Gratitude for this exhibition goes to the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Board, Executive Director, Ursula Morgan, Exhibitions Director, Jen Dragon, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Exhibitions Committee, Photographer John Kleinhans, and the Byrdcliffe Colony Artists in Residence Staff
Original graphic design concept: Susanna Ronner Design Studio
May 4 - June 9, 2024
Kleinert/James Center for the Arts
36 Tinker Street · Woodstock, NY · 12498
A.i.R. ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE 2024 Annual Exhibition
Susanna Ronner Design
KATHERINE ARNOLDI
I write the subject I have been given: growing up an artist in rust belt failed Canton, Ohio, working in a rubber glove factory, becoming a teenage mother, escaping domestic violence and struggling to find the way to college, where I saw another world was possible. I write of the joy of living with other artists in Denver, of buying a farm in Arkansas, of coming to the East Village in the 1980’s, where I found my artistic home. The Sunshine House tells the story of some of my happiest days, living with artists and musicians in a cooperative in an old convent with twenty-five bedrooms in Denver in the 1970’s.
Katherine Arnoldi, Ph.D., Creative Writing Fulbright Fellow to Paraguay (2008-9), received two NYFA Awards (Fiction/Drawing), De Jur Award and Trans-Atlantic Fiction Award. Her graphic novel, The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom (Hyperion, 1998) was nominated for a Will Eisner, won two American Library Association awards, was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly and was featured on the Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN Entertainment Today and NPR Weekend Edition. All Things Are Labor, Stories (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) was a Juniper Prize winner.
Katherine Arnoldi
The Sunshine House, (detail)
KAITLYN BASTA
Kaitlyn Basta (b.1993, United States) is an interdisciplinary visual artist who draws from subjective memory, history, and the corporeal to mine existentialism and the human condition. Her concept-driven work demands a variety of materials – from painting, mixed media sculpture, found materials and immersive installation – through which Basta deliberately incorporates handmade processes in meticulous detail to embody the transient complexity and physicality of human existence.
Originally from Minneapolis, MN, Basta earned her BFA in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2016. There she earned several awards, notably the Gross McCleaf Gallery Prize, the Simone C. Titone Drawing Prize, and the Sylvia G. Wexler Memorial Award. She has exhibited in It is Here, It is New, I Am at Pentimenti Gallery, Impossible Archive at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, and founded The Codex Project with partner Mostafa Darwish, exhibiting in its first year. Basta has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild (Woodstock, NY), and will be an artist in residence at ChaNorth in Pine Plains, NY.
Kaitlyn Basta Barzin 2024
ISABEL BROWN
Isabel Brown is a self-taught multimedia artist who lives and works in Philadelphia. Isabel found collage as a backdoor into “painting” that requires nothing more than junk mail and scissors. They expand the limits of collage as a medium, weaving together traditional painting techniques and a curiosity for handcrafts to render sculptural forms on paper. Isabel’s experience at Byrdcliffe was colored by familial loss. The process of constructing Knot mirrored the futile effort to pin down grief to a single form that can be extracted and held up to the light. Knot is also imagined as an heirloom that is carried throughout a lineage without end. Knot is the first in a series of attempts to capture the things we carry with us, pluck them out, and look closely
Isabel Brown Knot, 2023
LISA CANDELA
Lisa Candela is a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City who works in paper mâché, fabrics, and oil paint. Her creative process is a vigorous exploration of the female form. She prefers to work on a large scale using her body in a physical way, moving around the canvas while drawing and redrawing the form resulting in an overlapping of multiple lines, limbs, hands and facial features. She then reworks the painting in a more methodical way tracing her hands or drawing a repetition of patterns found in nature, overlapping new drawings over existing ones.
Lisa received her MFA in May 2023 from City College, CUNY, New York and recently participated in several group shows around New York City such as the “Every Woman Biennial 2024” at LaMaMa Galleria and “Transplants” at Amos Eno Gallery. She also participated in residencies at the Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY in the summer of 2023 and ChaNorth, Pine Plains, NY in the fall of 2023.
Lisa Candela Fiery and Fervid, 2024
DONNAR. CHARGING (Three Affiliated Tribes / Eastern Shoshone)
I constructed an installation titled THAT LIMBLESS SIGN by embedding 8 screens into a freestanding wall. There were 9 squares in the wall (3 x 3) but the 9th square, bottom row on the left, was an opening through the wall presenting a small diorama. The viewer was meant to peek through the wall and take notice of a small wooden red chair hidden behind a tiny paper curtain fashioned from cream-colored dress pattern paper. The chair was a body covered by a body (the dress pattern paper) and accompanied by spoken Shoshone language emitting from a motion-sensitive speaker installed on the top of the wall. As soon as the viewer approached the wall, a woman’s voice began speaking in Shoshone without any translation or a promise of one. I photographed furnishings found at White Pines, Jane and Ralph’s manor house and used them to create drawings while scanning my process to create the GIF images displayed on the 8 screens. It was my intention to represent oral language as it exists among extant Native American tribes using furniture found or produced at the utopian artist colony. The title THAT LIMBLESS SIGN originated from Diné poet Orlando White’s poem, Configuration from his second book, LETTERS. In his first book, Bone Light: Poems, White likens the letter “i” written in the English language to a human body in his poem, Ats’ííts’in. 1.
