Inside the Artists Studio: Exploring the Creative Life

Exhibition Statement by Jerry Russo:

In 2012, I began a long-term documentary photography project focused on artists in their studios. Over the next fourteen years, I traveled throughout Massachusetts photographing painters, sculptors, photographers, performance artists, and filmmakers. By the project’s completion, I had documented more than 200 artists in the spaces where their work is born.

My aim was to reveal the origin of the artistic ritual: the studio as both sanctuary and laboratory. These portraits allow viewers to see artists within their environments and to witness the materials and physical spaces that shape their creative process. At times, the experience felt almost voyeuristic, as if observing a private, sacred ritual underscoring how essential solitude and privacy are to an artist’s ability to fully immerse themselves in their work. For the exhibition drawn from this project, I challenged myself to curate through a photographer’s eye, selecting only artists who paint and draw. The show creates a visual timeline of the act of making—something non-artists rarely get to experience. Each artist is represented by one painting or drawing displayed alongside their portrait, accompanied by a written statement ref lecting on their relationship to their studio and the importance of having a dedicated creative space.

Curator Jerry Russo is a prominent documentary filmmaker and fine art photographer based in the Boston area educated at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He is particularly recognized for his Alone Together series, which captures the vulnerability of commuters on the MBTA and his extensive oral history project interviewing 249 visual artists and creatives all over the world via Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Jerry Russo Oral History Collection is housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections.