BIO

American painter Emily Langer's artistic journey has taken her from the city streets of Boston where she studied at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, to the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts where she completed her BFA in Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College. Langer is the recipient of a Justine Carrington F. Coe Fellowship and a 2026 Ruth E. Warfel Art Prize. She currently works out of an 1800's farmhouse in rural Central Massachusetts where she lives with her husband and three children.

ARTIST STATEMENT

When I paint, my canvas becomes a time machine. By using my brush to tap into the intimate spaces of memory and home, I am able to step back into a place that now only exists in the mind. With layers of oil paint in soft color tones of earth and jewel, I convey a nostalgia for a place that we want to return to, or even a longing for somewhere we have never been. Through my brushwork, I explore these dynamic, and often elastic spaces, which are in intimate conversation with the concepts of motherhood, home and time. Thick and textural paint assert the dignity of these reflections, while delicate glazes reveal their fragility. By navigating these themes through paint, I seek to slow down and hold otherwise fleeting moments: expressions of care, places of respite, comforting routines.

I find beauty in the tension between the constant, forward-march of time, necessary and nurturing rhythms of work and how they converse with the areas of domestic life where we can find rest. Although my artistic expression is deeply personal, it taps into a room of longing in the heart which we all possess: the space of home as both a quiet place of shelter and an ever-evolving archive of family and self. My artwork uses emotionally intimate portraiture and nostalgic vignettes of familiar places to stretch the concept of home beyond the boundaries of its physical walls. In my paintings, nothing is considered too insignificant to be catalogued as an heirloom of the mind, from a beloved paperback read over-and-over again, to a familiar beach towel, tossed in a summer wind.