5 Great Artists from the Boston Arts Festival

Emily Garfield
Emily Garfield started creating geographic mappings of urban landscapes for a senior show at Brown University, where she received her B.A. in 2009. Her highly structured maps depict aerial views of cityscapes and landscapes. “I start with an ink wash and move the page to roll the ink around and see where it will settle and build a civilization,” Garfield said. “I try to imagine places I've never been before.”

Monkey Chow
Aaron Kovalcsik conceived his Monkey Chow characters in his sketchbook in the years following his graduation from Kendall College of Art and Design. The idea blossomed into colorful, illustrative prints of humorous interactions between personified fruits and dated objects, like a cassette tape. Kovalcsik’s prints are also available at Magpie in Somerville.

Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda
“What others consider junk, I consider relics,” said Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda, a poetic soul and collagist working with recycled material. Viejo's Letter series is a narrative in cut pieces of paper that speaks to her desire to reach out to those to whom she would like to write – a “letter to a poet,” a “letter to my sisters,” and a “letter to the ones we lost” – translated into artwork through colorful paper layering. A huge Celtics fan, Viejo has another series of miniature paintings of Celtics players.

Monkey Sox Productions
Thomas Durand, photographer and curator of JP Licks’ artwork, discovered the possibilities of sock monkeys 25 years ago -- before they were cool – photographing the dolls in dramatized settings that convey heart-wrenching scenes of loss, whimsy, and isolation. “These handmade, Depression-era dolls were the perfect figures to express the seemingly never-ending, raw emotions I was experiencing at the time," Durand says on his website.

Maggie Carberry
With a background in printmaking, Maggie Carberry adopted a mixed-media format to bring her gum transfer prints, which start simply with a photograph, to life. In her Daydream Dwellings series, Carberry imagines the architecture around her in a repetitive and layered format.

Did you attend this weekend's festival? Who were some of your favorite artists?

Photos by Tamar Zmora: Diablo Glass School gives a glassblowing demonstration (top). Emily Garfield smiles by one of her maps (middle). Monkey Sox Productions' display (bottom).

By Tamar Zmora -- I'm a recent Wellesley College grad with a degree in English and studio art. I grew up in the Midwest and briefly lived in Europe and the Middle East. My name is often mistaken for Tamara from "Sister, Sister." I love exploring coffee shops and am almost always highly caffeinated. I am very interested in films, the arts, theatre, painting, photography -- you name it -- '90s TV shows, and music.

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