An Inside Look at the “Full Circle” Exhibition

Natalie Bell, Chief Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center

Natalie Bell is Chief Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, where she has organized recent solo exhibitions of Every Ocean Hughes, American Artist, Steina, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Raymond Boisjoly, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Leslie Thornton, Sung Tieu, and Sreshta Rit Premnath, among others, and co-curated the group exhibition Symboints: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere. From 2013-19, she worked at the New Museum, New York, where she curated and co-curated over a dozen solo exhibitions and several major group exhibitions.

Richard Fleischner, Artist

“Richard Fleischner’s experience of built form was established in the densely populated, highly determined environment of the Bronx, New York, where he spent his childhood. It was a place in which the unyielding planes of handball or basketball courts defined open, public space, where enclosures circumscribed by chain-link fences and brick walls became the stage for his imagination and first encounters with his own perspective on the world.”

“Through the body’s proportions, he has mediated countless disparate contexts ranging in size from a football field to the palm of his hand, in scope from the public to the deeply personal, and in substance from his early land installations to freestanding sculptures, reliefs, photographs, and gouaches.”

"Negotiating the world from his [...] perspective led to what he has identified as his sustained, greatest singular concern as an artist, 'the definition of boundary of inside/outside,' an inquiry that embraces sculpture and architecture and works to establish a place for the artist and the viewer to occupy." [1]

[1] Quotes from Jennifer R. Gross, “A Recalibrated Approach,” in Richard Fleischner. Witness Mark, February 12-April 16, 2020, catalogue for an exhibition at the Helwaser Gallery, New York, 2020, p.8-10

Dr. Catherine Moran, Co-Curator of the "Full Circle" exhibition and Manager of Academic Partnerships and Research Fellows Program for The Preservation Society of Newport County

Dr. Catherine Moran, PhD, is an art and cultural historian whose research explores the intersection between material culture, architecture and identity as an expression of the human experience. Dr. Moran has more than 10 years of experience as a lecturer of art and design history at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and is the former Gallery Director for Bernard and S. Dean Levy, New York. She is engaged with local cultural, historic preservation and arts-based non-profit organizations and has lectured at several local universities, professional conferences and cultural institutions.

Her master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation focused on American architect Richard Morris Hunt, and she was excited to work in support of the Preservation Society's 2025 exhibition dedicated to his work.

Uri Aran, Artist

Uri Aran's (American, b. 1977, Jerusalem) practice encompasses a wide range of media and subject matter, including film, sculpture, drawing, painting and assemblage. Throughout his practice, Aran constructs a language of indeterminate signifiers in an ongoing pursuit of graphic and linguistic systems, and the pushing of these systems to the point of disintegration. "The discord of meaning in language is something I’m interested in," he has explained. "I don’t know if it’s because English is not my mother tongue; I see a delay of meaning. I see things as mediated — almost everything is quoted."

His work has been exhibited extensively, with recent solo exhibitions in London, New York, Dublin, Tokyo, Cologne, Milan and Zurich, among others. Aran additionally has participated in the Whitney Biennial (2014), Liverpool Biennial (2014), Venice Biennale (2013), and numerous group exhibitions. In 2026, Aran's work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Madre Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Italy.

Uri Aran received an MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2007, and additionally studied at Cooper Union, New York and completed a Bachelor of Design at Bezalel Academy Jerusalem, Jerusalem in 2004. His work is held in the permanent collections of American University, Washington, DC; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Fundació Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; KADIST, Paris, France and San Francisco, CA; and RISD Museum, Providence, RI; The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.