Leah Dunn lives in Newton, Massachusetts. She has been attending Gateway Arts since 2018.

Dunn’s artistic interests include painting–especially animal imagery from her colorful, whimsical artist’s book; embroidery, jewelry, and fibers wearables. She is also a prolific writer and illustrator of her own stories, which draw heavily from fairy tales in the vernacular.

Dunn’s work has been exhibited at The Gateway Gallery.

Farah Faustin was born in 1994 in Boston, MA. She began working at Gateway Arts in 2016.

Faustin has been an artist much of her life–she started seriously exploring her interest in drawing when she was 16 years old. Faustin makes drawings and paintings using her favorite subject matter of landscapes, patterns and still life. Currently she primarily works in acrylics. Faustin’s work has a joyous element to it, and she creates it in the hopes that the viewers will experience that joy when viewing her work. Her interests outside of Gateway include Manga, super heroes, and exercising.

Faustin’s work has been exhibited at the Gateway Gallery.

Born in 1991, Charles “Chuck” Johnson lives in Boston. He began working in the Gateway Studios in 2019.

Johnson has a keen drawing ability and expresses himself in layered surfaces reminiscent of spray painting, Japanese animation and video game style–some of Johnson’s influences. Johnson is further inspired by rock ‘n roll and heavy metal from the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing, digital animation, and jewelry making are some of his chosen mediums, but he exhibits adeptness in all of the media he pursues.

Johnson’s work is available in The Gateway Store. 

Russell McNaught was born and educated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began working at Gateway in 2001.

As a teenager, McNaught worked at the Harvard University Fogg Museum, sparking an initial interest in art.  McNaught attended college in Tennessee for two years, then joined the US Navy, specializing in computers, software and hardware for air traffic control systems. After spending much of his life working in an incredibly precise field, McNaught decided to begin art making and exploring the philosophy behind it as an exercise in working more freely.  McNaught’s work is a complex relationship between or the juxtaposition of computer like geometric systems and the abstract inkblot visuals.  McNaught often works in acrylic, ink marker or paint pens on canvas or Bristol board.  His work is vibrant and saturated with primary and secondary colors and he will commonly work in a long series exploring a particular visual experience or technique.  McNaught tries to challenge the viewer to expand their minds about what is considered good art, bad art, or science and the relationship between these various elements.

McNaught’s work has been exhibited at the Gateway Gallery.

Charlene Murphy was born in Massachusetts and spent most of her young adult life at Fernald State School.

While in her 20s, Murphy was placed at Gateway Arts as one of the original 8 Gateway artists over 40 years ago.  Murphy loves to draw and paint, and primarily creates works in the fabric, paper, and folk art production studios.  Murphy historically depicts men and women in the simplest form; however, her focus recently has turned to drawing and painting whimsical animals.

Murphy’s work has been exhibited locally at the Gateway Gallery, the Mall at Chestnut Hill in Boston, and Brookline Open Studios.

Michael Oliveira has been working at Gateway Arts since 2000.

While he works in a variety of materials, Oliveira’s stylized drawings constructed with paint markers and sharpies are his most sought after works. The cohesion between Oliveira’s two dimensional work centers around portraits of others. Oliveira’s ability to capture key features and isolate them in his drawings is quite remarkable. The intention with which he makes every mark is seen in his work, no matter the material or subject matter. Oliveira’s dedication to his work is apparent and part of what makes it so visually appealing.

Oliveira’s work has been shown throughout Massachusetts at the Berenberg Gallery, Boston’s State Hall, the Gateway Gallery, Barney’s NY, and the Mall at Chestnut Hill.

Born in 1997, Rotimi Osinubi joined Gateway Arts in July 2019.

Osinubi is constantly hard at work and enjoys being busy and in the mix of things. He is sociable, friendly, and lives to be around his fellow peers. He has a deep interest in art, specifically in drawing and is open to learning and exploring additional art mediums. Rotimi’s work at Gateway explores patterning and animals in bold and graphic colors. He frequently works in graphite and colored pencil on paper, methodically mapping out the picture plane in geometric sections.

Osinubi’s work is available in The Gateway Store.

Patricia Ann Peter was born in Camden, New Jersey. Currently, she resides in Arlington, Massachusetts.

