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At its core, my practice is about radical joy and liberation. Each piece reveals a process record as a roadmap to bridging the heart and mind. Stories contain emergent themes of our human experience on a micro and macro level engaged with the language of abstraction. Multivalent materiality, linguistic mark-making, biomorphic shapes, fractured planes, and experimentation celebrate the parallels between rigorous play and invention. As a practice of collective care, I employ layering, color, and scale to occupy and energize space with vibrancy. Layers of paint and other materials consider the tensions between space, perception, and belonging. My practice asks for a willingness to reconsider our relationship with the unknown and locate ourselves in the constellation of infinite possibilities.

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​BIOGRAPHY:

Cicely Carew (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) is a Boston-based artist, mother, and educator whose practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, collage, printmaking, and sound. Rooted in improvisation and spiritual embodiment, her vibrant language of abstraction signals the transformative power of joy and liberation. Across mediums and scales, Carew's work invites viewers into a realm of healing and play. Her stand-alone pieces carry an intimate charge, drawing in and activating the spaces they inhabit, while her large-scale, site-responsive installations create what critics have described as "sacred containers," spaces of reflection, expanded perception, and embodied connection.

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Her public commissions include Ambrosia at Boston's Prudential Center (2021), a 5,000 sq. ft. installation of suspended mixed-media hybrids; Wishing Well for the Jewish Arts Collaborative (2023), an interactive meditation space addressing healing and ancestral trauma in BIPOC communities; and Elevate, a 2026 commission for the New England Botanic Garden. Her 2025 solo exhibition BeLOVEd at Fuller Craft Museum created what critic Cate McQuaid described as "a sacred container," a place where visitors bring "all that's so hard to understand and articulate in our lives" and leave transformed. Her Foster Prize exhibition at ICA Boston was noted by The Boston Globe for "amplifying the themes of joy and liberation central to her practice."

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An active contributor to the arts community, Carew has served as a juror for Fuller Craft Museum and Gallery 263 and has presented lectures at Lesley University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, The Art Complex Museum, and MassArt, and has mentored MFA candidates. Her work is held in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, Boston Public Library, the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies program, Google, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, among others. She is the recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize (ICA Boston, 2023), Brother Thomas Fellowship (2023), and Blanche E. Colman Award (2022).

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Carew lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.