
Annual Member Holiday Showcase
A Member Show at Salem Arts Association Gallery
The Salem Arts Association is excited to announce our Annual Member Holiday Showcase at our Pickering Wharf gallery! This festive exhibition celebrates the creativity and community of our members during the holiday season. We encourage members to submit artwork that embodies the essence of the holidays, whether it’s a celebration of winter, personal reflections, or the warmth of togetherness.
From painting and photography to sculpture, crafts, and mixed media, this show is a perfect opportunity to share your latest creations and maybe find them a new home for the holidays!
Join us as we fill the gallery with color, warmth, and imagination to celebrate another vibrant year of art in Salem and ring in the holiday season together!

| Our Guest Juror: Amy Hourihan is a New England-based printmaker and painter whose work focuses heavily on coastal themes, regional landscapes, and nature. Based out of a studio in Marblehead, Massachusetts, she works across a broad range of traditional disciplines, combining outdoor observation with an eye toward loosely expressing simplicity and repose. She teaches fundamentals of printmaking at Little Harbor Studios in Marblehead. Additionally, she maintains active memberships with several regional art organizations, including the Monotype Guild of New England, Boston Artists North, The New England Watercolor Society.and is a member of Four Sparrows, a North Shore Printmakers group. Hourihan has trained extensively under notable New England artists, studying watercolor and printmaking with Joel Janowitz of Boston, and plein air watercolor with Gary Tucker, also of Boston. She has studied moku hanga printmaking/woodcut techniques with Matt Brown, of Lyme, NH. Her work can be seen at www.amyhourihan.com |
Awards
![]() Russell Findley - Essex Street This architectural cityscape is deftly drawn in layers of color and detail. There are suggestions of blue metallic touches in the sky that vibrate against the warm sienna tones of the buildings. I think the artist has struck a fine balance between playfulness and careful observation, and the layering gives the piece movement, particularly when the viewer looks at it from different vantage points. It’s an inventive technique. |
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Sunsan Schrader - The Ladies Ms. Schrader’s leggy ladies become abstractions against her field of intriguing marks, and the surface of the panel sports a milky, waxy finish which suggests encaustic materials. My eye likes to travel around her painting, and if there is a narrative suggested in the piece, I’m of a mind that her work doesn’t need one. It’s a pleasure just to gaze at it and admire the coherence and lyrical quality of lines, dots, colors. |
Robert J Beauvais - Only One Present? This photograph seems to catch Virgin Mary as she stands before the cross that has claimed her son, without a trace of lament. Having overcome the horror of her initial loss, she expresses a beatific serenity and seems to reassure us that grief can be transcended. The image has a lot of mid-level tone that keeps us moving along through the foliage, the trees, in contradiction to the strong architecture of the cross, as it reaches for the heavens. There is drama, and there is silence, all at the same time. |
![]() Bobbie Bush – Summer's End A dramatic sky and rocky coastline in a limited palette appears to be a mash-up between a photograph and a painting with digital editing. Here the neutral graphite-like palette really helps to draw our eye up to a beautiful cloud formation, which is quite beautifully painted. The water seems to carry more of the digital touches, almost mechanical in places. Purists may be troubled by the hybrid methods. For me, it simply provokes a lot of unanswerable questions that get me thinking about whether there is much difference between artists copying photos, or painting into them. Gerhard Richter’s paintings, deliberately meant to look like copied photographs, come to mind. I liked looking at it, and I hope it provokes conversations about the places where Art, AI and authenticity overlap. |
Nancy Barnes – Splash | ![]() Daniel Zampino – Mother Earth Birth |