August 26 - September 26, 2025
Awards Reception September 13, 3 - 5 PM
Fivesparks
7 Fairbank Street, Harvard MA
Welcome to our 2025 Marks of Distinction National Juried Show! CMPS is delighted to bring you our annual exhibition of artworks in soft pastel from artists working throughout the United States and Canada. Congratulations to the accepted artists and award winners for your outstanding work, and thank you to our Jurors of Selection, Robin Frisella and Charles Peer, and our Judge of Awards, Joachim Homann, PhD, of the Harvard University Art Museums!
Meet our Selection Jurors
![]() | Robin Frisella Robin Frisella, Pastel Society of America Master Pastelist, IAPS-Master Circle artist, and Juried Member of the Guild of Boston Artists, is an award-winning still life painter in the style of traditional realism. She owns Frisella Fine Art Gallery in Candia, NH, and shows her work throughout the country in juried national exhibitions and fine art festivals. |
Charles Peer Charles Peer is an award-winning landscape painter from Arkansas whose work reflects his love of color. He owns a gallery in his home town and teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at John Brown University, where he is also the Fine Arts Gallery Director. Charles is a Signature Member of Pastel Society of America and Ozark Pastel Society. |
Meet our Judge of Awards
Photo by Dennis and Diana Griggs, Tannery Hill Studio | Joachim Homann, PhD Joachim Homann oversees the collection of European and American drawings and watercolors. Homann studied in Göttingen, Munich, Karlsruhe, and Heidelberg and received a doctoral fellowship at the University of Hamburg. His dissertation was focused on Habsburgian and Napoleonic art, politics, and the public sphere in the city of Milan between 1770 and 1814. A curatorial fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums prepared him for positions at the University of Texas, El Paso; Colgate University; and most recently Bowdoin College. As head of the curatorial team at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, he organized numerous exhibitions on European and American art with a special emphasis on works on paper. At the Harvard Art Museums, he recently co-curated American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light, an exhibition drawn from the museums’ collections, with exceptional works by artists from Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent to Richard Tuttle and Hannah Wilke. He is currently working on Ten Trails, an exhibition of drawings and watercolors of the outdoors in 19th-century Europe. He is developing a class, The Object in the Museum, to be taught in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. |
To purchase any painting in the gallery, visit our online store. Purchased paintings must remain on exhibition through the end of the show. Please contact president@cmpastels.org with questions.