Throughout my artistic journey from painting to sculpture, I’ve built upon First Wave Feminist art’s legacy of transforming spaces, engaging viewers, and challenging traditional hierarchies of material and form. My work continues this tradition while speaking to contemporary concerns about presence and interaction. I rely on formal content – the meaning extends from color relationships and mark-making, while engaging with feminist art’s tradition of challenging hierarchical distinctions between abstract and embodied experience.
While the forms in my paintings and sculpture often echo natural and floral shapes, they deliberately play with and subvert traditionally ‘feminine’ imagery. My sinuous lines and flower-like forms are exaggerated and transformed into something more ambiguous and challenging – sometimes even unsettling. My work takes stereotypically ‘feminine’ organic shapes and makes them monumental, unavoidable, and slightly alien. These forms don’t politely decorate – they command space and demand engagement.
My recent work explores the choreography of pattern and void. The pieces float and interact like notes in a visual score, creating rhythms through both color and shape. While I embrace traditionally ‘feminine’ colors like pink, I deliberately disrupt their sweetness by introducing structural elements and unexpected color combinations. The negative spaces become as important as the forms themselves, turning the white wall into an active participant in the composition. This interplay between structure and fluidity, presence and absence, reflects my interest in how ‘feminine’ imagery can be both acknowledged and challenged within the same piece.
My early training in dance continues to influence how I think about space, movement, and the body’s relationship to its position. Each installation becomes a kind of choreographed environment where forms perform in space, creating temporal experiences that unfold as viewers move through them. The suspended pieces in particular engage in a slow dance with gravity, while their shadows create an ever-changing performance on walls and floors. This understanding of movement and spatial relationships informs everything from my initial drawings to final installation decisions.
Adria Arch is a mixed media artist living and working in Arlington, Massachusetts. She is interested in creating immersive experiences with sculpture and paint, using hand-cut or laser-cut lightweight polystyrene plastic to create sculptural forms that populate my large-scale colorful installations. Her work references the things seen every day- from neighborhood flower gardens to the ever-growing skyline of Boston. She has a vocabulary of shapes that includes ladders, grids, and spirals. The installations of hanging painted sculptures are whimsical, playful spaces that provide an experience of both delight and surprise.
Arch has had solo exhibitions at Danforth Art in Framingham, MA, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA, and the Hunt Gallery at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She has completed site specific murals at Lesley University’s Porter Square building in Cambridge, MA, Stonehill College, and Danforth Art in Framingham, MA. Arch has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, and in Auvillar, France. Her work is included in many private and public collections including the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fidelity Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. In 2019 her work was featured at the Fitchburg Art Museum, and in 2020 at the Cahoon Museum of American Art. Most recently, Arch was commissioned by Google to do a room-sized installation. Arch showed installations at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Brattleboro Art Museum in Vermont and the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA. Her work will be on view at the San Luis Obispo Art Museum in 2025.
Images:
Top: Detail, Holding the Center 4, 2025, Acrylic on synthetic paper, 8′ x 4′
Right top: Shape of Things, 2025, Acrylic on polystyrene
Right bottom: Holding the Center 4, 2025, Acrylic on synthetic paper, 8′ x 4′