Isabelle Higgins, “Nocturnal”

At Anderson Yezerski Gallery’s current group exhibition, “State of Mind,” self-portraiture takes a quieter, more inward turn.

On view at the SoWa gallery, the exhibition brings together 11 works by six contemporary women artists: Isabelle Higgins, Barbara Ishikura, Colleen Kiely, Shantel Miller, Miranda Pikul and Rosie Ranauro whose self-portraits trace psychological and emotional states across time.

That interior focus anchors the exhibition. Each work offers a glimpse into a moment of reflection, whether shaped by grief, faith, anxiety or spiritual renewal. The result is a collective portrait of women artists engaging honestly with their own psyches.

Hyde Park native Isabelle Higgins contributes three colorful and bold mixed-media gouache paintings:

“Nocturnal,” “All Night” and “You Followed Me Up the Stairs.” Her work draws directly from her experiences as a Black woman with grief, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, themes she approaches with candor rather than distance.

“I have always been interested in doing self-portraits because I don’t feel comfortable telling anyone else’s story,” Higgins said.

“All Night” is her favorite painting of the three, she said. In this portrait she is at the center sitting crosslegged on her blue bed in her purple bedroom. With her hand to her heart her tilted head and eyes look at the viewer as she checks her pulse. The sky outside is an alarming gradient of red and orange.

The painting, like “Nocturnal,” documents the insomnia that often accompanies her anxiety and OCD.

The nocturnal settings evoke both restlessness and solitude, moments when the mind refuses to quiet itself.

“You Followed Me Up the Stairs” addresses a different emotional register.

The work reflects Higgins’ grief following the death of her father in 2018, a loss that continues to shape her artistic practice. The piece suggests the lingering presence of memory — how grief can feel close, persistent and personal.

A graduate of Boston Arts Academy and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Higgins credits the city’s accessible public arts education with helping to shape her career. Growing up and studying in Boston gave her the tools and space to develop a practice rooted in emotional honesty, she said.

Faith and spirituality take center stage in the work of Shantel Miller, a Jamaican-Canadian artist originally from Toronto. Miller has two oil paintings in the exhibition, “Ascent” and “Confrontation on the Mountaintop,” both of which explore states of grace within a Christian framework.

Both paintings depict the back side of a nude Black woman with blue hair in the mountains under a yellow and orange gradient sky. In “Ascent,” the figure tries scaling a mountain to reach God’s kingdom represented by a white castle.

In “Confrontation on the Mountaintop,” the woman is surrounded by a red fortress in the valley of the mountains confronting a black, winged demon.

The latter, her favorite, is inspired by Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain” created between 1308 and 1311. The panel reimagines a biblical moment as an internal reckoning, merging art history with personal reflection.

Miller, who is currently a student at Yale Divinity School, describes her practice as a “site for healing,” drawing on Christianity, liberation theology and womanist theology. Miller identifies as a nondenominational Christian and said her faith informs not only the content of her work, but the way it is made.

“This is a gift I’ve been given, and I want to be a steward of that gift and be as effective as I can with it,” Miller said of her artistic practice.

Miller lived in Dorchester from 2019 to 2022 while attending a master of fine arts program at Boston University. It was a period she described as both difficult and transformative.

Raised by ministers, she was living away from home for the first time and experiencing what it meant to be a Black woman in the United States.

Her daily commute from Dorchester to BU’s campus in Fenway-Kenmore made Boston’s segregation and disparities impossible to ignore. She said those contrasts were felt “viscerally” and contributed to mental health challenges during that time. Simultaneously, Miller was undergoing a spiritual renewal and was rebaptized.

After graduating, her relationship to the city shifted.

What once felt jarring became formative, shaping both her personal growth and her artistic voice. Notably, the works included in “State of Mind” came together quickly after years of false starts and dead ends — one in a matter of days, the other within a week — reflecting an urgency and clarity in her process.

Renee Anderson, curator and owner of Anderson Yezerski Gallery, said Miller’s work resonates for its depth and sincerity, particularly in how it approaches faith without didacticism. The paintings, she noted, invite viewers into moments of contemplation rather than instruction.

Collectively, “State of Mind” offers an opportunity to see self-portraiture used as quiet testimony. By centering the inner lives of women artists, the exhibition underscores the power of introspection and the courage it takes to make the personal visible.

“State of Mind” is on view at Anderson Yezerski Gallery in SoWa until March 28.

ON THE WEB

Learn more at andersonyezerskigallery.com