I had the opportunity to preview the Schweinfurth Art Center’s Member Show 2025, on display now through October 11, 2025.
I am a member of the museum but I did not participate this year. They hang everything submitted. It is really astonishing how cohesive the show is – a lot of artists using blue, for example.
Address: 205 Genesee St. Auburn, NY 13021, United States.
 Phone: 315.255.1553
 Email: mail@schweinfurthartcenter.org
Click here for the list of exhibiting artists.
Here is my last project for the 2023-2024 school year and also the final project of my thirty-year career: pencil-only portrait drawings of teachers on Arches drawing paper by my eighth grade Studio in Art students (at Chittenango Middle School, Chittenango, New York).
I’d displayed the drawings on the magnetic wall boards in my classroom because the hallway walls were getting slippery from the humidity of the not air-conditioned school in the middle of June.
Students were taught how to place and measure the facial features. We used 2H pencils for the contour line drawings.
Shading was done with 2B pencils. The trick is to shade the entire face with a light shade. While dealing with that medium value, students were able to erase with a kneaded eraser to get the highlights then use pressure to get their darks dark. Except for the ones who didn’t want to.
I am grateful to those students because I did what I could to educate them. Their refusal helped convince me that I made the right decision to retire. I never thought I would be anything less than youthful, but I guess I must admit I am of a different generation and the gap just started to feel incredibly vast – kids these days, am I right???
Good-bye, yellow brick road.
And thanks, for the memories. It’s all just a dream to me now.
Yulia Levkovich facilitated a class at the local community college – the focus? Portraits. Specifically women painting portraits of other women, Utica residents who have inspired them in some way – teachers, doctors, lawyers, mothers….
The result is this exhibition, currently on view through April 6, 2024 at Mohawk Valley Center for the Arts, 401-403 Canal Place, Little Falls, New York.
There are two galleries at this location. The other is filled with consigned objects – paintings, ceramics, sculptures, accessories and other trinkets all by regional artists.
Mohawk Valley Center for the Arts is open Thursdays-Saturdays. Call (315) 823-0808 or email director@mohawkvalleyarts.org for more information including any inquiries regarding upcoming art shows.
You can find Coming Home, a photography collection by Doug Muir, in the Robineau Gallery (first floor) at the Everson Museum of Art. Muir passed away in 2016 just as the San Francisco Museum had aquired several dozens of his work for their permanent collection.
Muir grew up in Syracuse but spent his adult life in California. The photographs depict images taken on both coasts, some of family and others not, but all articulating the American slice-of-life experience through the decades.
His daughter helped curate this show, sorting through journals documenting the artist’s journey, some of which are displayed alongside images from newspaper clippings and baseball-style trading cards (showcasing photographers), and other paraphernalia that helps us discover the inner dialogue of this new-to-me photographer.
His nephew took this iPhone photo of me, because these days we are all photographers. Doug Muir’s equipment was more the Brownie ilk.
Doug Muir – Coming Home will be on display through September 3, 2023. Visit the Everson’s web-site for more information including hours of operation.
https://www.localsyr.com/community/the-conversation/the-conversation-david-and-heather-muir/
My Art-8 students viewed the paintings of Canadian artist Daniel Bergeron, specifically, his installation in Regent Park in Toronto.
Then they painted the teachers and staff at our school! The steps were as follows:
This is my sample (above). We used acrylic paint.
Here are the results. They are on display in the school library. I’ve got one more class finishing up tomorrow for a total of fifty-five paintings. So fun! <3
The Kirkland Art Center in Clinton, New York is celebrating its sixtieth year! They’ve invited artists who have had exhibitions there in the past – both founding members and recent exhibitors – to be a part of their anniversary show, which runs June 8, 2021-July 8, 2021.
The art reception was today from 1-4pm. There are forty-nine artists represented, among them, my friends Penny Santy and Linda Bigness (pictured). Most of the pieces are for sale.
The Kirkland Art Center is located at 9 1/2 East Park Row, Clinton, New York 13323.
They are open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 am to 2 pm, and on Saturdays from 1 pm to 4 pm.
Call (315) 853-8871 for more information
KAC 60 years of art exhibitors –
Stephen Arnison, Constance Avery, John Bentham, Linda Bigness, Jan Burke, Howard Chaney, Edward Christiana, Karen Christiansen, Robert Cimbalo, Frank Cittadino, Sally Clark, Sylvia de Swaan, Barbara Decker, Laura Diddle, Sebastian Domenico, Kathy Donovan, Charlie Fisher, Jan Fisher, John Gardner, Frank Jacobs, Pinny Kuckel, Jessie Landecker, Gregory Lawler, Mary Gaylord Loy, John Loy, Jim McDermid, Roger Moore, Ralph Murray, Gina Murtaugh, Stephen Perrone, Vartan Poghosian, Easton Pribble, Tim Rand, Marietta Raposo,Bill Salzillo, Penny Santy, Stella Scarano, Alba Scott, Sheila Smith,Gail Strout, Joseph Trovato, Frank Viola, Frank Vlossak, Heidi von Bergen, John von Bergen, Shirley B. Waters, Rainer Maria Wehner, Doug Whitfield, Jonathan Woodward
The Everson Museum of Art is open! I mean, it’s been open – I just didn’t know it. I was able to catch the tail end of the Lacey McKinney show, Reconfiguration. The Everson Bulletin states the show’s run ended on the 24th so…lucky me and my friend Penny.
*The show has now been extended to February 28, 2021 so…lucky you!
I love the discourse between Penny Santy and me when we see exhibitions together. We don’t always like the same pieces but we understand each other’s point of view.
