Looking for more space to spread out and work on a project? Or maybe you want to work amongst other artists to feel inspired and get some helpful feedback on your work. Join other local artists any time between 9am-12pm, for Open Studio. Please pay $10 cash at the door. Bring all supplies you need to use, NRAS has easels available. 

No registration, drop in only, cash or check.

No registration required – all are welcome! $10 cash only 

Looking for a creative way to kick off your week? Join us every FIRST and THIRD Monday night at North River Arts Society for Drop-In Craft Night! Bring your own project—whether it’s knitting, sketching, embroidery, sewing, collage, or any craft you're working on—and enjoy a relaxed, welcoming space to create alongside fellow makers.

All skill levels are welcome. This is an informal, social night perfect for getting inspired, sharing ideas, and making progress on whatever you're into. Come solo or with friends—stay the whole time or just pop in!

This group is open to all ages, levels, skills and crafts. 

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

Join North River Arts for Friday Night Figure Drawing!

Settle into a relaxed, creative atmosphere and spend your Friday evening drawing or painting from a live model. Each session begins with a series of short, dynamic poses designed to help you warm up, loosen your hand, and explore gesture. We then transition into longer poses, giving you the opportunity to dive deeper into proportion, anatomy, shading, and more refined detail at your own pace.

This is an uninstructed studio session, making it a wonderful option for artists of all levels who are looking to practice, build confidence, or simply enjoy dedicated time to create in community with others. Bring your preferred materials and enjoy a supportive, inspiring environment to grow your figure drawing skills.

Easels provided by NRAS. $20 drop in fee at the door, cash only. Space limited to 14 students. 

Join local artists Sally Dean and Michelle Levesque for a fun and creative evening of bird-making! Participants will design and build their own whimsical flying birds, complete with movable wings and mounted on a stick—perfect for bringing to life in our Festival of the Arts Puppet Parade.

Your handmade creation will become part of the celebration as festival-goers take to the parade with their birds in motion!

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

Learn the art of traditional Nantucket-style basket weaving in this half-day workshop focused on creating a beautiful lidded glass jar basket. Students will weave a classic cane basket around a glass jar base, then finish their piece with a fitted lid and signature Nantucket-style details.

This workshop is perfect for beginners and returning weavers alike, and participants will leave with a functional, timeless basket that can be used for storage, gifting, or display.

All materials are included, and each student will go home with a completed lidded jar basket.

About the Instructor: Joy Sawyer

In the 1980’s when I was raising my two sons I had a basket making business called Duxbury Bay Baskets. I taught classes all over the Boston area, sold my creations at art and fine craft fairs, and exhibited my work in local art shows. I put my reeds away in the 1990’s when I started my 25 year career as an Interior Designer. After my husband and I retired I picked up a Nantucket basket that had been sitting unfinished for a decade and I was once again smitten! I encouraged him to learn this amazing craft and he has been a talented student. We started Nimble Fingers Studio three years ago and now teach shaker style baskets, Nantucket baskets and Nantucket bracelets. We are delighted that you will be joining us for a class. 

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

Join artist and floral designer Grace Moore for a relaxing afternoon of floral arranging. Grace will guide participants in creating beautiful arrangements perfect for tea party settings. Please bring your own teapot and two teacups to incorporate into your design (check your local savers or thrift shops!). Students will leave with a stunning floral arrangement and the skills to create elegant tablescapes for future gatherings—just in time for Mother’s Day!

About the Instructor: Grace Moore

Grace is a local artist and floral designer out of Marshfield, MA. She works at Beach Plum Floral in Marshfield and spends her free time painting, making earrings, crafting, and generally anything creative! Grace is a co-founder of Wicked Women Makers Market, a holiday craft market at the Marshfield Fairgrounds.

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

Welcome to creative portrait photography! In this one-day workshop, you can look forward to learning and practicing new creative techniques in photographic portraiture. Our time together will be structured around twohands-on collaborative photoshoots. Some examples of concepts we may explore include prisms, water, colorful lighting, making your own creative filters to shoot through, and more! Models and materials will be provided, just bring yourcamera or smartphone. There will also be some opportunities to jump in front of the camera if you’d like a few portraits of yourself! We’ll be focusing mainly on portraiture, but some of the techniques you’ll learn can certainly be applied to other subjects as well. 