1. Orlando White, Bone Light : Poems (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2009), 22.
Donna R. Charging
THAT LIMBLESS SIGN, 2023 video
BEN COWAN
Ben Cowan was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Indiana University. During his education, Cowan held a residency in Umbria, Italy, that deeply influenced his paintings. By witnessing first hand the interaction of devoted pilgrims with art historical places, objects, and paintings, and simultaneously painting landscapes in the footsteps of Corot, the landscape and character of Cowan’s surroundings has remained the energizing force in his work. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Occupationally, Cowan has worked in the studio of Jeff Koons and presently as a Scenic Artist for motion pictures, both roles have increased Cowan’s resolve for refined painting techniques, experimentation with process, and a keen eye for illusions. In his work, Cowan draws inspiration from urban landscapes and gothic architecture, blending observed places, personal objects, and religious abstractions to create paintings that bridge reality and illusion, personifying the interpersonal and the supernatural. Cowan’s work has been shown in solo and group shows throughout the United States including New York City’s 550 Gallery and The Painting Center. He has been featured in Manifest Gallery’s International Painting Annual, Fresh Paint Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The Brooklyn Review. Cowan’s work is in private and public collections including The University of Scranton, Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan, and The Racquet Club of Chicago.
Ben Cowan Hem and Haw ,2023
KATIE CROFT
Katie Croft is multi-disciplinary artist, art therapist, and educator. She is a painter and ceramic sculptor. Her current work is focused on the intersection of art and healing. She graduated from Pratt with her MFA in 2020 and her MPS in 2022. Katie actively exhibits her work globally. Most recently her work has been featured in Whose Story Is It?, Spilt Milk Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland; Site:Brooklyn, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Winston Wachter Fine Art in Revisited 2021, Platform 2020, and Super Dutchess Gallery, NY. She’s been featured in numerous publications including the 2020 New American Paintings, No. 147, MFA Annual Issue and the inaugural issue of AllSheMakes contemporary art and culture magazine curated by ArtGirlRising. She was a 2022 finalist for Subject Matter, RePaint History, Art Girl Rising, Winter Prize, London, UK. Her work is currently featured online at Subject Matter, Site:Brooklyn, and Spilt Milk Gallery.
Katie Croft, Wall Sculpture No.6, 2023
CAROL FABRICATORE
Carol Fabricatore is a visual artist from New York City. Her work is fueled by keen observation and a commitment to infusing her narrative imagery with a deep emotional connection. She loves discovering the rewards of receptive consideration, risk-taking, and intuitive drawing and is motivated by exploring a balance of abstraction, representation, and linear mark-making within her images.
Carol's career began in editorial and book illustration. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Franklin Library, and The Chicago Tribune. She has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and has taught in graduate and undergraduate programs there for over 20 years. Carol has been awarded multiple artist residencies, including Cill Rialaig Project, Ireland; Alderworks, Alaska; Wildacres, NC; Cuttyhunk, MA; and SVA Studio Residency, Oaxaca, Mexico.
Carol has garnered numerous awards and earned spots in solo exhibitions, and group showcases in the United States and internationally. Her work has appeared in prestigious publications, including American Illustration, Communication Arts, and Society of Illustrators. Notable exhibitions include those at SVA Visual Arts Gallery, NY; New York Artists Equity, NY; St. Rémy de Provence, France; Katonah Museum, NY; The National Arts Club, NYC; and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, NYC.
The culture of Coney Island is an underlying theme of Carol's most recent series. These works explore the figure within the urban landscape of Coney Island and evoke their folklore, traditions, superstitions, and rituals. In this series, she interprets the Mermaid Parade's prominent personalities and portrays a diverse series of women and female-presenting people. She explores their divergent emotions, projecting women's power, and vulnerability in different ways. The Parade's dreamlike quality offers rich symbolic narratives about human strengths and weaknesses. She uses a selection of mediums, including acrylic, gouache, and a variety of drawing mediums.
Carol Fabricatore Summer Mermaids, 2023
LAUREN FAULKNER
Lauren Faulkner is a visual artist and teacher based in New York City. Utilizing printmaking techniques Faulkner’s compositions begin with low-relief, matrices of collected and found objects that are run through the printing press to create embossed paper frames. Building on the embossed paper surface, Faulkner responds to girlhood narratives and imagined worlds in graphite and oil paint. The attention to the materiality of natural elements in Faulkner’s work is informed by her Pacific Northwest upbringing and professional experience as an award-winning floral designer in New York City. Faulkner received her BA from the University of Puget Sound and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2023. Faulkner teaches drawing, painting and monotype printmaking at several institutions across New York City. She has been published in Create Magazine and was the Annual Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship for Visual Artists Award recipient at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY. Faulkner has been the recipient of the LCU Fund for Women’s Education Scholarship and the Leslie T. and Francis Posey Scholarship.
