Eliot and I met Laura Shabott at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown two years ago. The minute we walked in to the international art establishment, Laura, an educator, lecturer, artist and ambassador at FAWC, became a good friend and networker for us. She kept us informed about all of the amazing art activities PTown had to offer. We were busy all summer long.
We also have to thank Debbie Bowles and Derik Burgess for introducing us to Laura.
The Provincetown Independent just featured Laura’s exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. DigiDame is thrilled to present it to you.
The event: An exhibition of work by Laura Shabott
The time: Through Jan. 25, 2026
The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis
The cost: $15 general admission
Laura Shabott’s Body Language
When Laura Shabott describes her life as an artist, she talks about four interrelated pursuits: making, teaching, building community, and engaging with art history. “I’m not a solo artist,” she says. “I like to work with others.”
The works on view in her exhibition titled “You Only Get One Body” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, are not collaborations per se. But they derive their energy from her interactions: attending figure drawing sessions, teaching workshops, and studying art history.
The exhibition is punctuated by large figurative works existing somewhere between painting, drawing, and collage. She made them on raw, unstretched canvas after teaching a workshop on Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract expressionist known for her stained paintings on unprimed canvas. In the class, she asked students to work in the mode of Frankenthaler. “I wouldn’t ask my students to do anything I hadn’t done,” says Shabott. Her own explorations stain cascading lengths of canvas.
This is just one of many examples in the exhibition where Shabott’s art practice directly intersects with her present-day teaching and her interest in artists past.
David Perry, the exhibition’s curator, hung line drawings on Mylar among the larger works. They were made in the spirit of the assignments Shabott gave her students encouraging them to abstract the figure and experiment with composition. In the rear of the exhibition space there’s a room devoted to collages made from ripped-up figure drawings inspired by a similar project Lee Krasner made with her own drawings.
Shabott has taught a series of classes — the titles beginning with the phrase “Through the eyes of” — in which participants make art inspired by the principles and working methodologies of artists associated with Provincetown, including Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Lester Johnson.
Shabott taught her first class in 2017 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and has since continued to teach at PAAM as well as the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Work Center. During the pandemic, she began teaching online and founded the art collective Prompt with Alana Barrett, an artist living in Miami. Their classes generated a tight-knit community bonded by the isolation of the pandemic and a passion for art. Many of the older students were rekindling a commitment to art after years of neglect. Shabott could relate to their stories.
In the Drawing Room no. 2. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
As a child growing up in North Haven, Conn., Shabott regularly visited the Yale University Art Gallery. “I would go there a lot alone,” she says. As a teenager, she took figure drawing classes, which she continued in art school until life and work got in the way and she took a 10-year hiatus.
In 1992, she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “I immediately went into figure drawing, because for me it’s very grounding,” says Shabott. Eventually her focus broadened and she began studying film and acting in addition to drawing and painting).
During this time, a friend introduced Shabott to Provincetown and she moved here in 1995. “I worked at the Boatslip, the Governor Bradford, and in hospitality until 2014,” she says. All the while, her artmaking was on the back burner as she contended with the pressure of paying off a student loan that had ballooned to $110,000.
In 2014, she started working at Berta Walker Gallery as an assistant. Inspired by the artwork around her and Walker’s encouragement, Shabott began painting again. “I said to myself, ‘You know, you have to stop beating yourself up over the student loan and go back into painting and drawing, which is all you’ve ever wanted to do. You bought the degree — now use it.’
Five Line Prayer. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
And once again, a figure drawing class was where she found her footing. PAAM offered her a scholarship to draw from the figure for six months. “I was shaking,” she says. “I was scared to return,” The current exhibition shows that things turned out well. “I gave myself permission to do it again, and through a miracle, the loan was forgiven during the Biden administration,” says Shabott.
The show, says Shabott, is about her desire to make art and the way that desire helped her transcend difficulties. More than anything, she says, “this exhibition is a celebration.”
The artworks on view reveal Shabott’s continued devotion to the figure. It grounds the exhibition, providing continuity in a show that incorporates painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and installation and an equally permissive approach to scale, with some pictures measuring more than 14 feet and others less than a foot.
One wall looks like it could have been lifted from her studio. There’s a mix of quick sketches and a large painting, Sacred Space. It’s an image of a reclining nude painted with black paint on raw canvas. The improvisational manner in which it is executed, along with the use of black lines, places this work within the territory of drawing. The viewer gets a snapshot of the back-and-forth process of an artist working across different scales with related imagery and materials.
In two medium-size drawings on canvas, Activated Space 1 and Activated Space 2, Shabott draws the figures in a manner recalling the gesture or blind contour drawings one might do in a figure drawing class. Here the line is more felt than descriptive. It embodies the physical energy of the model.
Line is Shabott’s great strength. In one gesture describing the edge of a model’s backside, the line quivers, echoing the graceful if imperfect quality of a body.
Working in the traditions of abstract expressionism and figurative expressionism, Shabott uses the embodied gesture as a means of conveying the body’s presence in an image. In Waiting, one of the strongest paintings in the show, Shabott uses dirty pinks, scrawling marks, and alternating dry and juicy brushstrokes to reflect the corporeality of the curvaceous woman in the image.Waiting by Laura Shabott. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
Waiting by Laura Shabott. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
A devotion to experimentation and a sense of exuberance echo through the exhibition. On one wall there is a variety of works about figures or objects in interiors including a sculpture of a flower on a pedestal that projects into the actual space of the gallery. Shabott festooned the ceiling with purple fabric — a soft voile — that she painted with rough outlines of an elongated figure. In Spring (After Rousseau), a 14-foot painting, a central figure is constructed (or deconstructed) with a patchwork of lushly painted collage fragments.Spring (After Rousseau). (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
The show, says Shabott, is about her desire to make art and the way that desire helped her transcend difficulties. More than anything, she says, “this exhibition is a celebration.”
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DigiDame 