What We Learn to Believe
Solo Exhibition
Hammond Gallery, Fitchburg State University, Fitchburg, MA
October 26 – December 20, 2026
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Thursday, October 29, 3:30 – 5 pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, December 5, time: 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.
Deconstructing Disability: Perspectives + Identities
Curator & Juror
Raizes Gallery, Lesley University, Cambridge, MA
October 12 – November 15, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 15, 12 – 2 pm
Programming includes a gallery talk with participating artists, poetry performed by Michelé Crowder (Adult Learner, Expressive Arts Therapy), and dance performances with integrated audio description and ASL interpretation, choreographed by Jewels Roberts (undergraduate, Psychology + Expressive Arts Therapy) and Alex Dolph (graduate, Clinical Mental Health Counseling/Dance/Movement Therapy).
Closing Event: Thursday, November 12, 7 – 8:30 pm, Zoom Webinar:
Outta Sight, Never Outta Vision: Poetry, Creative Practice + Lived Experience
Jeanetta “Outta Sight” Price in Conversation with Bill Porter
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.
Exhibition accessibility developed in partnership with: Perkins Library and NaviLens.
2026
Altered States: Transformation in Art, Mosesian Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA.
2025
Failed Seriousness. Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA
Why We Make, RSM Gallery, Bentley University, Waltham, MA
2024
Deconstructing Disability. Raizes Gallery, Lesley Art + Design, Cambridge, MA (juror & co-curator)
2023
Remedy: How We Heal, Narrows Center for the Arts, Fall River, MA
Lesley MFA 20th Anniversary Alumni Exhibition, Vandernoot Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2022
National Prize Show, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA
Reflective Narratives (solo), All She Wrote Books, Sommerville, MA
2021
LA+D Faculty Exhibition, Lesley Art + Design, Cambridge, MA
Eye of the Beholder, Foundation Fighting Blindness, Online
August Salon, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
July Salon, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Content/Context, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
2020
Taking Inventory, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Art Ability, Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital, Malvern, PA
1st Prize Mixed Media, The James Panasci Family Memorial Award
WINTERMISION II, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
2019
Coastal Skye, Skye Gallery, Providence, RI & Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Diversified Portfolio, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Brave and Bold, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Unleashing, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
2018
Impart: Works by Bill Porter, Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, MA
W-Intermission, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Art for the View:An Exhibition Celebrating Artists with Physical Disabilities, Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital, Schenectady, NY. Awarded: “Best in Show.”
Home, Artist Corner Gallery, Acton, MA
Hard Edge Painting, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL
Heat On Thames: A Summer Soiree, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
New England Collective IX, Galatea Fine Art, Boston, MA
A Stable System: Rotational Remix, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Collective Extravaganza: A Grand Event, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
On Board: Joining Forces, Coastal Contemporary Gallery, Newport, RI
Dialogues: Medium and Materiality, New Arts Center, Newton, MA
2017
Postcard to Maud…Please Forward, Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Myths and Valor, The Front Space, Rollinsford, NH
Up/Rooted, Brookline Arts Center, Brookline, MA
Half-Truth, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
2016
A Group Thing, Thomas Young Gallery, Boston, MA
New England Collective VII, Galatea Fine Art, Boston, MA
Magnitude Seven, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
15th Annual National Prize Show, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA
Repurposed, Core New Art Space, Denver, CO
Directions, Roberts Gallery, Lesley University College of Art and Design, Cambridge, MA
2015
New New England, Galley 263, Cambridge, MA
Folktales & Legends, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI
Re:Classified: LUCAD/AIB MFA Alumni Biennial, Warehouse XI, Somerville, MA
Small Works Salon 2015: Word + Image, Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, MA
This into That: Found Object Art, Assemblage, and Other Transformed Work, Nave Gallery Annex, Somerville, MA
MFA in Visual Arts Graduate Exhibition, Washburn Hall, Lesley University, Cambridge, MA
2014
‘Auto-biography’: Artists (Re)Writing and Telling Histories, WoCA Projects, Fort Worth, TX
Emerge Boston, Menino Arts Center, Hyde Park, MA