Laura Faulkner
The Barn at Night, 2023
HOLLY FRIESEN
Holly Friesen was born in Saskatchewan, studied Visual Arts at John Abbott College in Montreal and painting at York University in Toronto. After many years of travel and study she settled in Mont- Tremblant, QC and opened ArtBeat Studio where she painted and taught for 15 years. Four summer seasons saw Holly as artistic director and curator of The Art Barn in Mont-Tremblant. In 2010 she was curator and project manager of Ateliers du Village, an artist run gallery in Mont-Tremblant village. For three years she worked as the Montreal curator for the daily online art auction
ArtBomb which featured Canadian artists and their artwork. The artist’s current studio is based out of Montreal QC and her paintings are collected internationally as part of both corporate and private collections. Holly’s passion is painting vibrant landscapes from the inside out while collaborating with other artists to make art more visible in our everyday world.
Artist Statement: My work revolves around earth-honoring images that reflect and instill connection to local bio-regions. These images internalize a reverence for the earth and shift the intent from harming the world to living in a mutually life enhancing manner. I learn what I need to know by painting. The more I paint the less separation there is between inner and outer worlds. For me, painting is like deep prayer awakening an inner wilderness that reflects the earth’s landscape; the image is in you and you are in the image. Painting is my breath, beauty my compass and the earth is my body.
Holly Friesen Sixth Sense, 2023
LILIAN GARCIA-ROIG
Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuba born, Texas raised artist living in Tallahassee, Florida whose works landscape-themed works have always explored the complex propositions of sense of place and belonging which so influence the construction of personal identity While she is most known for her perceptually based, large-scale, “all-day” cumulative paintings that underscores the complex nature of trying to capture first-hand the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being in that specific location.
Major awards include a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2021 Blackwell Prize in Painting, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award in painting & a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Residencies include a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Fellowship, Hambidge Arts Center, MacDowell Colony Milton & Sally Avery Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Center A-I-R, , Millay Arts A-I-R, Art Omi Milton & Sally Avery Fellow, Deering Estate A-I-R, and as a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba.
Lilian Garcia-Roig
Cumulative Nature: Woodstock Birches & Boulders, 2023
OLIVIA GIBB
Olivia Gibb received her BFA in Printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2014. The exploration of her artwork takes shape through clay, music, paintings and performance. The undercurrent of her work exists in tandem with her 15 year long relationship with punk music and the DIY (Do It Yourself) community.
Olivia Gibb Ralph on Residency, 2023
LAUREN GIDWITZ
Gidwitz’s work explores notions of home, illusions of safety, consumption, as well as sexual and emotional power dynamics. The foundation is based on direct memories of lived experiences, and through this, the work delves into the dimensions of intimacy. Gidwitz plays with the visual tensions of paint and other mixed media to support these ideas; pitting rigid patterning against more organic forms and juxtaposing tonal relationships with saturated contrasting colors.
Lauren Gidwitz [American, b. 1983 Chicago, IL] is an artist working in oil painting and mixed-media. Gidwitz's work has been exhibited and collected throughout the U.S., Europe, and Australia; including the public collections of Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City and the Creative Arts Council at Brown University. Gidwitz was a resident Byrdcliffe Artist Residency, BigCI in the Wollemi National Park, Australia, the Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard, Norway, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Alfred and Trafford Klots Program in Léhon, France. Gidwitz has been a visiting critic at Tufts University, Maryland Institute College of Art and Brown University, and is an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Gidwitz received an MFA in Painting and Drawing, from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Gidwitz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Lauren Gidwitz Showshow, 2023
MARTHA GUILLORN
Martha Guillorn is a visual artist from New York City focused on mixed media sculptures and drawings that deal with the curiosity of touch, texture, and the way we feel about our feelings. Guillorn participated in the Fantasy Fountain Fund Fellowship in bronze casting at Modern Art Foundry in Queens, NY, and received several other merit-based awards and scholarships, including opportunities to work with glass at Urban Glass in Brooklyn. Guillorn received an MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York with a solo exhibition and has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and Anderson Ranch.
Martha Guillorn Untitled
PATTY HARRIS
My work deals with mapping elements that inform a particular site but lie outside the formal concerns of art. I’ve collected information about the weather, taken aerial photos of kites, and created animations that explore ways to experience architecture outside of normal experience. I like to think of my work as creating a portal to another point-of-view. Much of my recent work has focused on climate change. I have created maps of predicted ocean rise. I have also created public artworks that use iconic imagery to draw awareness to natural processes. I am inspired by the power of nature and its mysteries and track changes in the natural environment.
Milkweed Late Summer is related to a public art piece created in Fall 22 at Hawthorne Valley Farm. This was through a collaboration with Millay Arts and the Farm. I became fascinated by the changing form of the Milkweed plant and how it evolves through the seasons. The sculpture consists of 6 corten panels that are viewed sequentially while walking down a dirt road. The animation focuses on one phase of the plant’s changes through the seasons. I worked on this animation while at Woodstock Byrdcliffe last summer. I was inspired by being surrounded by nature.
Patty Harris
Milkweed Late Summer, 2023
HOLDEN HEAD
Holden Head was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Growing up in the South was largely influential to his understanding of the world. Currently he works in sculpture with an emphasis on the figurative and performative. His work centers around the tragicomic. A self proclaimed optimistic nihilist, learning to love the horrible parts of life. He holds a BFA in photography from Watkins College of Art (2016) and a MFA from the University of Chicago (2020).
