Chester Art Centre's 2025 inaugural People's Portrait Prize was recognized across the province as a showcase celebrating the diversity and creativity of the human spirit. Last year we received 100 submissions from 53 Lunenburg County artists and had 40-60 visitors come to view the exhibition each day.
Winners will be chosen for the following categories: Digital Art & Mixed Media, Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Textile, Photography, and the People's Choice Award.
The Exhibition runs January 14th, 2026 to February 7th, 2026. Closing Reception and Award Gala is on Saturday, February 7th at 6pm.
The Spoken Landscape An Exhibition by Lorna Mulligan
February 12th - 22nd
Opening Reception Thursday, Feb 12th 5-7pm
This exhibition features work that talks about landscape with black ink, words, gestural mark making, and flowing colours. The lyrical imagery wavers between the suggestion of a real place and the constant reminder of the actual painted surface.
Working at the intersection of materiality and memory, my paintings are often about unpredictable edges, incorporating the immediacy of watercolour, hand-ground pigments, and black ink. I’m motivated by observation, visual responses, and the contemplative joy of walking through the coastal landscape.
Hooking Goes Pop An Exhibition by Terri Whetstone & Rose Wilson
February 26th - March 15th
Opening Reception Thursday, Feb 26th 5-7pm
This exhibition brings together two visual artists working with rug hooking, exploring contemporary approaches through technique, materials, and personal narrative as subject matter.
Rug hooking, and fibre arts in general, has seen a surge in popularity in recent years, driven by people’s search for activities during the Covid pandemic and also by the development of new tools and novel materials. This exhibition highlights the emergence of new themes and ideas being expressed through rug hooking that go beyond the traditional motifs so often seen in our community. It seeks to encourage individual exploration of the medium as a form of self-expression and narrative (pictorial) story-telling.
The exhibition comprises both graphic and text-based work, which compliment each other in their wry humour while riffing on mass culture. The work can be considered contemporary Pop Art in both its content and its visual impact; and thoroughly Post-Modern in its tongue-in-cheek, confrontational self-awareness of style. Rose’s work is reminiscent of both tattoo art and comic book illustration, while Terri’s text-based work with stylized consideration for the “right” font to match the word plays with expectations of appropriate language and the written word.
