Behind VA Shadows, in partnership with the Harvard Square Business Association and Intercontinental Management, is pleased to welcome The Curated Fridge Winter 2026 Show, the latest installation at the 25/8 artspace located at 2 Linden Street in Harvard Square.
Behind VA Shadows presents this group show which is on view through March 29th. Created by Yorgos Efthymiadis in 2015, The Curated Fridge is an exhibition project that celebrates fine art photography and fosters connections within the community by exhibiting photograph works on the fridge at Efthymiadis’s house. Its Winter 2026 Show is curated by Disparate Projects, an artist collective founded by Lisa Beard, Micah McCoy, and Vann Thomas Powell dedicated to the photographic curation. The Curated Fridge Winter 2026 Show travels to the gallery space of Behind VA Shadows, showcasing the works of artists Andrew Bailey, Annemarie Deckers, Arthur Hunking, Aubree Lourdes Guilbault, Bell Beecher Pitkin, Brynne Quinlan, Cathy Cone, Chuck Davis, Dafna Steinberg, Dan Borden, Dany Vigil, Elizabeth Wiese, Erica McKeehen, Harry Knight, Jake Corcoran, Jane Waggoner Deschner, Jeff Smudde, Jessica Gianna, John English, Jose Carrasquillo, Josephine Bidoli, Kate Albright, Ken Rothman, Laura Noel, Lexi Howard, Lilan Yang, Lisa Tang Liu, Liz Potter, Matt Fortin, Maureen Bond, Mickey Lee, Skip Williams, Susan Isaacson, Vahid Valikhani, and Yi Cynthia Chen.
Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, commented, “We are so thankful to Intercontinental Management for continuing to foster the arts in the public way. This popup gallery exhibits beautiful and thought provoking artwork that is to be enjoyed ‘from the street’ in an unexpected location in Harvard Square.”
Courtesy by Behind VA Shadows
Disparate Projects’ curation started with an open call with the theme “instant permanence,” reflecting on the illusion of permanence in the digital age. Drawing on the paradoxical quality of photography, the curatorial collective turns the emphasis to its materiality, where “its creation is an act of rebellion against the fleeting and the digital.” Turning away from the immateriality of the digital, Disparate Projects centers the instant format which is prescribed with imperfection and the quotidian. Within this curation, Disparate Projects identifies the common threads of mystery emerging from it, where rough edges of accidental patterns are unconcealably visible, contrasting the precision and intentionality of photographers. Moving beyond the debris of chemicals, the cutoff frames from a roll of film, and the cracks of emulsion, the exhibited works create a strong narrative quality, asking viewers to think through the missing pieces and wonder about the full stories behind the captured moments. Within the gallery space, the instance of the fridge turns into a pair of mini fridges, where their black surfaces continue to serve as the background for the photographs, as well as extending onto the gallery wall.
Courtesy by Behind VA Shadows
The exhibition marks Behind VA Shadows’s continuing direction to collaborate and share space with other DIY art projects, following last year’s pop-up collaboration with Shelter In Place Gallery run by Eben Haines and Delaney Dameron. According to Yolanda He Yang, founder of Behind VA Shadows, “I’ve felt a strong need to connect DIY art projects and artist-run spaces with one another as a way of collectively responding to the long-standing, highly institutionalized art landscape in the Greater Boston area. Rather than existing in parallel, these spaces have so much potential when they are tied together.” Over the past decade, The Curated Fridge has been cultivating a vibrant community surrounding lens-based media and practicing photography curation, which for Efthymiadis is often a very tactile, loose, and fun process.
The “takeover” of Behind VA Shadows gallery by The Curated Fridge draws on many shared interests, such as imagining the alternative modes of sharing art. As suggested by Yang, “the collaboration made visible something that was already there: a shared ecosystem of care, labor, and artistic practice that just needed a place to converge.”