Exciting news!
My painting – MUSTANG DANCE – will be included in an exhibition called Horse Power! taking place at Main Street Arts, 20 W. Main Street, Clifton Springs, New York 14432. The exhibition begins on June 6, 2026 and will run through July 15, 2026.
The artist reception will be held from 3:00 – 6:00 PM on Saturday June 6, 2026.
Normal hours of operation for Main Street Arts: Tuesday & Wednesday 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM, Thursday, Friday & Saturday 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM.
Seventy-four New York state-based artists comprise the current MINY art exhibition at Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, NY, including my middle school art teacher circa the 1970s, Mrs, Joyce Homan!
Her piece, “COVID Bubbles” is a watercolor.
(From the Schweinfurth website)
Jurors
A New Hartford native, Gary Sczerbaniewicz currently lives and works in Buffalo. He earned degrees at Munson-Williams Proctor Institute School of Art, Alfred University, and the University at Buffalo.
“My recent sculptural work investigates the concept of cognitive dissonance as articulated through an architectural lexicon,” he says on his website. “I am drawn to create works in which an unknown, sudden, violent event has rendered a space inert, transforming it from its original intended function into a hybrid and liminal zone. A recovering child of both Catholicism and the Cold War, my works possess an acute fondness for cultural marginalia: the post-apocalyptic, the science-fictional, the Fortean, the weird and the eerie (as articulated by theorist Mark Fisher), the occult, and the many bewildering worlds of alternative history and conspiracy theory.
Sczerbaniewicz has had solo exhibits in Buffalo, Niagara, Philadephia, Connecticut, Delaware, and Florida, and has been included in group exhibitions in Toronto, New York City, Cleveland, Indiana, and Texas. His entry to Made in NY 2020 at the Schweinfurth won Best in Show award.
Theda Sandiford, mixed media artist
Based in Jersey City, NJ, Theda Sandiford creates multi-disciplinary experiences that provide a safe space to explore themes such as equity and inclusion, sustainability, and personal well-being.
“Using personal conflict as a starting point, I juxtapose various fibers with a variety of found materials using free form weaving, coiling, knotting, wrapping, and jewelry-making techniques,” Sandiford told Artwork Archive. “Meticulously collected materials, transformed by their collective memory become ‘social fabric’ weaving together contemporary issues and personal narratives.”
Her work has been selected for Excellence in Fibers, curated by Fiber Art Now; displayed publicly in installations in New Jersey, New York, Florida, and more; and displayed in solo exhibits in New Jersey, New York City, Chicago, and more.
Kevin Larmon is a retired professor emeritus and Program Coordinator Art, Design, and Transmedia in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. He received a BFA from Harpur College at SUNY Binghamton, and currently resides in Upstate New York.
For over three decades, Kevin Larmon has received critical acclaim for creating paintings that lyrically explore the divide between abstraction and referential imagery. His work has been associated with the post-conceptualism and neo-conceptual art movements, which were prominent aspects of exhibitions of the early 80s East Village Gallery Nature Morte and with critics/curators Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo shaping the nature of painting after the rise of conceptual art.
His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the recipient of an Atlantic-Pacific Fellowship and a Pollack Krasner Foundation grant.
Pattern and texture is at play here. So many paintings, prints and mixed-media pieces are visually embellished with intricate segments of color, while macrame and other crafts, including crochet, embroidery and weaving adds the tactile component, which creates a cohesive bond to the exhibit. After perusing the jurors’ individual dossiers, it all makes sense.
It is a wonderful show. The art is for sale. Made in New York 2023 opened last night and continues through May 28, 2023.
The museum is open Wednesdays-Saturdays 10:00 am – 5:00 pm and Sundays 1:00 – 5:00 pm. Visit their website for details.
Every year the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center does a Made in New York (MINY) juried exhibition. This year’s show – what can I say? A lot of eggs and phallic symbols, am I right? OMG – round circular objects with the center piece sculpture filled with actual eggs. And every other sculpture is sporting the dildo-esqueness of a you-know-what.