Holden Head Canal, 2023
NINNI HELDT
Trained as an artist in her home country Finland and later in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence Italy, Ninni Heldt is a painter with deep roots in traditional, classical fine arts techniques. Heldt’s 2008 Master’s thesis for the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in Finland focused on the effects of light on an object.
Based on direct observation of nature, Ninni Heldt paints primarily with oil colors along with traditional gilding techniques incorporated into her paintings. Heldt has been a working artist since 2003 and has had several solo exhibitions in Finland. Her work has been exhibited in the Dacia Gallery and in the Salmagundi club in New York city and in the Portrait Now! Exhibition in the Carlsberg Foundation's Portrait Award, Frederiksborg castle in Denmark and in the Portrait Now! Exhibition in Ljungberg Museum in Sweden. Her work has been exhibited also in the Mall Galleries in London, UK and in many group exhibitions in Japan. She has participated as an artist-in-residence in Italy and Finland. Recently she also joined artist-in-residence programs in the New York Academy of Art, New York City and at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony.
Ninni Heldt’s work is in private collections in Japan, Australia and Finland. As a portrait artist, Ninni Heldt has painted several official portrait commissions for University of Helsinki, the Finnish Defense forces and many others.
Ninni Heldt Waiting, 2023
KATE HOFFMAN
Kate Hoffman is a Los Angeles artist and teacher. Hoffman has an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego and a BFA in Fibers from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is a former artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine and at Est-Nord-Est in Quebec, Canada. She has been exhibiting in LA since 2007 and has had solo exhibitions of her whaling meets the underground railroad project, Black Gold-Liquid Gold, the Golden Age of Whaling at the Greenleaf Gallery at Whittier College and at the ATA Gallery in San Francisco. In 2017 her Dream Home series was included in the show "Focus Group" at the Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown, LA.
Kate Hoffman Sea of Teeth, 2023 Edition of 25
MIRRAH JOHNSON
I am a fiber artist from rural Tennessee. I am currently based in Austin, TX, where I work as a seamstress. I use textiles, because I have always been drawn to their softness, structure, ubiquity, function, and beauty, as well as the slowness of the processes that create them. Fibers and textiles have been used for thousands of years as forms of storytelling, symbols of power, and personal expression. The creation of textiles is as much to credit for human civilization and economic structures as food production.
I have often incorporated foraged natural dyes into my work, and I use natural fibers. I feel more connected to these materials because of my meaningful relationship with the natural world. The specific process I utilize is dependent on the project at hand. I might use weaving, embroidery, or screen printing. My creative practice is rooted in my relationship to what we call nature: plants, animals, and spaces that are not used for extraction of resources, or spaces where that extraction is not as visible. Lines, or the absence of them, are central to most of the work that I do. Grids made by lines (weaving), lines that continue in order to create an image (drawing with thread), and lines that repeat over and over to create a pattern.
This is also reflected metaphorically in my work, as I am always following a line, researching how far back a particular question can lead me, and looking out for where lines separate rather than connect. The words “line” and “linen” have the same root: “linum” in latin means flax, which is the plant that linen is made from.
My work is a form of resistance against the current speed at which society is moving. Weaving, hand sewing, natural dyeing, and lace tatting are processes that are so slow, they cause me to lose my sense of time and gain clarity for a sense of present.
Mirrah Johnson Through the Attic Window, 2023
RAGHUBIR KINTISCH
Exploring the confluence of creative and spiritual practices is the polestar of my art practice. My work is an ongoing investigation into the instincts and predicaments intrinsic to the human experience using nature and organic form as both inspiration and metaphor. My projects delve into the realm of mystical abstraction through a fusion of photography, collaging techniques, and oil painting. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as paranormal and mystical events, nature and the supernatural, and self-portraiture and personal experience, I create mental terrains that evolve from deep transformative experience. My most recent work consists of oil paintings created as diptychs or triptychs, mixed media collage, and tonal paintings in India ink; all of which utilize texture, vibrant color, and reflected geometry and pattern.
Raghubir Kintisch (b. 1955, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1989. Kintisch earned a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 1976, and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 2017. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museum internationally, alternative spaces and film/video festivals. Some of these are: La Foret Museum, Tokyo, Japan; LAXART, Hollywood, LA; Keystone Art Gallery, LA; Robert Berman Gallery, LA; Merry Karnowsky Gallery, LA; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Winslow Garage, LA; Kleinert-James Gallery, Woodstock, NY; Proxy Gallery, LA; MutMuz Gallery, LA; Angels Gate Cultural Center Gallery, San Pedro, LAUNCH Gallery in LA, and Tryst Art Fair in Torrence; among others. In 2017-2018, Kintisch participated in a long-running group show at the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y. titled Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983. In the summer of 2023, Kintisch was a Byrdcliffe Cottage Artist-in-Residence, in 2022 a Byrdcliffe Communal Artist-in-Residence, and in 2021, a recipient of the Silver Sun Foundation Residency through The Secret City - also in Woodstock, N.Y. Raghubir Kintisch Antimacassar, 2023
ALISON KRUVANT
Alison Kruvant is an artist born in Washington, DC, based in New York City. She received a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where she spent a year studying in Rome, Italy. Kruvant has exhibited at Ki Smith Gallery (New York, NY), High Line Nine Galleries (New York, NY), The Painting Center (New York, NY), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Bridgette Mayer Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) Da Vinci Art Alliance (Philadelphia, PA), and GoggleWorks Center for the Arts (Reading, PA). Her paintings are featured in the White Columns Curated Artist Registry and Deanna Evans Projects Trove [flat file]. Kruvant’s writing is published in Painters on Paintings and she was interviewed in Whitehot Magazine. Additionally, she has worked on several community mural projects in the New York area and contributed to the reconstruction of a 17th-century Polish wooden synagogue roof and ceiling murals, which are now permanently displayed at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland.
