In Conversation: Kelsey Shultis and Victoria Papa
Nov. 13, 2025, 5:30 p.m.
MOSAIC EventSpace
49 Main St. North Adams, MA
Artist Kelsey Shultis speaks with curator of Ecologies of the In\between, Dr. Victoria Papa. They will discuss Shultis’ work in the exhibition, a series of human-scale paintings and a salon wall. The conversation will peel back the multiple layers of meaning in the work, speaking to how Shultis aesthetically and thematically inhabits the in/between in her paintings. Topics span Shultis’ conception of the paintings as “glamour shots” of figures ranging from her childhood self to the Virgin Mary, femininity as a liminal space between chaos and containment, and the multiple portals and paths to the divine represented in the work.
Kelsey Shults (b.1988) is a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts specializing in sculptural paintings. Shultis received her BFA from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the 2025 Young Masters Invitational Exhibition at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Shultis creates deeply personal representations of her inner landscape through a practice of tapping into her intuition and the unconscious. Decentering logic, rationality, and conscious thought, Shultis channels her work through a process in which she “asks the image to reveal itself rather than impose meaning or thought onto it.” Through landscapes populated with a visual vocabulary of abandoned houses, goddesses, moss, goats, rainbows, forests, demons, mermaids, rabbits, witchcraft, and children, Shultis’ work alternates between abstraction and revelation, wonder and horror, creating an aesthetic that she refers to as “haunted innocence.”
Victoria Papa is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Animated by feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist methods, her work examines the intersection of embodiment and aesthetics in modern and contemporary literature and visual culture.
