Jackie Reeves: Larger than Life – Drawings in Time

Please join the artist for a Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture on Thursday, May 28 at 6pm. Included with $15 Museum admission, free for PAAM members.

Larger than Life ~ Drawings in Time presents a group of large-scale figurative works that expand the possibilities of observational drawing through imagination, movement, and expressive mark-making. The title speaks both to the scale of the imagery and to the layered experiences of a life lived as a woman, mother, and creative force.

ARTIST STATEMENT

These paintings feature larger-than-life female figures caught in various states of action and transformation. While the figures may first draw the viewer in, it is ultimately the paint application, gesture, and mark-making that I hope will hold their attention.

My process is spontaneous and rooted in movement. I begin abstractly, often with spills, splatters, and poured paint, allowing the surface to evolve through pushing, dragging, and layering. From these Rorschach-like forms, figures begin to emerge- drawn first from memory and intuition, then shaped through references from myself, my daughters, and family photographs.

Performance and physicality are central to the work. My background as a mural painter, combined with an early love of drawing large, continues to inform how I approach scale, gesture, and the body in space. Together, these works create an immersive environment in which painting and drawing become acts of discovery, memory, and transformation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Canadian-American artist Jackie Reeves creates mixed media works that combine figurative and abstract elements. Raised in Montreal by architect parents, she earned her BFA in Design Art from Concordia University and her MFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design low-residency program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Reeves has exhibited widely throughout Cape Cod and beyond, and her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, Art New England, WHITEHOT Magazine, and Artscope Magazine. She was recently named one of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s 2026 Artists of the Year alongside author, poet, and artist Lauren Wolk. Together they created The InkLine Project, a collaborative series pairing Reeves’s animations with Wolk’s poetry. Reeves lives in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and teaches mixed media drawing and painting throughout Cape Cod

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Bert Yarborough has a degree in Architecture from Clemson University and an MA and MFA in Photography from the University of Iowa. He held the Sonia C. Davidow ’56 Endowed Chair in the Fine and Performing Arts at Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH, where he also served as the Director of the William and Sonja Carlson Davidow ’56 and Marian Graves Mugar Art Galleries and taught Drawing and Painting.

A former two year Resident Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, he served as Visual Program Coordinator for four years and Chair of the Visual Committee for 10 years, while serving on the Board of Trustees. He has received two NH State Arts Council Grants in Painting, an NEA Fellowship in Sculpture, a Fulbright Fellowship to Nigeria, also in Sculpture, and a Visual Arts Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbria, Italy. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of numerous institutions including the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH, the Boston Public Library and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY.

He is currently represented by the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA and resides in Truro, MA.