Ishibashi Gallery

Participation Award: Brooke Stewart and Chelsea Lyons Teta
Ishibashi Gallery | Middlesex School, 1400 Lowell Road, Concord MA 01742
Exhibition on view August 27 – October 20, 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 8, 2026 | 6:30–7:30 PM | Free and open to the public

Community Talk: Friday, October 9, 2026 | open to the Middlesex Community. For more information, please email ishibashigallery@mxschool.edu

Middlesex School’s Ishibashi Gallery presents Participation Award: Brooke Stewart and Chelsea Teta. This exhibition brings together the work of Brooke Stewart and Chelsea Lyons Teta in an exploration of the human desire to leave a physical trace of experience. Through painting and sculpture the artists investigate how memories are processed, preserved, and transformed into a tangible form.

Participation Award considers the ways we move through the world collecting experiences, emotions, and moments that shape us. Some memories we carry closely; others we feel compelled to release. Yet even memories we let go of are not discarded. We revisit them, examine them, and give them form in order to better understand their place in our lives. We feel the need to put them down. The exhibition asks: How do we process experience? What do we choose to preserve? And what physical evidence do we leave behind?

Both artists approach making as the most valued way we process our lives. For Brooke Stewart, memory is embedded in movement, repetition, and physical labor, she is drawing inspiration from her experience as an athlete and the areas and fields she's played on. Stewart sees these sites as places where effort, success and failures accumulate over time. Through her work, she transforms these experiences into records, considering the collection as both an act of preservation and a means of release.

Through a combination of sculpture and painting, Chelsea Teta creates intimate objects that hold memory. These works emerge from a sincere contemplation of a person, a feeling, or a meaningful experience, taking shape as physical manifestations of remembrance. Influenced by the folk art tradition of memory jugs and the outsider art of artists such as James “Son Ford” Thomas, the pieces become meditations on internal dialogue, presence, and absence.

Existing somewhere between artifact and portrait, they are intended to carry memory across time, honoring both what remains and what has been lost. By inviting viewers to bring their own experiences and associations to the work, the pieces blur the line between personal history and collective memory, creating a shared space for reflection. 

Together, Stewart and Teta consider the idea of the symbolic trophy, not as an object awarded solely for victory, but as a marker of experience. A trophy is, at its essence, a sculpture of success, a tangible form given to an intangible achievement. But what if the game is more important than the win? What if perseverance, growth, connection, heartbreak, repetition, and care are equally worthy of commemoration? Through photographs, collections, keepsakes, rituals, and acts of making, we all participate in the creation of physical memories, transforming ordinary objects into vessels that hold meaning far beyond their material form.