Alison Kruvant Early Night, 2023
JUYON LEE
In an attempt to materialize such ungraspable things as time and the human relationship to time, my work explores the idea of transience and ephemerality through physical materials. To achieve this process, I arrange functional and nonfunctional objects in absurd relationships. Tangible objects, such as glass orbs and metronomes, interact with ethereal materials like light and air to confuse and rearrange any pre-associations attached to the material. Imbuing the concrete objects with a sense of temporality and intangibility, the abstracted situations in my work invite new meanings through direct experience.
I consider my practice as a gradual process of developing a language to describe the puzzling notion of time. Through an iterative process of making, certain elements of my work like sine waves migrate from one body of work to another. In parallel to this rhizomatic approach to making, I experience light not only as an essential material, but also an existing condition of life that one relies on to perceive, navigate, and communicate in the world. The work embodies its own processual quality and materiality through this use of light.
Giving form to something that is constantly in flux through the use of light, membrane- like objects like blown glass, and architectural elements, my work is scaled for participants to perceive the presence of change in the medium of time. I am interested not only in the change itself, but also how one experiences this change. I weave in varied forms of reflection to shift the focus to the way we perceive things, rather than the thing itself. By constructing abstracted situations in collapsing layers and dimensions, the work meditates on the constantly shifting human perception and questions visual perception as an approximation of truth.
Juyon Lee
Wet Photographs II and III (photographs, glass, light) 2023
LUCY XC LIU
Lucy XC Liu is an artist and writer. She has received numerous awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and Paris Photo Prize. Reviews of her work are published by the Smithsonian Institution, China Daily, and People’s Daily.
She is drawn to the notions of healing on personal and societal levels, of fragility as a state of holding together gracefully and strenuously, of things falling apart as preludes of unity. She explores the multifaceted truths of historical trauma through individual testimonies of hunger and desire that refuse to justify power. Her large-scale immersive sculptures and performances are theatrical spaces that envelope viewers and elicit their responses to trigger societal truths; her photo, video, words, and sculptural objects create disorienting narratives of corporeal movement through mystic realms. She self-identifies as a “culture mechanic” mending the ruptures between the past and the present, the east and the west. She believes that the magic of art and literature sparks at points of spiritual contact and sutures the crevices within her culture, and between cultures.
Lucy XC Liu
Self-Portrait as Harnessed Ridiculously to the World, 2023
CAITLIN McCORMACK
My work acknowledges a trans-generational craft practice and externalizes experiences with self-harm, body dysmorphia, and assault, resulting in a taxonomy of emotive vessels. Exploring queerness, isolation, and environmentalism through an uncanny, occasionally humorous lens, I contemplate societal reluctance to legitimize gendered craft and regard crochet as a behavioral response to apocalyptic conditions. I'm inspired by folklore, medieval botanical motifs, institutional osteological displays, sci-fi, and body horror cinema. Each object is an unraveling artifact of a memory or fixation, tethered to a surface and made viewable from a distance.
I crochet antique thread, dredge it in glues and foraged pigments, and fashion it into sculptural forms. The transformative act of generating and stiffening each component into a static composition recontextualizes moments of despair and rage as ornate, provocative, comical specimens. The distinction between the viewer and the object is reinforced by notions of fabrication versus reality, gravitas versus absurdity, and animation versus death.
Caitlin McCormack Hyaluronica III, 2023
REBECCA NISON
Rebecca Nison is a writer, educator, and multimodal artist based in Brooklyn NY with an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School for Public Engagement and a BFA from Emerson College. She works and plays at the intersection of multimedia, visual arts, energy, light, healing, and language. Her non-fiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Catapult, and her graphic poetry collection, If We'd Never Seen the Sea, was published in 2015. Her art has been exhibited throughout New York and beyond. Her album, Waves of Possibility, with RISE the Collective, was released in 2022.
In her recent projects, she accesses and blends the imaginal, dream states, hypnotic exercises, embodiment, poetry, and storytelling to cultivate and activate experiences and artworks intended to connect to inner visions, exploration, sacred playfulness, and the contemplative. She perceives creations as meditative, embodied, ecstatic happenings. Embodied visual prayers. Each act of creation stands and dances as its own unique encounter based primarily on spiritual and sensual impulses to play, release, commune, and intuit. Her studies in mystical and healing traditions are dream-woven into the work.
Sometimes her hands and materials are her guides -- sometimes a voice -sometimes a vision -- sometimes the wilderness -- sometimes the wisdom of a friend, the fresh awareness of a moment, a movement, a touch. Her approach to art-making is one of discovery over perfection in dialogue with and across time, space, and the effervescent loving forces around us and within us.