In 1978, Peter graduated with a BS degree in Athletic Training. After several jobs in the healthcare field she returned to school and in 1985 received her BS degree in Physical Therapy, at which point she moved to Nantucket for work. In 2005, Peter was encouraged to join an art therapy group on Nantucket which is where she began painting. Initially, artmaking for Peter was purely therapeutic. Since then, her work has grown tremendously and has become highly sought after. Peter creates vibrant works in acrylic on canvas depicting scenes inspired by nature, personal experiences, and from her own dreams.

Peter has shown her work extensively across Massachusetts in galleries as well as in other settings.

Habib Plasencia was born in 1976 and lives in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. He has attended Gateway Arts since 2008.

Plasencia is inspired by the movies and TV shows he has recently seen, and he loves to draw in his sketchbook.  Plasencia’s work is very reactive to his surrounding; over the years he has developed a unique drawing style that combines elements of nature and existing anime characters.  Recently, Plasencia has expanded his use of materials and has become more confident in his own drawing skills, moving away from anime as his main source.  These new drawings are quite striking and have a resemblance to indigenous or aboriginal portraits.

Plasencia’s work has been shown in several locations throughout Massachusetts including the Gateway Gallery, Drive- by Projects in Watertown, and Barney’s NY in Boston.

Kenneth Reynolds was born in 1966 and currently lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. He has attended Gateway Arts since 1990.

Reynolds enjoys being busy in his various art studios which include jewelry, paper, fabric, pottery, and folk art. His primary activities in these studios are beading and drawing. Reynolds shows much focus when doing his artwork, especially while methodically beading yards of wire.  His beaded creations are transformed into sculptural jewelry and also adorn dresses, bags, and ornaments. The beauty of Reynold’s artwork is it’s truly all about feeling. He chooses a theme of each piece, inspired from seasons, holidays, or people he knows. Acting off his prompts, he will then be given wire and a box of beads, thread, or wax crayons. As he feels for each material he carefully places them where he wants, manipulating the media consistently creating and end result nearing sculpture. Reynolds has a very complex style that is truly original.

Reynolds’ artwork has been exhibited at the Gateway Gallery, the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, and Boston College in Chestnut Hill. Additionally one of Reynolds’ designs was the poster art for the Governor’s Commission on Employment for People with Disabilities in Boston.

Cheryl Russo was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and currently resides in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

Russo was adopted but always knew that her biological parents also made art. As Russo puts it, she was brought up as an artist and she is genetically an artist. Russo finds her style reflects the art they made: by examining the way nature and nurture connect.

Russo has exhibited her work at Artists Among Us, and at the Gateway Gallery.

Nancy Sampson (1941-2007) was at Wrentham State School from age nine to seventeen.

After that she lived with family members, worked at a variety of jobs, and had two children. In 1990, after a series of physical ailments, Sampson began attending Gateway Arts. She had always liked working with her hands, and at Gateway, a whole new world of making art and hand-crafted items opened to her.  At Gateway, she always showed interest in knowing more about being an artist. She drew and painted even in her spare time at home.  She became a proficient weaver and made wonderful pieces in the pottery studio.

Sampson was a friendly person, well liked by many of her colleagues. She had a wonderful sense of humor and was not only a self-advocate, but an advocate for others. She enjoyed relating her experiences to others and wrote a number of articles for “On Our Own,” a past Gateway publication. She also gave talks at Pierce School in Brookline about what it meant to be a person with a disability and shared her ability to create art and crafts. She had many fans who loved her depictions of cats and personal experiences.  She will be sorely missed and her memory will live on through the work she created.

Sampson won a number of awards for her artwork from The Ebensburg Center in Pennsylvania and showed her work nationally in Virginia, Washington D.C., Baltimore, MD, and internationally in Cambridge, England.  Her work was shown and sold in the Gateway Gallery and the Gateway Store as well as the Mall at Chestnut Hill. 

Susan Jean Semple was born in Oklahoma in 1949. She attended Gateway Arts from 1997 until 2006.  

At the age of eighteen, Semple began painting in oils and attended the University of Oklahoma where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree. For a number of years, Semple led the life of a vagabond. With her second husband she traveled all over the United States while simultaneously raising a family. To earn money, she set up shop as a portrait artist, drawing peoples’ likenesses for two dollars apiece. Ultimately, Semple made her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Semple is a versatile artist whose creativity shines through in many mediums, including: painting, drawing, print making, pottery, sculpture and quilting.

