Morgan Pietrorazio Artist Talk (Friday, December 4th | 5:00PM to 6:00PM)

Friday, December 4 | 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Location: Washington Art Association General Studio

Join emerging artist Morgan Pietrorazio as she discusses becoming a full-time artist within a year of her graduation, starting an organization for emerging artists, and her experience with a growing social media following. 

Bio:

Morgan Pietrorazio (b. 2003) is an expressionist painter from Middlebury, CT, currently based in New England. She received her BFA in Painting from MassArt in 2025, graduating with departmental honors while serving as President of the Student Government Association. Since graduating, Pietrorazio has exhibited throughout New England, with recent exhibitions including the Cambridge Art Association’s Emerging Artists Exhibit, multiple juried exhibitions at the Wickford Art Association, Connecticut Women Artists’ 2026 National Open Juried Show, and her solo exhibition, Behind Her Lenses. Her work has received Third in Show at the Wickford Art Association’s Floralism exhibition, the Phil Young Painting Prize from the Cambridge Art Association, and the Kofi Kayiga Auction Award from MassArt. In addition to her studio practice, Pietrorazio is a co-founder of the Northeast Emerging Artists Association, an organization dedicated to fostering opportunities, community, and professional development for emerging artists across the region. Pietrorazio has developed a public-facing digital presence for her work, using Instagram and Facebook to share her process, exhibitions, and releases with an audience of more than 75,000 followers across both platforms.

Pietrorazio’s work explores personal identity through the found, thrifted, and gifted objects that she collects. She gives new purpose to inanimate objects that otherwise may have ended up in a landfill. By approaching them as emotionally resonant forms, she allows them to carry a presence of their own, her natural connection to them strengthening as she includes them in her work. The congestion of her compositions reflect the layers of her thoughts, creating a visual way of experiencing how her mind jumps from idea to idea. These paintings become a form of self-reflection, often leading directly into her next work, and ultimately joining her collection transformed, becoming tangible, emotionally resonant objects themselves.

Artist Statement:

My work explores my sense of self through the found, thrifted, and gifted objects I collect. I’ve always been drawn to inanimate objects that I’ve felt an almost instinctive sense of life from, objects that seem to hold their own presence. This sense of a kind of soul has followed me throughout my life, and painting these objects has allowed me to share that feeling and understand it in a new way, repurposing things that may have gone to landfill otherwise. Through my work, these objects have taken on a life of their own, my natural connection to them strengthening over time.

A painting often begins with a personal theme or a particular object I feel called to paint without yet knowing why; its role becoming clearer as the piece develops. I often find the composition naturally reflects my train of thought, mirroring my personal state in a way beyond just the study of the inanimate. The maximalist nature of my compositions reflects the overcrowdedness of my thoughts, creating a visual way of experiencing how my mind jumps between ideas. The paint itself articulates this in ways that words cannot, the process becoming a form of self reflection. Ultimately these paintings join my collection transformed, becoming tangible emotionally resonant objects themselves.