" Collective Body: Uncovered and Illuminated" will open in 2015 at the New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA. It will be on view from September 1 through November 13. This group exhibition features the work of Corpus VI, a contemporary collective of women artists, and presents diverse approaches to the figure across the disciplines of painting, drawing and sculpture. "A Collective Body: Uncovered and Illuminated" will be accompanied by a full color catalogue.

Corpus VI was formed in 2003, when six women figurative painters, who studied together at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, united to curate, exhibit and present our work to the public on our own terms, and launch our artistic careers. The name was chosen because it reflected our shared commitment to figurative representation. Clarity Haynes, Elena Peteva, and Suzanne Schireson were three of the founding members of the group, which organized an inaugural, self-titled show at Philadelphia's Highwire Gallery in the spring of 2005. The exhibition essay was written by Jeffrey Carr, Dean of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The exhibition was very well-attended and reviewed in several art publications.

The experience of working together to successfully realize this exhibition, as well as the continuous dialogue and exchange of ideas on contemporary figuration, has proven to be greatly valuable to us. Ten years after graduating from PAFA, as our careers have taken us to different locations across the United States, three of the original members, Clarity Haynes, Suzanne Schireson, and Elena Peteva, have come together to reinvent the collective by inviting one artist each to be part of this exhibition that will begin at the New Bedford Art Museum in fall 2015 and travel to other institutions.

Holly Trostle Brigham, Stacy Latt Savage and Laurie Kaplowitz are professional figurative artists, whose strong artistic visions enrich the collective's range and explorations of contemporary representation. We are excited at the prospect of seeing our work all together in new configurations, creating new dialogues. Holly Brigham creates imaginative, narrative watercolors, which tell a feminist story, inserting her artistic persona into art historical narratives and mythologies. Laurie Kaplowitz uses textured paint to create personages that hint at the soul within, alluding to rituals of marking, scarring and adorning the body as an integral part of our human identity and presentation. Stacy Latt Savage combines figurative elements with fabricated structures and shapes to create objects that capture what it looks like to feel human and the complexities of our human condition. Clarity Haynes casts new light on ideas of beauty, femininity and embodiment through her realistic painted portraits of the female torso. Elena Peteva creates allegorical representations of our individual and social states through the human figure and subtle, charged, incomplete signs that invite the viewer's attempt for interpretation. Suzanne Schireson is influenced by her great-grandfather's autobiography as an early plastic surgeon and her paintings examine contradictions surrounding the birth of cosmetic surgery, such as the power to heal and the fostering of insecurity.

Asked whether she thought a woman's work had feminine qualities, the early 20th-century muralist Violet Oakley said that "in art the sex distinction is lost . . . that the artist puts in his work what is essentially human", illuminating the idea that art transcends gender. To be a woman artist today is a completely different experience than it was 100 years ago. We have chosen to form a collective based not just on a common identity, but on common artistic interests -- working with, interpreting, representing and reconsidering one of most ancient, complex and challenging subjects in art -- the human figure. We value our connection to a lineage of women artists forming collectives in the past, some of whom, like the early 20th-century group "The Red Rose Girls", which included artist Violet Oakley, had ties to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and played a role in the history of American Art. These artists forged creative ways of flourishing, navigating careers, creating fellowship, and supporting one another's work, ideas and careers, just as we do today. We hope that the dialogue between the works in this exhibition will inspire and provoke, illuminating contemporary and eternal questions concerning all that is, essentially, human.