McKinney’s paintings are oil and acrylic. I suspect the acrylic was either a means to create texture or the underlying Frankenthaler-esque washes in some of the female populated landscapes.
Penny loved these new-technique-for-the-artist “cyanotypes” (above) but they reminded me of a crafty high school art project – female body parts minus vagina, lol, that is too mean, sorry Lacey, but, I felt like these were a bit too safe and they read more like studies than finished pieces. I did admire the size relationships though. And in person, the blue hues are lovely and more nuanced than the photograph suggests.
The larger portrait/landscape mash-ups were far more interesting to me. They offered visual collage in a successful way – female as mountain, eyes averted so as not to become a focal point – they had an ethereal beauty to them. She is quite proficient in the rendering of the subject matter, as well as holding a cerebral allocation of the structure of her iconography.
These two (above) were my favorites. I loved the softness of the colorations and the rhythm in the compositions. They whisper emotion in a powerful feminine way with subtle colorations of glaze-infused shadow. Perfection!
This piece (above) reminded me of Marilyn Monroe, but that may be because I had just watched a documentary on Arthur Miller, ex-husband of MM, and one on the fashion designer Dries Van Noten, Belgium fashion designer who created a line of menswear with a variety of images of MM silk-screened on jackets and shirts.
The literature states that the artist selected images from magazines and reconfigured them stealing fragments of different women juxtaposed as either friend or foe. So, maybe?
This collection is on view in the Robineau gallery on the first floor of the museum. I believe there were only about five other people in the entire museum today when we visited. Plenty of social distancing room to ruminate on this new work. Call (315) 474-6064 for more information.
EVERSON MUSEUM OF ART HOURS:
| SUNDAY 12-5 MONDAY CLOSED TUESDAY CLOSED WEDNESDAY CLOSED | THURSDAY 12-5 (12-8 EVERY 3RD THURS) FRIDAY 12-5 SATURDAY 10-5 |
Here are some of the celebrity portraits my 8th grade Studio in Art students (from Chittenango Middle School) finished back in March. I didn’t display them because I was saving them for the school fair, which never happened.
I allow students to pick almost anyone – meaning anyone “appropriate”, and this year you will see a variety from sports, performing arts, the art world and social media (and one grand-dad). Two Steve Harveys, lol. He wins as most popular this time.
They are pencil drawings on Canton paper.
Joy Engelhart was the January and February 2020 artist exhibiting at the Community Library of DeWitt and Jamesville. (5110 Jamesville Road, DeWitt, New York 13078). I caught the tail end of the show on Sunday.
She is a “signature” member of the Central New York Watercolor Society. These pieces are watercolor and mixed-media, a combo of portraits and still-lifes. I am assuming that she will take down today. The library opens at 10 AM. Call (315) 446-3578 for the deets.
Library Hours
| Monday – Thursday | 10 AM – 9 PM |
| Friday | 10 AM – 5 PM |
| Saturday | 10 AM – 5 PM* |
| Sunday | 1 PM – 5 PM* |
*Summer hours:
| Saturday | 10 AM – 2 PM |
| Sunday | CLOSED |
Services limited 15 minutes before closing
The four upstairs galleries at the Everson Museum of Art (401 Harrison Street, Syracuse, New York 13202) are filled with treasures, some of which I have seen many times over the decades – but not like this. Elizabeth Dunbar, director and CEO, has a way of pairing paintings and ceramics with a keen eye that makes everything come alive and feel fresh again.
It is this new perspective that breathes love into the exhibition, A Legacy of Firsts: The Everson Collects. It showcases the museums over one hundred year history, presenting the cohesion via an American thread. The exhibition honors the museum’s legacy and in turn reveres the decisions made by previous curators and directors. I love this credence to respect. It feels welcoming. It feels like family. It feels like home. As she says in her message in the winter 2020 Everson Bulletin, [the museum is] “For artists. For community. For everyone.”
This is an historical trek that begins at the top of the spiral staircase with pieces purchased around 1911 when the museum was known as the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts – impressionistic landscapes, portraits and still-lifes displayed in ornate golden frames coupled with the ceramic pieces of the day. Adelaide Alsop Robineau was a local potter who corresponded with and met the museum’s director at that time, Fernando Carter, as she frequented the facility back then – her intricately carved vessels were the first pieces purchased for what became a premier ceramics collection.
There are over 11,000 items in the Everson’s collection! As the show progresses into the second chamber, you are jolted by bold colors. This room is filled with large-scale abstractions and colorful pottery to mix and match. Lee Krasner’s painting is displayed above her husband’s, an early Jackson Pollack. I love the similarity in their styles.
There is a display of transmedia here as well, but the videos don’t translate well in a photograph.
The next gallery is familiar in that the museum purchased pieces from exhibitions from their recent past. This (below) is a piece by Vanessa German.
And I believe that (above) is an Angela FraleighÂ
The fourth gallery space is heaviest on the ceramic collection. It is such a bold move to see these pieces sans glass or other protective shielding, but that is what makes them so compelling. Textural items created to be touched that one must not touch within reach – when I visited the museum as a child, all the ceramics were under glass in the do not touch space, as though they came to the museum to die, lol. Now they are sooooo alive!
This show is visual candy. I love the angles of the presentations, the way pieces connect, that flow, rhythm and the sheer beauty of the artwork. It’s a wonderful journey through yesteryear and beyond. <3
A Legacy of Firsts:Â The Everson Collects continues through March 22, 2020.
The Everson Museum of Art is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Hours of operation: Wednesday, Friday and Sunday noon – 5 PM, Thursdays noon – 8 PM and Saturdays 10 AM – 5 PM. There is a sliding scale admission fee (free for members). Visit their web-site for the deets.  www.everson.org