Our objectives are to spark creativity, create compelling imagery, learn new techniques, and have fun in creative community! 

Our time together will look something like this:

Shoot 1 (2-4pm): 2 hr studio setting in the afternoon (Duxbury, MA)

Break (4-5pm) - hour break with an informal Q&A / guided discussion of our creative goals and practices

Shoot 2 (5-7pm): 2 hr outdoor setting at golden hour 

Each shoot will feature different models, location and theme. 

Workshop is taking place at Studio West in Duxbury (796 West St, Duxbury, MA 02332).

About the Instructor: Amy Reichenbach 

Amy Reichenbach is a full-time photographer based in Massachusetts, celebrating the 10 year anniversary of her photography business this spring. She has been commissioned to photograph human connection around the world, including the seacoast of Ireland, olive groves of Italy, and mountaintops of Austria. Her work has been exhibited in local galleries as well as featured in magazines. Through her art, Amy explores connection, emotional intimacy, the natural world, and the body as nature.

You can find Amy's work at @thewildawake and @thewildawake.intimate.

Get ready to jump in and get your hands wet!  Your nature art journey starts here. Designed to coincide with World Ocean Day, this class sets the stage for deeper engagement with the world's oceans and to raise awareness about the vital role oceans play in our lives — from regulating climate and producing oxygen to providing food, jobs, and biodiversity.

Join Cape Cod educator/artist, Stephanie King, for a relaxed and creative workshop on the unique art of seaweed pressing.  In this workshop we will make seaweed pressings using drift seaweed collected off the coastline of Cape Cod.  Together we will learn how to create a “travel” press as well as learn the basic techniques for pressing seaweed on to paper.  Collecting seaweed that has washed ashore is a lovely way to enjoy nature and create art with very little environmental impact. This art form is a wonderful way to relax, go with the flow and preserve your seaside memories.  We will make several pressings of seaweed that can be used in scrapbooking, made into cards, or framed.

*For the love of the land and sea, all materials will be sustainably collected on Cape Cod by the instructor.  Please bring a small container to bring some leftover seaweed home for further exploration.

About the Instructor: Stephanie King 

Stephanie King is a native of Massachusetts. She maintains a full-time studio in Sandwich, MA. Stephanie is a Cape Cod based eco-artist who creates mixed media art on paper, canvas and wood panels using seaweed and botanicals. With a background in Sociology and Montessori education, Stephanie transitioned into a career in the visual arts in 2023. Driven by an innate desire to create and an aspiration to effect positive change in herself and her community, Stephanie’s art invites viewers to see seaweed and botanicals in new ways. She has been observing and studying plants, seaweed and nature through an artistic lens since 2005. She established ‘Seaside Botanical Art’ on Cape Cod in 2023. Since then, her artwork has been included in several group exhibitions as well as two solo shows on Cape Cod. She received an honorable mention in the 2024 Autumn Juried Exhibition at the Falmouth Art Center. In the Fall of 2025, Stephanie received the C.A.R.E for the Cape & Islands Stewardship Award for her commitment to preserve and enhance the natural environment, culture and history of the Cape and Islands. In addition to practicing sustainable methods while collecting drift seaweed and wild botanicals, she regularly cleans beaches and uses her work to educate and create behavior change.

Website: https://www.seasidebotanicalart.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-king-18750b359/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/stephanieking_botanicalart/

FB: Seaside Botanical Art

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

Learn how to repair your clothes using simple hand sewing techniques. Bring a piece of clothing that needs some love (cotton, denim, and linen items are preferable!) and give it a new lease on life. Mending tools, fabric, and a take-home instruction sheet will be provided, but please bring a pair of scissors. You may also bring any scrap fabric you’d like to use as a patch. No prior sewing experience is needed — come learn something new!

Materials provided:

• Needlebooks that come with sewing needles, pins, and safety pins

• Embroidery floss

• Scrap fabrics

• Scissors

• Instructional handout

What students should bring:

• An item of clothing that needs a patch or quick repair, preferably something that’s non-stretch.

