One year after its first exhibition in 2025, the Burlington, Vermont gallery and interior design studio Nurture by Nature announces its move into a new 2,000-square-foot space with a reflective exhibition featuring new work from international designers. Founded by designer and curator Kate Swanson, the gallery-slash-interior design studio is doubling in size at a time when institutions are shuttering in major cultural hubs.
For Swanson, the relationship with the artist is the investment. She is building a roster of artists and makers whose work she believes in and wants to grow alongside as the design practice evolves, with their work becoming part of the visual language of the homes she creates.
The gallery is where those relationships can be tested: new work can be introduced, lived with, placed in context, and shared with clients before evolving into commissions or larger design projects. The result is a model where the gallery and design studio continuously feed one another, creating a longer arc for both the artist and the client.
Last week, Nurture by Nature celebrated its first anniversary with Show Me to Me, its third exhibition and first installment in the new gallery space. Inspired by the concept of Show and Tell, the exhibition features internationally recognized creatives Jabez Bartlett, Luke Malaney, and Jane Wright, pairing new works with the personal belongings that shape each designer’s creative practice. Conceived during Swanson’s own process of moving and making room for what comes next, the exhibition transforms a personal moment of transition into a broader reflection on what we choose to carry forward.
At its heart, Show Me to Me is an exhibition about how people reveal themselves through objects. The work asks viewers to consider the things they surround themselves with – the things inherited, collected, made, saved, or carried from one place to another. For Swanson, that question became particularly immediate while moving into Nurture by Nature’s new space. Expansion requires editing. What stays? What goes? What deserves room? The questions became the starting point for the exhibition.
“To be alive is to know that life is temporary. That awareness deeply informs how I think about art, objects, and the environments we create around ourselves,” says Swanson.
The resulting exhibition treats grief and joy, loss and belonging, memory and material as interconnected parts of the same human experience. The things we live with become evidence of the lives we have lived.
Show Me to Me is on view now through December 5, 2026.
Photography by Joseph-Kramm.
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