Rebecca Nison
PHOTOSYNTHESIS, 2024
CHAU NGUYEN
Chau Nguyen (b. Hanoi, Vietnam) (they/she) is a Vietnamese immigrant artist based in Philadelphia.They navigate the intersection of art, technology, private/ collective memory, Vietnamese histories, and popular culture in their creation of transnational art objects.
Nguyen received their BAin FineArts and History ofArt from Bryn Mawr College and their MFAin Painting fromTyler School ofArt andArchitecture.Their artist residencies include Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL), Cow House Studios (Wexford, Ireland), MillayArts (Austerlitz, NY), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), ByrdcliffeArtist Residency (Woodstock, NY), and others.Their work has been in group and solo exhibitions at the National Liberty Museum, Delaware Contemporary, WoodmereArt Museum, Pentimenti Gallery,Temple Contemporary,Automat Collective, Studio Montclair, Vincom Center for ContemporaryArt (Vietnam), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (Sweden), and others.
Nguyen has received fellowships, grants, and awards fromThe Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio atTemple University Libraries, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, WoodmereArt Museum, Joseph Robert Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild,Tyler School ofArt andArchitecture, and others.
Chau Nguyen Dive, 2023,
MARGARET PEZALLA-GRANLUND
In my recent work, I have been thinking about what it means to be part of a community that is stretched thin -- across distance, across time, across culture-- and how ideas are shared across that expanse. Throughout my career, much of my work has been about how we understand the world: how we patch together a comprehension of time, or space, or the shape of things, and the strategies we use to try to communicate these ideas. My interest is both in how things are circulated –how they disperse, and maybe disappear – and in how they are held, and what the meaning of things has to do with these ideas of both circulating and holding. Over the past few years (and through the pandemic), I have been producing a series of prints, stencils, and gouaches drawn from images of books and journals held in library and museum collections, including the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The experience of browsing the magazines there happens at a meeting point between preservation and access: when the nearly century-old publications are delivered to your study space, you’re privileged to leaf through the volumes, but aware that each time you open a cover, or flip past a page, you both participate in the community of sharing inherent to the idea of an artist’s publication, and contribute to the magazine’s inevitable decay. To preserve the pages in my memory, I scan the images on the LOC’s special book scanner — another process, that while providing ongoing access to the content via digital images, contributes to the decay of the materials. These digital images are bound up in other types of decay as well: the loss of image quality, the loss of materiality of the original. These images, then, are bound up in both connection and loss, circulation, and collection. In my most recent works, I have continued thinking about holding and circulating, with a new interest in what this accumulation of stuff might mean: images, books, pamphlets, and all kinds of material goods made in multiple circulate, but then land… somewhere. These collections – of objects (like rocks, books, or piles of family photographs)– are reproduced (by hand this time) and alight back into a new kind of circulation, then holding, then dispersal.
Margaret Pezalla-Granlund Collection (what we
have), 2024
SIMONA PRIVES
Simona Prives is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work includes printmaking, painting, drawing, and time-based media. Having received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Prives creates animated collages that incorporate a variety of themes and materials. Her work explores the dialectic of growth and decay and examines our complex relationship between the organic and the man-made.
Recently Prives was commissioned by MTA Arts & Design to create a 52 channel, site-specific video installation in Fulton Center, Lower Manhattan. Titled “Even While The Dust Moves,” the installation was displayed across the 52 large video screens within the Fulton Center. A wide range of media — including video, drawings, ink paintings, and printmaking — comprised each animated artwork within the larger whole.
Prives currently teaches art and design at Parsons, New York University and is an assistant professor at CUNY.
Simona Prives towards the noise of dark waters (detail)
CAROL PULITZER
Carol’s recent series, The Ancients, reflect on the mystical Jewish teachings of the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah tell the story of a vessel containing all the light of Creation that shatters into an infinite number of pieces. Pulitzer notes: “We are left, each of us like a hologram, little Humpty Dumptys, containing all the light of Creation, trying to put the pieces of our lives back together again.”
Carol Pulitzer writes about her ceramic piece, The Mad Potter, “This pot made me think of George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi. I hated how it came out of the glaze firing so I reglazed and refired it. Doing that is like trying to get one pane of molten glass to stick to another pane of molten glass. It's strictly up to the clay gods how it comes out so this is unrepeatable, one of a kind.
George Ohr was a character. From NOMA curator, Mel Buchanan’s article on nolavie.com, “Ohr had no parallels in pottery or art. The artist acknowledged his individuality by decorating his five-story, pagoda-shaped Biloxi, Mississippi, building with signs: "Unequaled unrivaled — undisputed" and "Greatest Art Potter On The Earth- You prove the contrary.” - That's what I call Chutzpah!”
Mad Potter 2023
Carol Pulitzer
THOMAS SANTELLI
“Many of my images spring from an interest in the so called “human condition”. References to anatomy, superstition, biology, medicine, gender, mythology, religion, sexuality, and psychology have become recurring themes in my work, and I often attempt to connect them to my own concept of self-image.”
Tom was born (1952) and raised in the Bronx, New York and was always fascinated with stories and images as a child while often spending time drawing to explore where his imagination might transport him. He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, then went on to receive his BFA Degree in Drawing (1974) from Pratt institute in Brooklyn, NY. He worked as a Mechanical Artist, an Illustrator, a Graphic Designer, a Photographer and an Art Director for The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) as well as several advertising agencies and freelance accounts in Manhattan.