LOL, so great! I wonder if this was the intent, or am I being fresh?
Sixty-nine artists were selected….
Actually, the great thing about this exhibition is that artists must produce new work for it and everything looks very fresh in that sense of the word. It is all so colorful and curvy, clean, linear, firm and innocently provocative.
It’s a great show!
MINY will be on display through August 7, 2021. Check out videos of the artists sharing their respective visions here.
Jurors for this year’s exhibition:
(from the Schweinfurth website)
Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists, editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books, and the Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution. Louden’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Weisman Art Museum, National Gallery of Art and held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
George Afedzi Hughes is originally from Ghana and studied painting at The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, College of Art, Kumasi, Ghana, where he earned a BA in Art: Painting and Drawing (1989) and an MA in Art Education (1991). He later received an MFA in Painting and Drawing (2001) from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, U.S.A. His paintings, performances, and installations have been featured in several museum exhibitions: Perez Museum, Royal Ontario Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Football Museum, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and Museum voor Zuid-en Noord-Beveland. The following museums have collections of his work: Royal Museum of Ontario, Harn Museum of Art, Iwalewahaus and the Ghana National Museum.
Hannah Frieser is the Executive Director for the Center for Photography at Woodstock, an arts organization that features exhibitions, residencies and other artist-oriented programming. With over twenty years of leadership experience in the visual arts, she has curated countless solo and group exhibitions with contemporary photographers, including Suzanne Opton, Adam Magyar and Barry Anderson. Her essays have been featured in monographs and publications, such as Contact Sheet, Exposure, and Nueva Luz. Prior to joining CPW, she was Director of Light Work in Syracuse, NY.
MINY Artists
Carolyn Abrams
Liz Alderman
Robin Arnold
Patricia Bacon
Christina Bang
Howard Bartle
Madeline Bartley
Mary Begley
Marna Bell
Tammy Renée Brackett
Paul Brandwein
Lauren Bristol
Andrea Buckvold
Susan Byrnes
Carlos Caballero-Perez
Nancy Callahan
Eva Capobianco
Stephen Carlson
Kevin Carr
Tara Charles
Sage Churchill-Foster
Fernando Colón-González
Charles Compo
Cynthia Cratsley
Carole D’Inverno
Lisa DeLoria Weinblatt
KP Devlin
Lisa Donneson
Audrey Dowling
Robert Doyle
Sharon Draghi
Leonard Eichler
John Fitzsimmons
Faithanne Flesher
John Galt
Jacq Germanow
Cora Jane Glasser
Julia Graziano
Raechelle Hajduk
Barbara Hart
Laural Hartman
David Higgins
Lee Hoag
George Hrycun
Bob Ievers
Emily Kenas
Dale Klein
Tom Kredo
Timothy Massey
Becky McNeill
Valerie Patterson
Beth Pedersen
Judith Plotner
Rose Popper
Jim Quinn
Steve Rossi
Amy Schnitzer
Catherine Shuman Miller
James Skvarch
Jason Smith
Jean K. Stephens
Susan Stuart
Jane Verostek
Kim Waale
Mary Pat Wager
Shari Werner
Katharine Wood
Hope Zaccagni
Leah Zinder
The Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center is located at 205 Genesee Street, Auburn, New York 13021. For more information, including hours of operation, call (315) 255-1553 or visit their website here.
The Quilts = Art = Quilts exhibition at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center is up until January 10, 2021, so you have plenty of time to see it. It is only the second installation since the mandatory Covid-19 shutdowns. The Made in New York show was their toe-in-water – they have upped their safety and security measures to include weekend visits.
Not sure if a lot of people know the museum is open. It is – and it is BEAUTIFUL. A wonderful experience, especially when you practically have the place to yourself and you can enjoy that intimate discovery of art elements – line, shape, color, texture and size, while appearing incognito.
Only some of these quilts are standard sizes – the rest are meant as wall decoration. Iconography runs the gamut from portraits and landscapes to the abstract. Traditional quilting techniques offer a stepping stone to what is and what can be.
