artists, creating an interchange of ideas and dialogues has been instrumental to my personal growth.

In 2009, with help from a friend, I put a call to artists out to the Boston community and was delighted with the response. We took a raw space and my friend designed and built it out, and we had our first exhibition in November of that year. Since then, the gallery has changed, becoming a non-profit, but what remains is a very supportive community of artists. Personally, watching people evolve and bring their work to level after level of inquisitiveness is like peeking into many individual experiences. It is a pleasure to work with artists that are so incredibly committed to their perceptual exploration.

Marjorie , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Marjorie Kaye resides in the city of North Adams, MA, where the quiet beauty influences her forms and process. Her work is an exploration of opposites: form and color; organic and geometric; precision and chaos. Colorful and bold, her sculpture and gouache paintings are kinetic and energetic. Her work has been reviewed in many publications including the Boston Globe and ArtScope Magazine, the Boston Voyager and the Metapsychosis Journal. Her work has been shown extensively both locally and nationally, including galleries such as Galatea Fine Art in Boston, Walter Wickiser Gallery in Chelsea, NYC, Atlantic Works Gallery in East Boston, Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, and most recently at Boston CyberArts Gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA. She is a 2016 recipient of the Lillian Orlowsky/William Freed Foundation Grant from the Provincetown Art Center and Museum as well as a finalist in the 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship awards in Painting.

Marjorie is also the founder and Director of Galatea Fine Art in Boston, MA, a large artist-run gallery featuring over 30 artists from Boston and beyond. Some past projects also include the origination and curations of the web-based Caladan Gallery, which ran for 10 years and exhibited hundreds of artists from all over the world, and the Lawrence, MA Gallery 181, whose curated exhibitions enhanced the community with the inclusion of local, national, and international artists. She is also the Western Massachusetts correspondent for ArtScope Magazine, covering gallery and museum exhibitions in the Berkshires area, as well as Art Basel Miami for the 2022 edition of the event.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

During the lockdown we had no idea where the Covid journey was going to take Galatea Fine Art. In addition to being shut down due to the Pandemic, we had a huge flood situation in the building. Many members went over and risked their health to pull artwork out of the gallery to save it. We were extremely lucky in that although some work was damaged, the insurance company was on top of it. But what really stands out is the community spirit of the gallery and how people just jumped in to do what had to be done. Although some of our membership left the gallery during the lockdown, many die-hard artists banded together to ensure a future. Also during the lockdown, I initiated a series of inspired newsletters combining members’ art with poetry. We were able to make a bridge from what WAS to what IS.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

My work as an artist is the only aspect of life in which others cannot possibly dictate what happens. In all aspects of life, we are working as an ecosystem, in which one individual depends on the other. This is just a fact of life. In work situation, one must adapt to the desires and needs of others constantly. One accepts this. If I have a different point of view, I might be heard, but not necessarily followed. The same is true in family dynamics. However, with art, I listen to the collective consensus, take what I can use and dispose of the rest. The choices are fully my own. I follow something that is within, what we are all tapping into whether we know it or not, something ancient and mysterious that drives our creative vision. We are the vessels for the universal grand design, translators of an unspoken language.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marjoriekayeart.com
• Instagram: @kaye.marjorie
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marjorie.kaye.1

Image Credits
Images by the artist, Marjorie Kaye