Rice Polak Gallery Presents 2025 Summer Exhibition Schedule
Gallery to hold seven exhibitions; debut four new artists
Provincetown, MA – April 30, 2025 – The Rice Polak Gallery is pleased to announce its 2025 summer exhibition schedule, showcasing seven dynamic shows throughout the season. This year also marks the debut of four exciting new artists joining the gallery’s roster: Rick Legge, Nathaniel Mather, Michael R. Mills, and Jessica Pisano. In addition, two celebrated artists, Rebecca Kinkead & Nicolas V. Sanchez, will return to the gallery and will have solo exhibitions.
The 2025 Summer Feature Show Schedule includes:
OPENING GROUP SHOW
Now – July 2, 2025
The Gallery is proud to kick-off the 2025 summer season with an Opening Group Show. It will be on view until July 2nd, and will feature new works from all gallery artists. This includes pieces from gallery newcomers Rick Legge, Nathaniel Mather, Michael R. Mills, and Jessica Pisano.
SHOW 1: JULY 3 – JULY 16, 2025
Opening Reception: Rice Polak Gallery, Friday, July 4, 7pm
This show features the work of Bruce Ackerson, Rebecca Kinkead, and Anne Lilly. While each artist brings a distinct visual language to the exhibition, they share a deep commitment to process, materiality, and emotional resonance. This marks an exciting milestone as Rebecca Kinkead returns to Rice Polak and will have a feature exhibition at the gallery.
Ackerson’s richly textured oil paintings, viewed from above, explore modern life and the hidden corners of the human psyche through imaginative, often narrative scenes. Kinkead’s wax-infused paintings of people and animals capture fleeting moments of movement and memory, evoking a collective emotional experience. Drawing from a background in sculpture and a fascination with gesture, Kinkead layers oil, wax, and pigment to create surfaces that feel alive with energy and emotion. Lilly’s intricate drawings and watercolors carry forward the geometric precision of her sculptural practice, inviting close looking and contemplation through delicate gradients and repetition. Together, their work explores themes of perception, presence, and the layers that shape how we see the world.
SHOW 2: JULY 17-30, 2025
Opening Reception: Rice Polak Gallery, Friday, July 18, 7pm
This show features the work of Stanley Bielen, Donald Saaf, and René Romero Schuler. Though each artist brings a distinct aesthetic and set of influences, they are united by a deep emotional resonance and a poetic connection to the human experience—whether through intimate still lifes, dreamlike tableaus, or evocative figurative work.
Bielen’s lush still lifes are rooted in the European tradition, yet feel immediate and alive. His intimate floral arrangements, painted in oil, capture fleeting beauty with loose brushwork and dramatic half-light, offering a meditative reflection on seeing and sensation. Saaf blends folk art influences with personal and collective memory, crafting vibrant, layered compositions that explore the boundary between narrative and abstraction. Schuler’s emotionally charged figures—rendered in bold texture and stripped-down form—explore vulnerability, resilience, and the shared complexity of being human. Her work is deeply personal, yet universal, offering both raw honesty and quiet strength.
SHOW 3: JULY 31 – AUGUST 13, 2025
Opening Reception: Rice Polak Gallery, Friday, August 1, 7pm
This show features the work of Susan Mikula, Jessica Pisano, and Nicolas V. Sanchez. This will be the debut show at Rice Polak for new artist Jessica Pisano. Though all three artists’ mediums and methods differ, they each share a fascination with memory, perception, and the emotional resonance of place and identity. Their work invites viewers to pause, reflect, and engage with the layered complexity of visual experience.
Mikula’s atmospheric instant photography, created with vintage Polaroid cameras and expired film, captures fleeting moments with a dreamlike softness. Working only with available light and no post-processing, her process reveals the distilled essence of a subject, often exploring narrative through abstraction. Pisano draws inspiration from the natural world, blending classical oil painting techniques with contemporary experimentation. Her work bridges the abstract and representational, offering luminous, layered images that evoke both serenity and movement. Sanchez’s drawings and paintings—meticulous, intimate, and deeply personal—explore themes of identity, heritage, and memory. Drawing from his upbringing, he layers narratives that are at once familiar and uncertain, grounding personal history in universal emotion.
SHOW 4: AUGUST 14-27, 2025
Opening Reception: Rice Polak Gallery, Friday, August 15, 7pm
This show features the work of Willie Little, Pamela Murphy, and Christie Scheele. Rooted in memory and place, each artist’s work draws from the past to reflect on the present. Whether through evocative materials, vintage imagery, or stripped-down landscapes, these artists create work that lingers in emotional resonance—exploring identity, nostalgia, and the quiet poetry of everyday life.
Little’s abstract paintings and assemblages draw deeply from his personal history and the cultural memory of the rural South. Using materials like iron dust and acid oxidation, his textured surfaces evoke shanties and tin roofs while revealing layers of lived experience, resistance, and renewal. Murphy’s paintings, inspired by old photographs and rural life, are built through a process of layering and distressing, resulting in dreamlike compositions that feel at once deeply personal and universally familiar. Scheele’s minimalist landscapes reduce her surroundings to essential forms and moods, blending realism with abstraction to create meditative spaces that reflect both external terrain and internal experience.
SHOW 5: AUGUST 28 – SEPTEMBER 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Rice Polak Gallery, Friday, August 29, 7pm
This show features the work of Larry Calkins, Ellen Rolli, and Les Seifer. Each artist approaches storytelling through abstraction, symbolism, and layered imagery—offering a lens into personal mythology, emotion, and the passage of time. Their works span the uncanny and the intimate, shaped by memory, instinct, and the surreal qualities of everyday life.
Calkins’s hauntingly primitive paintings draw from childhood memories, folk iconography, and a darkly whimsical imagination. His use of wax, soot, and salvaged materials conjures a world suspended between dream and memory, populated by flying rabbits and moonlit hills. Rolli’s intuitive paintings emerge from process and emotion—driven by bold mark-making, layered color, and the expressive potential of abstraction. Her work resists literal interpretation, instead inviting a deeply personal response. Seifer’s narrative-driven panels blend collage, drawing, and paint into mysterious scenes full of evolving characters and shifting moods. Figures from childhood, Americana, and everyday life drift through his works, revealing the subconscious through gesture, repetition, and time.
FINAL GROUP SHOW: SEPTEMBER 11 – DECEMBER 31, 2025
The Gallery will close out the summer season, and carry into the colder months with a final group show. It will feature new works from all gallery artists, and will be on view through the end of the year.
A full list of Rice Polak Gallery artists can be found at www.ricepolakgallery.com.
The Gallery’s full summer exhibition schedule can be found here. For press inquiries, to be connected to the artists, or to request photos, contact Natasha Fee at [email protected] or 978-460-4449. You can also contact the Gallery at [email protected] or 508-487-1052.
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ABOUT THE RICE POLAK GALLERY
The Rice Polak Gallery holds a prominent place in Provincetown, Massachusetts as one of the primary venues for contemporary art. The gallery represents a select group of emerging and established artists whose work is both contemporary and contemplative. The gallery shows a wide cross-section of artistic approaches, including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, photography and installation. For more information visit ricepolakgallery.com.
Media contact:
Natasha Fee
[email protected]
978-460-4449