This is a juried exhibition cultivated from a nationwide call for entries. Seventy-one quilts were selected.
*from the SMAC website –
Jurors
Valerie S. Goodwin is a mixed media fiber artist and architect whose works of fine art are included in museum and private collections. Most of her work is inspired by a love of aerial views of landscapes and cities. Many of her quilts are based on maps.
Goodwin’s art has moved through various stages from traditional quilting to an interest in abstract expressionism and, currently it is inspired by real and imaginary landscapes and cities. In some cases, her work shows an architectural sense of space with an archaeological perspective. In others, the network of the city and its built form is more prominent. These compositions work on several levels, from close up and far away as if one was looking at it from above.
She received degrees in architecture from Washington University and Yale University. Her award-winning work has been widely published and exhibited. She also lectures and gives workshops nationally and internationally. Currently she teaches architectural design at Florida A&M University.
Fiber artist Mary Lou Alexander’s two great passions are art and nature. She grew up in Northeast Ohio playing along the streams and paths of a nearby forest, drawing, and stitching together fabric scraps in her Godmother’s sewing room. She studied art and art history in college, but spent much of her adult life as a biologist, examining the ecology and reproductive behavior of small South American monkeys. She earned a PhD from Kent State University in Biological Anthropology, and holds an international Diploma from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. She taught at Northeastern Ohio College of Medicine and in the Department of Biological Sciences at Kent State University.
In mid-career she resigned her tenured professorship to return to art and stitching full time. Over the year she had mounted 5 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries, and she has been represented in many juried exhibitions in the US and Europe including Artist as Quiltmaker, Quilt National, Quilts=Art=Quilts, Best of Ohio, Form Not Function, Focus Fiber, and others. Her work was invited to be included in Color Improvisations, which toured Europe in 2010 through 2013 in the Inaugural Exhibition at Edison Price Gallery in New York City and Material Pulses, which is touring the Us through 2023. Her quilts are part of many private and public collections including Marbaum Collection at the San Joe Museum of Quilts and Textiles. She has curated several exhibitions for the Butler Institute of American Art and written reviews for Fiber Arts Magazine. Natural phenomena remain a major inspiration for her work.
The exhibiting artists are as follows:
Margaret Abramshe, Geneviève Attinger, Bobbi Baugh, Deb Berkebile, Margaret Black, Ellen Blalock, Holly Brackmann, Peggy Brown, Betty Busby, Libby Cerullo, Shinhee Chin, Gregory Climer, Tyrus Clutter, Holly Cole, Shannon Conley, Petra Fallaux, Victoria Findlay Wolfe, Diana Fox, Kerri Green, Debbie Grifka, Carol Grotrian, Betty Hahn, Barbara Oliver Hartman, Jeanne Hewell-Chambers, Virginia Holloway, Judy Hooworth, Beth Porter Johnson, Noel Keith, Natalya Khorover, Judy Kirpich, Elke Klein, Karen Krieger, Denise Labadie, Judy Langille, Susan Lapham, Niraja Lorenz, Valerie Maser-Flanagan, Alicia Merrett, Kestrel Michaud, Susie Monday, Kathy Nida, Frauke Palmer, Julia Pfaff, Heather Pregger, Wen Redmond, Denise Roberts, Irene Roderick, Barbara Schulman, Karen Schulz, Candace Hackett Shively, Carolyn Skei, Brenda Gael Smith, Gerri Spilka, Lee Sproul, Victoria van der Laan, Cynthia Vogt
The Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center is located at 205 Genesee Street, Auburn, New York 13021. They are open Tuesdays-Saturdays from 10AM – 5PM and Sundays from 1PM – 5PM. Call (315) 255-1553 for more information or email at mail@schweinfurthartcenter.org.
The latest incarnation of the Made in New York show at Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, New York opened last night. It runs through May 12, 2019. This is a juried exhibition. This year Anne Novado and Marie Via selected the pieces.
Sixty artists (all of whom are New York state residents) are included here. The work is in the gallery’s Main Gallery space, which includes several smaller rooms within the space. The overall theme seemed to be one of nature and the idea that spring is in the air. I saw predominately yellows and oranges in color palettes, and a number of pieces with trees, as well as birds and bees as subject matter.