Semple was a featured artist in the Gateway Gallery and her work has been shown extensively in the U.S., especially Washington State and New York.

Patrick Shea was born in 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts, and began working at Gateway Arts in 2015.

Shea spent thirty-five years of his life living in Winthrop, Massachusetts where he was very active with hockey, soccer, and the boy scouts.  Since joining Gateway Arts Shea has actively pursued his interest in drawing. Often, Shea can be found working with paper and pencils, alternating working freely and using rulers—he creates works that are both abstract and figurative. Shea has also expanded his artistic practice to include both ceramic and fiber outputs.

Shea’s work has been exhibited at the Gateway Gallery.

Gabrielle Sichel graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1986, Tufts University in 1989, and came to Gateway Arts in 1997.

Gabrielle Sichel grew up in rural Connecticut, her mother an artist and her father a writer. Throughout her life, Sichel has seen the process of art making as a necessity, and has studied formally and independently. In 1989 she graduated from SMFA/Tufts University. Though painting and drawing have been a constant, Sichel works in an expansive variety of mediums culminating in the publication of several artist books, site-specific installations, wood carving, and a current focus on fiber art-based pieces.

Sichel’s work has been exhibited locally and nationally, including at Margaret Bodell Gallery in New York and the Berenberg Gallery in Boston. Sichel has had her work reviewed in the Boston Globe, Arts Media, and the Boston Herald. She is a three-time scholarship recipient for the Medicine Wheel Artist Retreat, and has received fellowships to attend The Vermont Studio Center five times. Additionally, Sichel has written and illustrated a book of poetry called Sees and Hears and her poems have been published in For Crying Out Loud.  Her current project is an artist’s book with poems, entitled Chance.

Parker Stallworth was born in 1991 and lives in Malden, MA. He began working in the Gateway studios in 2020.

Stallworth has a twin sister who, along with himself, sometimes figures into his playful, cartoon-style pen-and-ink-drawings. Stallworth has a strong interest in all still drawing media, including digital and watercolor, and his work also manifests in careful, astute graphite drawings of the animal kingdom. Stallworth’s sensitivity and attention to detail are notable in his approach.

Stallworth’s work is available in The Gateway Store.

Christina Taylor was born in 1983 in Boston.

Taylor had a prolific career as a Gateway artist from 2006 to 2013. She has a wonderful eye for color, perspective, and shape. Christina has a very meticulous and precise work method, which distinguishes her work in all media. She creates  jewelry, weaving, drawing, pottery, and stunning embroideries. Christina was always seen smiling and diligently working while at Gateway Arts.

Taylor has exhibited her work in the Phoenix Gallery, Berenberg Gallery, Gateway Gallery, the Mall at Chestnut Hill, and Barney’s New York retail stores. 

Matthew Treggiari resides in Salem, MA and has been attending Gateway Arts since 2005.

He enjoys painting, drawing, sculpting and making craft items. Treggiari draws on anything, including napkins and paper towels. One of his favorite subjects is cats, inspired by his pets Moey and Zoey, he often transforms everyday objects into cat hybrids. Treggiari is captivated by a rotating array of subjects, often derived from movies, television and video games. Not content with the existing roster of characters, he introduces scores of his own characters into these fantasy universes. Creativity could be Treggiari’s middle name. He is never at a loss for ideas and finds fulfillment by using art as a medium for communicating his ideas to the world. Treggiari works in many mediums, both 2 and 3 dimensional, including paint, clay and fibers. Treggiari is an exciting emerging artist, devoted to his work.

Treggiari’s work has been shown at the Gateway Gallery, the New Art Center in Newton, the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Drive- by Projects in Watertown, and at the Mall at Chestnut Hill in Chestnut Hill, MA.

Michela Zaccai joined Gateway Arts in 2019.

Fluent in English and Italian, Zaccai travels frequently. Her colorful, primarily two-dimensional work is inspired by her visits to Europe, her life in Boston, her love of animals, and her interest in movies and pop culture. While at Gateway, Zaccai explores painting with acrylic; drawing with markers, colored pencils and graphite; and jewelry making. Her work is characterized by bright colors, organic lines, and expressive feeling.

Zaccai’s work has been exhibited in the Gateway Gallery.