Launch: Saturday 14th February 2026 at 1pm

Dates: 14th February – 18th April 2026

Gallery: Lower & Upper Gallery

Artworks by alumni, staff, and faculty from the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Art & Art History Department, co-organized by the University Hall Gallery. Curated by Sam Toabe and Sarah McAvera

Insight into the Other is an exhibition exchange between Belfast and Boston that looks at how place affects how we see art and each other. The exhibition invites people to think about difference, understanding, and shared experience through prints, collage, animations, drawings, sculptures and videos.  Curated by Sam Toabe and Sarah McAvera, it asks if artworks can change meaning when shown in different countries and cultures. The works by artists connected to the University of Massachusetts Boston explore themes such as identity, work, migration, time, and loss. The exhibition encourages open thinking, empathy, and conversation across borders.

Artists include:

Jon Bakos, Tynan Byrne, Brian Christopher Glaser, Charlie Crowell, Margaret Hart, Zach Horn, Kakyoung Lee, Erik Levine, Erika Lopez Torres, Joetta Maue, Catherine Mazza, Nancy McCormack, Christopher Schade, and Wenhua Shi

About the exhibition:

Insight into the Other is an exhibition exchange between Belfast and Boston, set up to explore the impact of viewing the world through others’ eyes. We live in a tumultuous world with complicated pasts and presents foreshadowing complicated futures. The context of our lives, both what is happening to us personally and what is happening in the world in a wider sense, can change how we look at things. Curators Sam Toabe and Sarah McAvera created these two exchange exhibitions to investigate the extent to which the place that an artwork is viewed in changes how we see it. Do American viewers in Boston have a different understanding of Northern Irish work than Northern Irish audiences? And do Northern Irish audiences respond differently to works made in Boston than how American audiences saw them?

Do we find insight into ourselves in the artworks that we experience? Do we use them as a prompt to confirm our own values? Or do we use them as proof of “otherness”? Has the meaning of “the other” changed in the current political and social climate? Do we use the concept of “the other” as a means of maintaining the status quo?

The selection of artworks for Insight into the Other at the Golden Thread Gallery focuses on those whose meanings change according to the time and space they are shown in. All blur boundaries around what they are and what they appear to be, or could be, based on its relationship to the experience of the viewer and vice versa.

The selection of artworks is drawn from alumni, faculty, and staff of the Art & Art History Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston as part of an international exhibition exchange with the Golden Thread Gallery. In a moment when domestic and international politics in the US are fraught with tension, where truth and varied realities are in constant question due to artificial intelligence and misinformation, we hope this exhibition will help share some of the personal narratives and perspectives of the artists that have studied at and work within our public university, which is celebrated for being accessible, diverse, and progressive. Themes within the exhibition include labour rights, immigration, verisimilitude, authenticity, time, and grief.

This exhibition exchange includes Insight into the Other at the University Hall Gallery curated by Golden Thread Gallery’s Co-Director Sarah McAvera in collaboration with Gallery Director, Sam Toabe. This exhibition, currently on view in the US until February 21st, 2026, focuses on a selection of artworks from the Golden Thread Gallery’s collection. This program is helping to teach students in Boston about The Troubles, the history of the Golden Thread Gallery, and the art and culture of Belfast.

Image: Wenhua Shi. Still from Mother, 2025, 16mm to HD

Accessibility 

The Upper Gallery is accessed via lift from the ground floor or via the main staircase.

Large print versions of exhibition texts are available.

Access videos of the gallery are available on our website here, with BSL and ISL signed versions.

Please let us know if you have any questions or additional requirements, we are working hard to make the gallery as accessible as possible for everyone.

Golden Thread Gallery is proud to hold an Arts & Disability Access Award 2025 Venue Accreditation. 

Golden Thread Gallery is supported by: