Chapter or Circle Name: New England Society of Botanical Artists

Contact Person: Elizabeth Rush, Member at Large

Membership: (Numbers of members, membership gains or losses)

• Current membership: 233

• This is a net loss of 21 members from the end of 2025

• 156 of our members are from the six New England states

• 71 live throughout the rest of the country and the world

Membership Meetings:

NESBA held a full Board and Membership Zoom meeting October 23, 2025. Board member changes were announced in the meeting. The agenda was focused on NESBA operations: membership, finances, programming and on other initiatives undertaken by members of the Board. The business meeting was followed by an interactive Q & A discussion, and a preview of events scheduled for late 2025 and early 2026. The meeting was recorded and the video posted on the member section of the NESBA website.
The quarterly Board meetings are also held on Zoom and are open to all members.

Communication (how do you communicate with your members):

NESBA communicates with members regularly using two vehicles. The first is through our monthly newsletter which includes a calendar of upcoming events, links to more information about these events, a column called Member News and information for finding educational resources through ASBA. Members are also notified of important NESBA deadlines or event reminders via ad hoc emails. Links to ASBA events and exhibiting opportunities are included in every newsletter and statistics show that these links are always accessed by our members. Our communication is accomplished using Constant Contact.
Secondly, the NESBA website contains a robust event calendar, recorded Beyond the Brush sessions, our popular blog posts, registration pages for workshops and exhibitions, guidelines and standards for artwork submitted for exhibition including packaging and transport, as well as organizational information such as Bylaws and Board minutes.
We have recently started an Instagram page to post images of our digital exhibits, blogs, retreats and other activities that are suitable to be viewed by a wider audience.

2026 Board of Directors:

• Sarah Roche - Founding Director

• Lynn Shepherd - Treasurer

• Carole Magner – Secretary

• Elizabeth Rush - Member at Large

• Gail Pearlstein - Member at Large

• Catherine Bryant – Member at Large

• Mary Shapiro – Member at Large

Media Team - Dedicated Volunteers:

• Joan Strauss - Website (Zoom back-up)

• Jackie Rockel - Newsletter (Zoom back-up)

• Mari Ryan - Website, Digital Exhibits

• Leslie Farrell - Website

• Donna Pesce - Website

• Mary Shapiro - Board member, BTB Zoom host, Instagram

• Elizabeth Rush - Board member, BTB host, Blog Editor

Projects, Programs and Events:

Beyond the Brush:

Originally developed in response to Covid lockdown, NESBA has continued it series of Zoom presentations called Beyond the Brush, a series of one-hour sessions featuring an artist, technique, or other topics of interest to our membership. In the past year, we have offered five artist sessions. We have chosen to feature NESBA members whenever possible. Artist presenters for the past year were as follows:

• Donnet Vanek, Exploring Silverpoint

• Margaret Best, Colored Pencil for Watercolorists

• Maryjo Koch, Nature in Gouache

• Kelsey Wilson, Lost in the Weeds

• Jean Mackay, Exploring Home: Watercolor Sketches Through the Year

164 NESBA members attended the Zoom Beyond the Brush sessions and another 245 viewed the videos for a total of 409 member views (an average of 81 per BTB session). Three Beyond the Brush sessions are already scheduled for fall 2026 and more sessions are being planned.

Workshops:

A virtual workshop was held with Margaret Best, November 4-6. Margaret instructed participants in how to layer colored pencil with watercolor to elevate the luminosity of their work. 12 members participated.

Retreat:

NESBA held its third annual weekend retreat March 20-23 in Harwich, MA. The retreat started with an afternoon presentation by author and gardening expert C.L. Fornari called The Artist’s Cocktail Garden with Bitters. Saturday’s workshop, Dried Botanicals in Watercolor, was led by Jessica Daigle. Participants explored working with the muted pallet of dried specimens and creating artwork at a larger than life scale. For Sunday’s workshop Kathie Miranda introduced the technique of drawing on archival polyester film, Colored Pencils on Dura-Lar. She led the group in exploring this medium and gave examples of its range and possibilities. 27 members attended the retreat.

Exhibitions:

The Massachusetts Horticultural Society held its 139th New England Flower Show at the Elm Bank location for the second year on September 20-21. In keeping with the Flower Show’s theme of a World in Bloom, our exhibit was called A World of Flowers and ran to mid October. We will be exhibiting there this Fall with an exhibition entitled Abundance September 9 - October 21
This year exhibit space at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston, MA was not available to us, as it has been for the last few years. We are now scheduled for an exhibition there in 2027 focusing on beneficial pollinator plants. We have begun to search for additional exhibit venues.

Online exhibitions:

To offer our members additional opportunities to exhibit their work we have restarted our virtual exhibitions. Currently available on our website is a show entitled Floral Abundance. The exhibit featured the artwork of 19 of our members with artwork in a wide range of mediums. We plan to continue to offer this opportunity to our members.

Holiday Festive Foods - Potluck Dec 14th:

This event hosted by Gail Pearlstein was an opportunity for members to meet face to face and celebrate the holiday season with delicious food and cheer.

Massachusetts Horticultural Society - Festival of Trees:

Members submitted original cards for ornaments and donated art supplies for ‘presents’ under the tree. The tree was donated by a member, and a team of members did a beautiful job of decorating the tree. Donations were sufficient to allow NESBA to participate again in 2026.

Blog Posts:

We have a blog team that coordinates and edits submissions to our blog. Our blog articles on our website are available to the general public and are part of our mission to provide information about botanical art. The blog articles are intended to give our members a voice and an opportunity to share their experience and expertise. Below are links to the blogs posted this year.

The History of Plant Classification - A Botanical Artist’s Overview - by Lauren Meier

Developing a Commission - East-West Whimsey - by Beverly Duncan

Welcoming Spring on Cape Cod - by Joan Strauss

Ferns: Lessons in Survival from Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants - book recommendation by Cheryl MacCaffrey

Board Business:

• Capacity

The Board continually considers how much programming we can support as a volunteer Board as well as how to accomplish the work while maintaining the quality of what we offer our members. To date, we have seven active board members. To encourage more member participation, we have developed a team of regular volunteers for specific tasks.

Our Media Team was created by former board members and is currently comprised of five dedicated volunteers and two board members. They meet regularly by Zoom to handle the challenges of:

Coordinating the publication of the newsletter and website
Creating and publishing Virtual exhibits – enabling additional member participation at a low cost and the opportunity to present topics not necessarily suitable for a fine art exhibit.
Maintaining and updating the website and its digital assets
Engaging editorial help with the website and newsletters
Supporting Board Meetings by managing Zoom and report presentation and archiving
Creating and managing sign-ups and Google forms for exhibits and other volunteer activities.
Creating, managing, and posting to an Instagram account

Focusing on the future:

The ASBA conference will be held in Boston in 2027. This will provide our organization with both challenges and opportunities. Organizing volunteers to meet the conference needs will taking planning and leadership. This will be a key topic for our upcoming Annual Meeting in September.

Volunteer organizations such as ours are always challenged with member participation. We have a membership base highly committed to NESBA and have a number of roles that are planned, specific, time-limited, and fun which we hope will be attractive to members.

On the technical side, we hope to continue to attract active volunteers this year to train in specific roles on Zoom or the website and to continue to offer and update digital exhibitions. Over the past year we have spent time documenting processes, roles and responsibilities so new volunteers can get oriented quickly and feel supported.

On the programming side, there is continued interest in exhibitions or projects with themes such as invasive and non-native plants. In response to requests for more in-person activities we offer in-person workshops will continue to hold our weekend retreat on Cape Cod. We hope to find new venues for exhibits.