NAOMI RUSH is a painter, photographer, and multi-media artist with roots on the outer Cape going back to a family vacation during the late 1960s, in a rustic shack perched atop the high dunes of the "outer beach" on the Wellfleet-Truro line. That visit inspired a lifelong connection to the same "backwoods" neighborhood and its artistic and intellectual denizens. Early and enduring influences range from folk to fine art, and from Giselbertus of Autun and the Bayeux tapestry, to Matisse paintings and cutouts. Rush spent youthful afternoons studying pottery at Castle Hill and haunting the museums of New York. Her first jobs during high school were at the Cloisters in New York and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA. Travels in the United States, Europe, Central America, Southern Africa, India, and Vietnam have also informed Rush's eye. She has studied painting and multi-media art-making at MassArt, Castle Hill Truro Center for the Arts, Black Pond Studio, Concord Art, and PAAM. She holds degrees from Harvard, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Boston College School of Management, and the Simmons School of Social Work. Rush's work juxtaposes discarded and salvaged materials (she enjoys Candy Jernigan's term "rejectamenta”) and prepared ones. Her work is primarily motivated by process and formal concerns, but also reflects Rush's preoccupation with social and cultural arrangements that distribute power, inform identities, and shape capacities for attention, apprehension, and empathy. Rush retains family ties to Wellfleet and lives in Orleans. She works remotely as a psychotherapist at the Massachusetts General Hospital health care center in Chelsea, that serves a predominantly working class and immigrant community and leads grief groups on Cape Cod.