After Eden / My Berlin WallWork by Sandra Cavanagh & Mariana Cicerchia at A.P.E. Gallery
After Eden / My Berlin Wall
Work by Sandra Cavanagh & Mariana Cicerchia
Visual Art Exhibition
September 11 - October 4, 2026
Opening Reception: September 11, 5-8pm (Arts Night Out)
Venue: A.P.E. Gallery, 126 Main St, Northampton, MA 01060
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 5, Friday 1 - 8, closed Monday & Tuesday Contact: Mollye Maxner: mollyemaxner@apearts.org
For additional public programming related to this exhibit, visit apearts.org
A.P.E. is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring work by two artists:Sandra Cavanagh’s After Eden and Mariana Cicerchia’s My Berlin Wall. These two bodies of work, on view from September 11 - October 4, 2026, bring together Cavanagh’s narrative oil painting series and Cicerchia’s works made with charcoal, graphite, watercolor, ink, and acrylics layered over daily newspapers.
After Eden, by Sandra Cavanagh, sustains a figurative focus in reaction to current and historical narratives, considering mortality and loss of innocence in transgenerational stories, the usefulness of art’s centuries old regard of myth, foundational stereotypes and the mundane occurrence of violence.
Interested in the pairing of form and message, and formal variations on a theme, Cavanagh often works in series, creating pictorial storylines with some urgency to exhaust the subject and form to the point of understanding or unburdening myself of it. The result is an annotation of feelings and opinions underscoring a dramatic approach to composition. Cavanagh starts to work on a concept through sketches, seeking new figurative expression for whatever is the narrative in hand with a view to heighten the pictorial drama. The process may end in a series of graphite or ink drawings, lithographs or/and paintings. Usually an idea will develop into a series comprising various media. Maintaining a consistent practice, Cavanagh developed a large portfolio of work including paintings, drawings and prints. She takes intervals with the painting of still life and portraiture. In After Eden, the artist explores cycles of conflict, displacement, survival, and witness through a series of allegorical and vividly colored paintings. Drawing on themes that range from humanity’s earliest acts of violence to contemporary concerns of war, migration, and environmental instability, the works examine both collective vulnerability and resilience.
My Berlin Wall: A Silent Protest Song, created between 2025 and 2026 by Mariana Cicerchia, reflects on the recurring cycles of history and the forces that shape individual and collective experience. Through newspaper-based compositions, Cicerchia examines power, repression, displacement, and the persistent human desire for freedom.
The exhibition’s title evokes the Berlin Wall as both a historical marker and a broader symbol of the boundaries—visible and invisible—that divide people, communities, and nations. Conceived as a quiet act of resistance, My Berlin Wall functions as what the artist calls a “silent protest song,” an urgent but restrained response to the instability and absurdity of contemporary global politics.
“This work is about screaming out into the night without making a sound,” Cicerchia says. “It is a way of naming what is often left unnamed—fear, displacement, isolation, and the fragile hope that allows us to continue.”
By working directly on daily newspapers, Cicerchia anchors each piece in the immediacy of the present while connecting contemporary events to deeper patterns of memory, repression, resilience, and transformation.
About the Artists
Sandra Cavanagh was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her early life was pitched on a growing awareness of the prevailing political instability, an overbearing patriarchal society and the dangers of state sanctioned brutality and censorship. Cavanagh read Social Sciences at the University of Belgrano, emigrated to California and later to the UK. She is a Fine Art graduate from the Kent Institute of Art and Design, UK. Since 2010, she's worked and resided in New York City.
Cavanagh's work has been exhibited at various venues, including the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Pen & Brush, Gallery 14C, Westbeth Gallery and PS122 Gallery in New York; Schelfhaudt Gallery at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut; the Susquehanna Art Museum and the National Liberty Museum in Pennsylvania; Miami National Fine Arts in Florida; and Museo Limen in Italy. In 2025, she presented a solo exhibition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
She has participated in notable exhibitions such as Aqua Art Miami and the Every Woman Biennale at La Mama Galleria. Her art has received recognition, including the Waave New York Women's Art Month Award in 2025 and being a finalist for the Women United Art Prize in 2023. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2025 Jackson Art Prize Oil Award and Homiens Art Prize. Cavanagh's practice has been featured in several publications, including the covers of The Brooklyn Review, Create! Magazine and Feminist Space Journal, as well as interviews with Women in the Arts Network, Contemporary Art Collectors, and the Women United Art Prize. Additionally, her work has been highlighted in publications such as The Jersey Journal, Jackson's, White Hot Magazine, Contemporary Art Collectors and Canvas Rebel. www.SandraCavanagh.com IG: @sandra_cavanagh_artista
Mariana Cicerchia is a self-taught visual artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work is shaped by personal experience, including formative years marked by Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship and her history of immigration.
Her practice explores identity, belonging, isolation, displacement, and the tension between solitude and freedom. Through layered materials and meditative reflection, Cicerchia develops a visual language that links personal memory with broader social and political realities.
Cicerchia was awarded the 2026 Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals, as well as the 2026 The Martha Boschen Porter Fund for Artists, awarded by Berkshire Taconic Foundation. She is also a member of the 2026 AMP It Up cohort at the Northampton Center for the Arts. Cicerchia has exhibited her work throughout Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. Her first Solo exhibit was at the Barn Door Gallery at 33 Hawley.She was also a participant of the 2026 Every Woman Biennial at Pen & Brush Gallery in New York.
www.marianacicerchia.com IG: @mariana.cicerchia
Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd. (A.P.E.) is an artist-led, artist-centered 501(c)3 non-profit organization supporting contemporary artists working in all disciplines by stewarding the spaces in which they create, perform and exhibit their work. A.P.E is dedicated to fostering relationships, encounters, and exchanges that nourish the capacity for imagination.
apearts.org || 413.586.5553
A.P.E.’s work is made possible in part through ongoing support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts’ Valley Creates program.