He received his Masters Degree (MFA) In Fine Art Photography and Photo History and Aesthetics (1989) from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York. For thirty two years Tom has been a college professor at The Center for Art and Design at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York where he has taught all levels of photography and photo based imaging from sophomore introductory film/darkroom classes up to graduate level thesis/exhibition courses. He recently retired having been nominated and awarded Professor Emeritus.
As a fine art photographer his work has been published in: Stone Canoe, A Journal of Arts, Literature and Social Commentary, Black and White Photography: Manifest Visions/An International Collection, The Total Tattoo Book and Photo Metro magazine to name just a few. His exhibition list is extensive and Tom has numerous photographic images in both Public and Private Collections.
His Artist-in-Residence experience at Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in 2023 was his first residency.
Thomas Santelli Retablo, (There have been cases...), 2023
DOMINICK SANTISE
Dominick Santise is a Hudson Valley based artist who has studied the ever changing landscape between our natural world and the industrial creations of man for over two decades. Combining the poetic and the prosaic in a multi-disciplinary practice of illustration and graphic design, he is a classically elegant designer and an expressive draughtsman, animator and photographer.
Dominick’s work embraces the realities of every day settings as a spring board to explore new symbols and graphics that connect the seemingly mundane with the beauty and depth of the world around us. He has focused on finding the stories that exist in these overlooked moments, exposing patterns in our daily lives through his layered scenes of nature and humanity. Dominick is a founding member of the illustration co-operative Studio 1482 and has designed books and logos for the past 20 years. He is the author/illustrator of several books including Beneath the Tree, The Earth Still Shakes, No One Listens, and Stop The Press and is the creator of the eco-agricultural project Terra Messor. His work has been exhibited by the Mystic Seaport Museum, Emerge Gallery, Olive Free Library, The Loft at Millbrook, the Cultural Alliance of Western Connecticut, Lotus Works, Super Secret Projects and Mills Pond Gallery.
Dominick Santise Behind the Tractor
FREDA SHAPIRO
My artwork is a journey that celebrates nature's transient beauty and explores her profound emotional resonance. My current themes are often taken from my wooded walks during New England's winter reveal: nature's overlooked, her forgotten, the fallen or dying, or her detritus, whose details are as rich as a saturated spring rebirth or a symphonic fall color change. I seek out what stands firm in the face of harsh conditions; capture the core of the living that holds fast and allude to what’s hidden below a cold surface; document the dead, rise them up for reconsideration. I see this as deeply related to our current political climate, global issues of climate change damage, and societal disruption. As nature goes, so goes the world around us.
More of my work can be seen in 2024 solo shows: June 15 - October 6 at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum and October 10 - December 10 at Boston's FP3 Gallery.
Freda Shapiro, Winter Yew, 2023
ANNA SHOWERS-CRUSER
In 2023, "Symbiotic Vessel (Between My Thumb and Their Thallus)" was an intuitive form in Byrdcliffe greenware, botanically-tinted bio-plastic, local lichen, spit, and stone. In their second life as "Symbiotic Vessel (Alter Altar)", glaze recipes and synthetic fabric suggest humble material alchemy that may resist expectations and embody non-binary play.
Anna Showers-Cruser (they/them) is an artist, educator, and herbalist working across object-making traditions to propose hybrid alternatives to persisting hegemonic binaries, including sick vs. well, body vs. object, and synthetic vs. organic. Systems of queerness, humor, ecology, hospitality, and materialities of so-called “invisible” disability are intrinsic to their creative practice. ASC has been an artist-in-residence with Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, VisArts Richmond, Chicago Artists Coalition, Vermont Studio Center, and Annmarie Arts. With roots in Appalachia’s Central Plateau and the Blue Ridge, they hold an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago, and a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Anna Showers-Cruser Symbiotic Vessel (Alter Altar), 2023
COLLEEN RAE SMILEY
A Game of Telephone is a captivating piece from Colleen Rae Smiley’s series
Wayward Sisters - Rebellion Dogs Our Every Step. Crafted from vintage white cotton gloves, vintage satin ribbon, fringe, silk/rayon velvet, and backed with black linen and cotton batting, this artwork draws inspiration from the seances prevalent during the Suffrage movement. The round shape mirrors the circular arrangement of seances, where hands are placed on the table.
The vintage unfurled ribbon evokes the appearance of pressed flowers or sentimental mementos, reflecting the sentimentality and scrapbooking practices of the time. Symbolically, the white gloves represent purity, while the green ribbon symbolizes hope, both emblematic colors of the suffragette movement.
The series Wayward Sisters - Rebellion Dogs Our Every Step delves into the intertwined history of Spiritualism and the Women's Suffrage movement, revealing how Spiritualism empowered women to challenge societal norms and assert their rights. Originating in response to traditional religion's disregard for death's significance, Spiritualism provided solace and empowerment, especially for women viewed as inherently more spiritual. As Spiritualism gained ground, women ascended as mediums, aligning seamlessly with the burgeoning women's rights movement. The synchronous birth of both movements in 1848, rooted in central/western NY, fostered mutual support and synergy. This nexus became the cradle of activism, where publications, public speaking, and grassroots efforts catalyzed social change. The series draws from historical symbols and Suffragette colors, leveraging lesser-known facts such as the covert nature of suffragette gatherings, often disguised as seances. It celebrates the audacity and resilience of women who challenged societal norms, utilizing vibrant colors and symbolism to pay homage to Spiritualist suffragettes' enduring impact on social reform. Through these artistic expressions, the series honors their indelible contribution to the ongoing struggle for equality and justice.
