A woman in a red and white striped shirt sits mostly in shadow, her eyes mostly closed against bright light across her face

Shellburne Thurber:
Full Circle

October 24, 2025 – March 21, 2026

For much of her career, Shellburne Thurber has been engaged in an ongoing photographic investigation of the relationship between constructed space and human energy. Long intrigued by the idea of lived space as an extension of the body and a site for projection, she has photographed a wide variety of subjects. Early on, she turned her camera to family and friends and their homes, and she has since created projects around images of generic back road motels, churches, abandoned and derelict homes and hospitals, and historic sites. She is especially interested in spaces that straddle the line between public and private. 

The images in Full Circle represent the range of Thurber’s focus on interior work that is private, domestic, psychological, or insular. She has been engaged with these aspects of space and site over the course of her career–beginning with early photographs in the 1970s of her grandmother’s home in southern Indiana to one of her more recent bodies of work photographing psychoanalytic offices, which was published into a book in 2023 by Kehrer Verlag. Thurber considers her interior work an extension of the portraits of those close to her that she began making early in her career and continues to pursue to the present day.

Conceived with Bates Museum of Art, Full Circle is a focused retrospective containing threads that are present throughout many of Thurber’s projects spanning from the 1970s to today. This exhibition centers the artist’s eye in crafting images of resonating interiors imbued with individuals’ past lives through details like light shining through windows and doors, mirrors and electrical features, chairs, beds, bookshelves, and decor. Each photograph invites us into a discarded monument for everyday lives carried out in the passage of time at these exact sites: secrets, emotions, and interactions by anonymous people or known intimately to the artist. In returning to these themes at various times through the artist’s life, Thurber comes full circle to her material, representing also a fullness of both her own circle of relationships and connections as well as others that remain unknown often behind closed doors. This exhibition–a collaboration between artist Shellburne Thurber and Bates curator Samantha Sigmon–presents unique selections of works for Bates College.

Thurber graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. She has shown widely both in the United States and abroad and her work is in several collections, including the Massachusetts-based Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, the Worcester Art Museum, the ICA Boston, and the Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln. She has taught extensively throughout New England, most recently as visiting professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has also undertaken commissioned projects such as the renovation of the Boston Athenæum and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. Thurber has been the recipient of several awards including a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an Anonymous Was a Woman grant. Her work is represented by Krakow/Witkin Gallery in Boston.

Cover Image: Shellburne Thurber, Self Portrait on Squam Porch, archival pigment print, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist

Photograph by Shellburne Thurber of a bedroom interior
Matt’s Bedroom at Night, from Phantom Limb, 2018, archival pigment print, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist.
Art photograph of an ornately decorated house's interior, shot from the library, looking into a sitting room
9 Wellington Street: First Floor Library with Orange Chair and View of the Livingroom, from 9 Wellington, 2004-2009, archival pigment print, 40 x 40 inches, courtesy of the artist
Shellburne Thurber, Beechwood: Blue Bedroom with Graffiti and Damaged Wall, 1998, chromogenic print, Museum purchase with the Robert A. and Minna F. Johnson Art Acquisition Fund, 1999.27.1
Beechwood: Blue Bedroom with Graffiti and Damaged Wall, from Abandoned, 1998, chromogenic print, 40 x 50 inches, museum purchase with the Robert A. and Minna F. Johnson Art Acquisition Fund, 1999.27.1
Shellburne Thurber photograph of a blue couch by a window, under multiple portraits of Sigmund Freud
Newtonville, MA: Blue Couch with Multiple Portrait of Freud, from Analytic, 2000, archival pigment print, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist
Art photograph of a therapists office with a plush chair for clients
Belmont, MA: Attic Office with Red Patient’s Chair and Ship’s Clock, from Analytic, 2000, archival pigment print, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist.
Black and white photograph of two tufted chairs flanking the portrait of an elderly woman
My Grandmother’s Portrait with Matching Chairs and Footstools, 1974/1975, archival pigment print, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist.
A boy crouches in the limbs of a low tree, facing away from the photographer, wearing a homemade spiderman costume
Matt Sitting in the Tree in his Spiderman Suit, 1977, inkjet print, 20 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist
An elderly woman with white hair, dressed in a green floral dress, sits in a needlepoint-cushioned wooden chair in a living room
Aunt Anna in her Library, archival pigment print, 1975, 20 x 20 in., courtesy of the artist
Dimly lit interior scene of a kitchen sink in front of a dingy window, paint peeling on the counter and window wood
Dozier Kitchen Sink with Dixie Cup Dispenser, from Abandoned,  1998,  chromogenic print, courtesy of the artist.