We’ve seen a lot of art shows this year. While solo exhibitions give us the chance to dive deep into one artist’s work and devote many words to it, group shows don’t always allow us to discuss everyone’s art, or at least not in as much detail as we’d like. So we wanted to shine a little more light on seven artists from group shows we covered in 2025. They practice in all kinds of media, from photography to ceramics, and are well worth watching in the New Year.
Emily Piccirillo
All that glitters is not gold — in March, silver works of art took over the main gallery of Studio Place Arts in Barre in celebration of the organization’s 25th anniversary. One of them, Emily Piccirillo’s “Below Zero,” interpreted the theme as a painting of bare trees silhouetted against a muted, gray winter sky. Like many of Piccirillo’s works, the canvas was not traditionally stretched but suspended from a metal frame that protruded a few inches from the wall. A handful of cords along its edge pulled the painting tight, like a skin over a drum.
The Burlington artist’s portfolio is a series of variations on that painting’s form: skies, trees, frames. Many pieces feature deep azure skies of summer, puffy white clouds or growing thunderheads. Some are monumental and singular, such as “Crush,” which pictures an archetypal cloud in a blue sky; others, such as “Flush,” present multiple views of the sky over time, as the sun sets. Piccirillo’s style looks almost photographic in its accuracy, but her skies are suffused with painterly luminosity. Many of the canvases are also painted with saturated color on the back, giving a glow to the walls behind them.
Aimée Papazian
In May, I was struck by Aimée Papazian’s installation “Which End Is Up? II” in “Signals” at K. Grant Fine Art, the final show before the Vergennes venue’s closure. Papazian’s tiny ceramic trees, houses, birds and cars marched across topographic-style shelves that protruded from the wall and even the ceiling, as though the denizens of an architectural model had gone off on their own adventure.
The installation in Vergennes was a version of one Papazian presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., as part of “New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024,” which showcased regional artists. Papazian represented Arkansas, where she lived before a 2022 move to Burlington. The piece evokes feeling disconnected from a discombobulated world during the pandemic.
Many of Papazian’s installations are murmurations of things: A public sculpture in an Arkansas library is a swarm of ceramic keys that seem to undulate and rise into the air above a stairwell. Others are literal word clouds: 3D versions of cursive text, looping and barely legible, suspended in front of a wall. One of the latter, installed in her studio for Burlington’s South End Art Hop, looks perfectly elegant but says, “shhhhh, just another asshole.”
Jordan Douglas
This fall, Jericho photographer Jordan Douglas was everywhere. Soon after I saw his work in Calais’ Art at the Kent, we met when he organized the Rachel Portesi exhibition at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, where he teaches photography. Shortly afterward, his photos were included in “Do We Say Goodbye? Grief, Loss, and Mourning” at BCA Center in Burlington. (Catch it by January 24 if you haven’t yet.)
Douglas has made hundreds of photographs of objects that belonged to his parents, many in the form of contact grids featuring multiple images. At the Kent, he showed photos shot while cleaning out his late father’s house and studio; at BCA, the mementos were from his mother.
Both collections convey the absurdity of knowing and not knowing one’s parents, a feeling so familiar to those mourning their loss. Some objects, such as scissors or pencil stubs, are generic but communicate the absence of a hand. Others — a worn-out toy truck, an oil can — are inscrutable. Among his mother’s items is the Star of David she wore as a child in Nazi Germany, a weighty reminder of the trauma our stuff can hold.
Chiara No
Last month, Chiara No closed a solo show at Field Projects in New York City, and in January she will open a two-person show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. But I saw her work in a 22-artist exhibition at a Waitsfield venue: “Earthen” at Mad River Valley Arts in June.
The Johnson artist contributed ceramic bells representing demons and inspired by terra-cotta artifacts from ancient Boeotia, in present-day Greece. The bells are part of a larger body of work investigating the intersections of myth and domesticity.
No’s figures, meanwhile, capture the unnerving quality of antiquities at the juncture of art, function, spirituality and superstition — objects we don’t really understand but that spark a deep feeling of recognition and reverence. They have many eyes or many breasts, animal elements, and finely detailed decoration. Yet No also updates these figures, giving them brightly colored sandals or, in the case of “Idol (The Sybil),” a jaunty mortarboard hat with many tassels.
The artist makes rugs — which she describes on her website as protective barriers and objects of transition — as well as a series of rug-beaters with metal handles in shapes that suggest words. Her practice as a whole combines lightness with intellectual depth and offers a new way of looking at the ancient.
James Secor
I have known James Secor for a decade, since we were both members of the Front gallery collective in Montpelier. It’s been tremendous to see his work and painting career take off — including at “Spaces & Places,” which I viewed in July at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery.
The palette of Secor’s places grabs you right away. Cotton-candy pink, butter yellow, sherbet orange or ICEE turquoise are often at the fore, but they sit cohesively alongside muckier browns and grays and dark greens. Texture plays an even more important role. Stripes abound on pavement, on clothing and in shadows; the Montpelier artist scrapes one color back to reveal a different hue underneath or builds layers that vibrate at the edges with an unexpected shade of something else.
All of this is in service of scenes that vary from landscapes to towns to interiors and are always some level of weird. Secor’s figures often share space while staying solitary — lost in a phone, a TV show or their own thoughts. He sketches from life, which you can see in his compositions: The light on his landscapes is stark and bright, the angles a little off. Objects many painters avoid — power lines, parking meters, highway barriers — tend to be the most beautiful parts of the picture.
Veronica Y Pham
I first saw Veronica Y Pham’s work in September, in the Art at the Kent show in Calais. But an art listing of hers caught my eye months earlier: In April, she taught a Vietnamese papermaking workshop at Generator Makerspace in Burlington to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
While I wasn’t able to make it to the event, I was so glad to encounter her work in person later in the year. The Burlington artist contributed several installations at the Kent: Downstairs, she stretched a handmade mulberry-twine net back and forth across a small hallway. It cast shadows on the walls and ceiling, adding to the building’s own textures. Another sculpture presented dishes, teapots included, made solely from diaphanous paper fibers.
Upstairs, her installation “letters, gia đình ba” took over a full room of the museum. Vertical paper banners moved in the breeze. Looking closely, you could see watermarks of missing script, written in Vietnamese and not quite legible. Pham traced her father’s handwriting when she made the paper, both erasing his words and letting the light shine through them. Her use of the material makes the work poetic and poignant without our needing to know what’s been said.
Julia Jensen
Vermont has more than its per-capita share of landscape painters, whether they moved here for the setting or were moved to paint by it. Setting out to see three holiday shows of small works this month, I expected lots of scenic views by accomplished painters. Julia Jensen, whose work is on view at Edgewater on the Green in Middlebury, is one of the best.
The artist, who splits her time between southern Vermont and Nantucket, has a juicy approach to paint, creating works with a loose, gestural style. She maintains depth and density — the paintings are worked and considered — while conveying a quick, expressionistic hand. Paintings teeter on the border between landscape and abstraction.
In “The Sound of Crows,” on view in the Edgewater small-works show despite its 40-by-40-inch size, a blurry pewter sky communicates humidity. Zippy streaks of yellow across a field of green create an absurd contrast yet still look exactly accurate. The artist’s confidence in what she’s seeing comes through loud and clear, making her scenes both believable and magical — just like Vermont.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ones to Watch | Standout Vermont artists to keep an eye on in 2026”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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