It is currently spring in New York, so this does make sense, although no one told Mother Nature, who decided to smack us with blizzard-like conditions for the drive home.
Several artists received monetary prizes for their work including John Fitzsimmons who received Best in Show for his oil painting titled “The Voices of Those” (below left).
Other winners included David Higgins, First Prize for “Loomis” (below), Stefan Zoller, Second Prize for “Skeletal Trees”, Russell Serrianne, Juror’s Choice for “Continuum”, and Faithanne Flesher, Juror’s Choice for “Floodfires”.
The gallery is hosting several events during this exhibition. On Saturday, April 27, 2019, Stefan Zoller will demonstrate an image transfer technique and on Saturday, May 11, 2019, Sally Hootnick will demonstrate working with wax. Both presentations will begin at 1:00 pm on their respective dates. Other events: First Friday celebrations on Friday, April 5, 2019 and Friday, May 3, 2019, and several educational activities. See their website for more details here. We are heading into better, non-white-knuckle driving conditions, which will make the trip to Auburn (about 40 minutes from Syracuse) a satisfying one. It is sunny with dry roads as we speak (read: as I write).
There is more art too. The upstairs gallery is the temporary home of Double Vision, paintings by Pennie Brantley and Robert Morgan. Willson Cummer’s photography show, titled Common Places, currently occupies the Gallery Julius.
Point of Contact gallery is located in The Warehouse building, 350 W. Fayette Street (near the intersection with West Street) in Syracuse, New York. It is an annex of Syracuse University located in the Armory Square area of town. Its mission is to provide an arts dialogue with the community focusing on Latin American culture.
In the summer, however, the gallery opens its doors to a juried exhibition, welcoming all local artists to participate. Currently, Sum Art 2017 is up until mid-August. The art reception was last night.
For some reason, every time I enter this gallery, it starts out feeling like Dr. Who’s Tardis – bigger on the inside. Last night, as I winded my way around the exhibit taking quick snapshots here and there around the many patrons who attended finding myself in the second room and nearly impaling myself on a tall wooden sculpture, I realized that idea is an illusion.
It isn’t so big and yet, this show really packs a punch. So much to delight in – to see. Large scale works and tiny collage pieces. Realism in both painting and ceramics juxtaposed with pricey abstracts. There was something for every individual aesthetic.
Last year I bailed on this show, lol. I made up for it last night, even getting an Instagram fashion post out of the dealio – thanks to contributing artist Penny Santy (photo cred)!
Maybe next year I will go a step further and enter my artwork…. (???)
Gallery Hours: The gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday, 12-5 PM to the general public.
A lot happened last Thursday evening. The third Thursday of the month has become synonymous with art receptions here in Syracuse, NY. And of course, there are all sorts of social things going on including some that suddenly popped up.
Sandwiched in between my art reception at The Syracuse Tech Garden and the vigil, and subsequent wind down at Delphia’s in Chittenango for my dear friend Lynn Kurz (where I met her beautiful family for the first time), was a pop up art show at the Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse, NY.
It was a juried show filled with some of the most incredible art by local artists! My friends Angela Arrey-Wastavino and Davana Robedee showcased their work, as well as several others – some work I’d never seen displayed locally before. Really brilliant stuff!
There was a silent auction for a series of 8″ x 8″ pieces made by the exhibitors. I won this piece by Dana Bonn called Neon! I love it because of the numbers on it – love text/numbers in art anyhow but this is 768. Seven is just a lucky number and six-eight is my birthday (June 8th) so that is really cool!
The show is already down, I’m sorry to report. It was literally there and gone in like two days. Such a shame, but I am so glad I got a chance to witness it. Art in Syracuse is nothing to be afraid of – I mean, for those of you non-artists who think the scene is some dark underworld type thing. It is welcoming. I feel that part of my job as an artist and art blogger is to introduce you to these events. While this one may be over, another will surely suddenly pop up again in the future!
