While We Build
Ongoing
Upper Frances L. Hiatt Gallery (215)
The Worcester Art Museum is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. We are currently renovating and upgrading our over 125-year-old campus to create a better experience for our visitors and provide an optimal environment for the art collection we steward. Some of our galleries are temporarily closed, so we have created this gallery to bring many of the beloved works of art from our collections back on view. As renovations are completed, the art shown in this gallery will rotate. You will also be able to watch our conservators treat some of the objects that will later fill our newly renovated spaces
The artworks on view in the While We Build gallery include sculpture from the ancient Americas and ancient Greece, Japanese woodblock prints, and contemporary paintings, as well as 17th–19th-century paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the United States.
Learn more about our campus transformation and the capital projects currently in progress, all supported by our landmark fundraising campaignA Bold Step Forward: Campaign for the Worcester Art Museum.
While We Build is generously supported by the Fletcher Foundation. Sponsored by Kaplan Construction.
Hilary Doyle
Central Massachusetts Artists Initiative
May 14, 2025–November 9, 2025
Sidney and Rosalie Rose Gallery (321)
Hilary Doyle is an artist, teacher, and curator from Worcester, Massachusetts. Through her art, Doyle explores issues of women’s autonomy, motherhood, and nature—and the potent intersections between them.For this installation, Doyle will exhibit paintings from her newest series exploring the life of Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647–1717). Merian—an artist, mother, and scientist—was a pioneering ecologist and one of the most significant early contributors to entomology (the study of insects). She was among the first to study butterfly metamorphosis, which she documented in exquisitely detailed drawings and self-published books.
She is also believed to have been the first European woman to travel to the Americas in the pursuit of science, which she did independently and with her youngest daughter in tow.
She taught her daughters to be artists as well, and in the latter years of her life ran a successful studio with them. Doyle reflects, “As an artist and mother of two young children studying an artist/mother of two living three centuries ago, I notice similar struggles working mothers still face today.
Each story and myth about Maria is a source of hope and strength as I paint. In an increasingly oppressive world, we can find guidance and inspiration in the stories of women who succeeded against all odds.”
Doyle (American, born 1985) received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She co-founded and teaches for the NYC Crit Club, an alternative program offering community, connection, and critique to artists post BFA and MFA, as well as self-taught artists. Doyle teaches at the College of the Holy Cross
The Central Massachusetts Artist Initiative is supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund and John M. Nelson Fund.
Crystalle Lacouture
Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop)
Ongoing
The Worcester Art Museum has commissioned Massachusetts-based artist Crystalle Lacouture to create a new installation for the Wall at WAM. She is the 11th artist featured in this series since it began in 1998. The billboard-sized wall fills a 67-foot expanse on the second story of the Museum’s Renaissance Court.
For her Wall at WAM installation, Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop), Lacouture created an original painting which was translated into a monumental mural that reverberates through the space and is visible through a promenade of arches integral to the design of the 1930s building in which it resides.
Lacouture makes abstract paintings that embrace the powerful symbolism of pattern and color to create sensitive, mystical designs imbued with deep personal meaning.
Lacouture’s work references sacred geometries—recurring patterns found throughout nature and world religions—as well as art history, particularly art created for devotional purposes. For her Wall at WAM commission, Lacouture was inspired by ideas of place and space, and of corresponding design elements across time and cultures.
She incorporates into this site-specific installation patterns found in artworks throughout the Museum’s collection, such as the wave-like trim along the bottom which corresponds to an ancient Antioch mosaic installed directly below her mural. The title, as well as several elements of the painting, reference poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born and buried in Worcester.
Lacouture’s symbolic reference to Bishop and her citations of artworks in WAM’s collection pay homage to those artists and are a larger meditation on the city of Worcester and its art museum. Lacouture invites the viewer to be present in this space and consider their own connections to it through the experience of her transcendental, monumental artwork.
Crystalle Lacouture (American, born Montreal, 1978) is an artist who works conceptually across disciplines including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. She received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College and has exhibited throughout New England, New York, and beyond. She is represented by Praise Shadows Gallery, Brookline, and is based in Boston and North Adams, MA.
Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop) by Crystalle Lacouture is organized by Samantha Cataldo, Curator of Contemporary Art, with Delaney Keenan, Curatorial Assistant.