• Optional: a small embroidery hoop, scrap fabric from their own stash

Olivia Harvey is an avid sewist and upcycler who first learned how to sew as a kid right here at NRAS with Brooke Stanton — and she hasn’t stopped since! Along with making and embellishing her own clothes, Olivia also sells her upcycled creations through her online shop OHpleeze. She believes that everyone should learn how to sew because it makes life (and your closet) a lot more interesting!

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

You can do this! Explore sketching with abandonment. Step out of your comfort zone and draw with a variety of materials, letting all the imperfections, “mistakes,” and corrections lead you to beautiful discoveries and exciting images. Perfectionism is highly overrated. Let fearless mark making lead you to dynamic images that engage and delight! Layer, smudge, erase…it’s all good.

In this workshop, we will look at some of the masters of intuitive drawing (both past and present) for inspiration. You will watch Suzette demonstrate various techniques and be coached through exercises using different mediums. You will utilize still life as subject matter. Please bring 3-5 objects from your home to arrange in your space and a patterned dishtowel or fabric piece to wrap into the still life. Anything goes! Ordinary objects are often poetic. Don’t over think what you bring in. Suzette encourages you to bring the drawing tools you already have in your kit and not to worry if you don’t have every element on the extended

materials list. Get ready to wow yourself…

Materials list:

Must have:

• A book of cheap sketch paper for exercises
• A Bristol pad, Vellum or Smooth, as big as you please but not smaller than 11x14
• A graphite pencil
• Some willow or vine charcoal
• Paynes Gray acrylic ink
• white charcoal or white conte crayon or white pastel
• 3 colors watercolor, acrylic gouache, or acrylic paint and a brush

Nice to have:

• watercolor, gouache, acrylic sets
• pastels, oil or soft
• ink tense pencils
• Cran d’arche Neocolor crayons or like product
• water-soluble graphite
• acrylic markers
• crayons
• gel pens
• prior works you are willing to tear into collage material

About the Instructor: Suzette Lebenzon

Suzette Lebenzon has painted since her childhood in Scituate, MA. She has kept a studio and shown in galleries most of her adult life. Her home and studio are in Wellfleet.

Suzette was a recipient of the Mass Cultural Council’s Unrestricted Artists’ Grants. In 2023, Suzette was inducted to the National Association of Women Artists, as a Signature Member. Her work has been curated into shows at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, the Scollay Square Gallery in Boston’s City Hall, and the Galatea Fine Art Gallery in SOWA.

She is represented by the  AMZehnder Gallery in Wellfleet, MA; and the BBLG Gallery in Smithtown, NY.

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.

In this captivating 2-day workshop Julie and Michael will help you discover the beauty of pastels. You will explore color, layering, blending and composition as you learn how to create a vibrant floral artwork. They will share: their knowledge; skills; materials/process; tricks and tips and their love of detail – all of which can be applied to any genre, and the workshop is perfect for all skill levels. Two tutors, two creative days.

About the Artists:

Julie and Michael are international award-winning artists sharing a love of pastel and realism. They’ve been fascinated with realism since childhood and in their artwork, they strive to create paintings with greater depth and feeling than can be achieved with a photograph. Julie is in the IAPS Master Circle (IAPS-MC) a Master Pastelist in: New Zealand (MPANZ); and Australia (MPSA) and is a Signature member of the Pastel Society of America (PSA). Michael is an IAPS Eminent Pastelist (IAPS-EP), a Master Pastelist in: the Pastel Society of America (PSA-MP); New Zealand (MPANZ); and Australia (MPSA) They both have had articles and their pastel paintings published in many leading art magazines and sell their work internationally and through galleries in New Zealand. Between them they have over 40 years of teaching experience and currently teach workshops Internationally and throughout New Zealand. Julie also teaches privately from their studio in Greenhithe, Auckland.

www.juliefreeman.co.nz www.michaelfreemanartist.com

Additional Information:

Please help us be respectful to our neighbors.
Do not park in front of neighbors or turn around in their driveways.