Colleen Rae Smiley A Game of Telephone, 2024
BRITLAND TRACY
No Man's Land is a multifaceted character study of contemporary, conflicting expressions of masculinity in Marfa, Texas, a remote and mythologized town located in the Chihuahuan Desert.
What began as a ranching community with a train depot transformed into a military base throughout both World Wars, then a minimalist art oasis, and eventually a performative tourist destination with a housing crisis, located two hundred miles from the nearest city and sixty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Its population of 1800 people belies its larger-than-life reputation, which was built on the mystique of Donald Judd and James Dean and big-skies-and-cowboys blockbusters. In reality, it comprises ranchers, writers, artists, drifters, service workers, border patrollers, park rangers, adoberos, activists, expats, retired billionaires, rocket scientists, musicians, chefs, land developers, and a swinging door of visitors who share, by choice or by circumstance, a common experience of scarcity and expansiveness in a place many call 'the middle of nowhere'. Locals describe Marfa as a state of mind; a purgatory; a bardo; a vortex; a desert island of misfit toys; an impossible dream. I see it as a place where men come to find something greater than themselves, or to hide from the world in plain sight.
After residing in this town for three years, during the Covid-19 pandemic that cemented isolation and the Supreme Court ruling that placed uterine reproductive rights in a vice grip, I began photographing the living quarters, personal possessions, and private writings of its male-identifying residents, with permission, searching for signifiers that upheld or upended current stereotypes of patriarchal, hegemonic masculinity. I call this process 'sanctioned voyeurism' and I use it to present a multiplicity of shapes that American masculinity is taking, while positioning Marfa as a pressurized microcosm of its complicated evolution.
This project combines collaged images of domestic spaces with found personal notes and journal entries to reimagine Marfa as a theatrical playground, a stage on which hypermasculine, nationalistic ideations of freedom and grandeur give way to interior worlds of vulnerability, aggression, enlightenment, obfuscation, and existential reckoning.
Britland Tracy Trophies (No Man's Land), 2023
KATI VILIM
Kati Vilim, visual artist, was born in Budapest, Hungary, and works in New York City.
Kati Vilim is an abstract painter, her non-referential paintings create an experience of a playful geometry, imbued with language and culture -- a mix of conceptual op-art and geometric abstraction. Her media range from traditional techniques as oil painting, to site -specific multimedia installation and digital animation.
Kati Vilim earned her MFA from University of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary and Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ.
Her work has been exhibited within the United States and in Europe, including the exhibition: The Geometric Unconscious (2012-13), held at the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, NE, and at galleries and institutions such as the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers, Newark; Pen and Brush Gallery, NYC; Mucciaccia Gallery, NYC; Vasarely Museum, Budapest, Hungary; and the Monmouth Museum, Lincroft NJ.
She was a recipient of Express Newark, a Rutgers Newark residency, Byrdcliffe Guild Artist Residency in Woodstock, NY, and the ESKFF residency at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.
Kati Vilim Painting 456, 2024
DAVID YANG
A landscape made from life is evocative, hyper-active in the sense that if done well, it can trigger an extreme sensory reaction in the viewer.
Landscape painting is powerful in that it has the potential to suddenly and forcefully evoke a memory of a forest clearing that took your breath away as a child, or the first time you stopped and noticed how beautiful dappled light really is - it’s like a bluetooth device that activates a sensory response in anyone who is open to its signal. I see plein air painting as a ritualistic process. It’s a way to empathize with nature and a chance to allow myself to be led purely by instinct. It’s meditation through movement, not unlike yoga or rock climbing or Tai Chi. It is a steady, quiet, and repetitive practice that begins the moment I set out to paint and ends only once I’m done taking down my makeshift setup; that is to say, the time I spend applying paint to a surface makes up only a portion of my holistic idea of the plein air painting process. In some ways, plein air painting is a test of discipline and endurance. I must be ready to brave the elements, adapting to rain, wind, or snow. It can be difficult to bring my materials out into the world, setting up my work station on whatever meager surface I have available to me (be it a tree stump, boulder, or, when I’m lucky, a park bench). When I do stay in my studio and paint from photos, I can’t help but be aware of how much easier and quicker the painting process becomes. At the end of the day, however, what always draws me back to plein air is the directly transcriptive, evocative, and hyperactive type of painting that one simply can’t get through any other means.
David Yang Lord Slug, 2023
ARINA ZHURAVLEVA
Arina Zhuravleva is an interdisciplinary countryless artist. Arina is currently a student at Bard College, studying the art of filmmaking, particularly focusing on poetic and diary film. Her artistic approach encompasses a wide range of modalities, from traditional to digital mediums, including photography, street art, and video art.
Arina Zhuravleva Nomad’s Diary, 2023
