Bill Porter

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Painting of a coat rack with a hat and a trench coat. Smoke is billowing from an exposed peg.

What We Learn to Believe
Solo Exhibition
Hammond Gallery, Fitchburg State University, Fitchburg, MA
October 26 – December 20, 2026
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: October 29, 3:30 – 5 pm
Closing Reception: TBD

What We Learn to Believe examines how stories, assumptions, and cultural narratives influence our understanding of the world. Through painting, installation, sound, and mixed media, Bill Porter explores how inherited ideas become embedded within that understanding.

The exhibition draws from narratives and imagery rooted in Porter’s childhood, bringing his Irish immigrant father’s stories of Christianity and life in rural Donegal into conversation with the cartoons, comics, and picture books of his American upbringing. These sources recur throughout the work as both subject matter and material.
As a Blind artist with low vision, Porter extends this inquiry to the cultural construction of blindness and disability, considering how cultural narratives shape lived experience.

What We Learn to Believe asks us to consider the stories we inherit, the assumptions they carry, and what we ultimately come to accept as true.

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Deconstructing Disability: Perspectives + Identities

October 12 – November 15, 2026. Raizes Gallery, Lunder Arts Center
Opening Reception: October 15, 12 - 2 pm

Deconstructing Disability: Perspectives + Identities brings together work by Lesley University students, staff, and faculty who identify as disabled. Encompassing a range of media, subjects, and creative approaches, the exhibition offers varied perspectives while encouraging a broader and more nuanced understanding of disability. The works on view may engage disability directly or reflect other dimensions of their makers’ personal, cultural, emotional, and creative lives.

Rather than presenting disability as a fixed or singular condition, Deconstructing Disability recognizes it as a broad spectrum of lived experiences, identities, and ways of moving through and understanding the world. The exhibition affirms the presence and contributions of disabled artists throughout the Lesley community while creating space for visibility, reflection, and dialogue. Participating artists were selected by guest jurors Camilla Jerome and Bill Porter, interdisciplinary artists and educators whose practices are informed by their own experiences of disability.

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Outta Sight, Never Outta Vision: Poetry, Creative Practice + Lived Experience
Jeanetta “Outta Sight” Price in Conversation with Bill Porter
Thursday, November 12, 7 - 8:30 pm ET, Zoom Webinar

Join Jeanetta “Outta Sight” Price, the Storytelling Queen, for an evening of poetry and conversation exploring the intersections of creative practice and lived experience. Price is a poet, transformational storytelling coach, bestselling author of The Write 2 Heal: It’s Not About the Sight Loss, But the Vision Gain, licensed professional counselor, disability advocate, and creator and producer of The Vision Monologues™. Interspersing performances of her poetry with a conversation with artist and educator Bill Porter, Price will reflect on blindness, grief, faith, independence, education, employment, and the role creativity has played throughout her life and work.

The conversation will explore writing as a means of healing and self-expression, as well as the relationship among Price’s creative practice, her work as a therapist, and her advocacy within the blind and low vision community. Price will also discuss The Vision Monologues™, her theatrical project featuring stories performed by a predominantly Blind and low vision cast, and explore the potential of storytelling to challenge assumptions, build community, and advocate for change.

Open to the public - Zoom registration page forthcoming

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Student-Led Peer Review:
A Practical Guide to Implementation Across Disciplines and Modalities

Based on the authors’ extensive experience and research, this book provides a practical introduction to the key principles, steps, and strategies to implement student peer review – sometimes referred to as “peer critique” or “workshopping”. It addresses common challenges that faculty and students encounter. The authors offer an easy-to-follow and rigorously tested three-part protocol to use before, during, and after a peer review session, and advice on adapting each step to individual courses.

"This book offers a research-based, practitioner-focused approach to using peer review in the classroom. The authors do a masterful job of anticipating the challenges of student peer review and describing the considerable benefits that accrue when students are asked to take responsibility, think critically and gain agency. The book is an excellent resource for teachers, as it provides strong rationale for encouraging peer review and compelling ideas for designing instruction and environments that foster student growth in this vital area. Highly recommended!"

- Peter Afflerbach, University of Maryland