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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 multivalent practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, collage, printmaking, and sound. Her site-responsive installations and public artworks are immersive and atmospheric, incorporating light, sound, and layered material processes to create immersive, atmospheric environments that challenge perception and invite curiosity, transformation, and expanded ways of sensing and being. Rooted in improvisation and spiritual embodiment, her work explores transformation, interdependence, and the generative potential of abstraction. Through these environments, Carew creates what critics have described as “sacred containers,” spaces that invite reflection, expanded perception, and embodied connection. Her installations often incorporate participatory elements that foster collective presence and shared experience.

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Her work unfolds across studio, architectural, and public contexts. Public art commissions include Ambrosia at the Prudential Center in Boston (Boston Properties and Now + There, 2021); chromatic installations for Peloton in New York City (2021); Origins, a permanent, architecturally integrated installation commissioned by Isenberg Projects (2022); Wishing Well (Jewish Arts Collaborative, 2023); and Rooted at Northeastern University (2024).

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Carew’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the New England Botanic Garden (2026); Fuller Craft Museum (2025); ICA Boston (2023); Fitchburg Art Museum (2022); The Commons, Provincetown (2021); Simmons University (2020); and Northeastern University (2017). Her presentation in the ICA Boston’s 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition was noted by Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe for “amplifying the themes of joy and liberation central to her practice.” Her work is held in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, Boston Public Library, Fitchburg Art Museum, the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies program, Chase, Fidelity Investments, Google, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, among others.

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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, and The Art Complex Museum. She is the recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize (ICA Boston), Brother Thomas Fellowship, Blanche E. Colman Award, and St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award.

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Carew lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.