Exhibition - Two Painters, Two Friends

Kim Barry is a painter, potter, sculptor, and art educator. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture and from University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth with an MFA in Painting. Kim has lived in the south coast of Massachusetts most of her life and is a member of Hatch Street Studios in New Bedford, South Coast Artist, an exhibiting and teaching member of the Providence Art Club, Rogers Gallery in Mattapoisett, The Drawing Room in New Bedford, Westport Art Group, Marion Art Center, Cape Cod Cultural Center, and owner of Clay Trout Pottery in Mattapoisett. Her work is informed by the beautiful, south coast environment and the natural objects she encounters.

My pockets are always full of shells and the bits I discover along my walks. Through deep observation and my intimate response to the natural world, I find a bounty of inspiration for my paintings. My subject matter such as fruits, flowers, veggies, shells can often reference the human form, gesture, memory, emotion, sensuality. My landscapes simply capture the energy of a time and place. When I work from the natural world, I ingest this experience and then synthesize it into my own expression. My use of paint is visceral. I have an appetite for color and enjoy the manipulation of paint that grabs the eye and stirs the unconscious. When painting, I am compelled to articulate a fierce passion for life, female strength, and fecundity.

Pamela Hoss received a BFA from Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1972 and an MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in 1984. She taught drawing at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University and Montserrat College of Art. She started teaching at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 1989 and continued for thirty years, retiring in 2018.

Among her many awards are: an award from the Boit Competition (the Museum School, 1982); the Tomaso Travel Award to Italy (Tufts University, 1984); a trip to the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain from Eleanor Sayre, an international authority on Goya and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the MFA Boston; a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Visual Artist’s Fellowship for works on paper in 1994; a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant and an ARTnet Grant from New Bedford Creative in 2023.

Hoss has also served as juror and curator: juror in 2023 and 2024 for the Cuttyhunk Plein Air Festival, a joint endeavor between the MAC and the Gosnold Cultural Council; co-curator (with Willoughby Elliott) of “Contemporary Drawing with South Coast Connections” for the New Bedford Art Museum in 2012; juror for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Individual Artists Grants, 2013; juror for the National Figure Show at the North River Art Society, Marshfield MA in 2009.

Hoss has several pieces of her work in the Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Boston Public Library. She has exhibited nationally and regionally in commercial galleries, university galleries and many museums. Selected exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Concord Center for the Visual Arts, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, the Fitchburg, the Danforth Museum in Framingham, the Fuller Museum in Brockton, the Attleboro Art Museum, and the New Bedford Art Museum.