Artist Talk: Rhonda Smith and Wendy Seller

Join Rhonda Smith, Main Gallery artist, and Wendy Seller, Project Space artist, as they discuss their November exhibtions at Kingston Gallery. Mary Sherman from the Transcultural Exchange will also be in attendance to share information about the March 2025 conference.

derives from various influences: sea tales, myths, poems, industrial and natural elements, medieval imagery, photographs, and contemporary statistics. These influences emerge during the creation of each piece. Rhonda Smith relies on the tactile process of shaping, molding, and assembling materials to give form to her ideas. Initial concepts often remain skeletal or merely impulsive, while the true essence of a piece develops through the tactile process of listening to what her hands transmute.

explores the fusion of traditional painting techniques and digital image-building. Wendy Seller embraces these polar-opposite artmaking approaches to create intangible hybridized worlds that integrate past and present, populated by magical figures and surreal landscapes. Seller developed this technique with Photoshop when an inherited “essential hand tremor” made it extremely difficult for her to write or paint any longer. Her digital collages evolve from a myriad of sources, including her own photography, Renaissance paintings, and current-day catalogs or magazines.

has been immersed in visual study all her adult life. She graduated from St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, and studied at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Cooperativa Mosaicisti, Ravenna Italy. She is currently a member of the Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA and the Pell Lucy Collective/Shim Art Network, and on the board of Transcultural Exchange. She was a painter until about seven years ago when she turned to sculpture and installation. Her work incorporates her abiding love of science, the land and water, and the sacred. The idea in science that any dynamic system can be in disequilibrium is an underlying concept in her work and process. Of particular concern now is that our planet has lost its wild spaces, we are in a continual state of displacement, and too many species have disappeared. On the other side of these tragedies is the aspiration for presence and the ineffable in any artwork. The Tibetan Buddhist concept resonates: that each phenomenon, physical or spiritual, has four levels: the outer, the inner, the secret, and the ultimately secret.

collages seamlessly fuse traditional painting techniques and digital image-building to create compelling surrealist works. Her solo shows and small group exhibitions include venues in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Arizona, Ireland, and Germany. Seller’s work is held in over a dozen collections, including the Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art in Ireland, Fidelity Investments in Boston, Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, and the Women Artists Collection at Simmons College in Boston. Her paintings, and more recently her digital collages, are featured in three issues of New American Paintings and over eight editions of Studio Visit, published by Open Studios Press.

Seller was part of a small group of mid-career artists who purchased and repurposed an abandoned elementary school in the late 80's, ultimately creating 14 large live/work studio spaces called the CLAFLIN SCHOOL STUDIOS. Single handedly she redeveloped half of the school gymnasium into the studio of her dreams, which took over six years. In 1994, a two-page article on this massive project was featured in the New York Times, entitled "A Drill and A Dream Make A Gym a Home.” Her renovated gym now serves as the residence for both Seller and her husband, as well as a working space for her practice.

Seller taught Design and Spatial Dynamics at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1990 to 2013, and now focuses full time on her professional art practice.

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