The Village of Fleischmanns will be holding its Regular Village Board Meeting on June 9th, 2025, at 6:00 pm, at Skene Memorial Library located on 1017 Main St, Fleischmanns, NY 12430
6/8/25
6/6/25
Why Art? - Breathing Room
BREATHING ROOM - Beginning on June 7th at 10 AM the public are invited to the kick off of PUBLIC ART PROJECTS - SUMMER 2025 at Birdsong Farm, in Hamden. The four month project is a collaboration with Institute for Cultural Activism International (I.C.A.I. or The Institute) and Birdsong Farm.
Regional & International Artists For Public Art and Conversations
The project is not as much about showing art as it is about using art, interactive installations and other aesthetic devices to promote conversations about our current social and environmental, regional and global situations.
In BREATHING ROOM visitors enter the Birdsong Farm Gallery where a 24 foot long sealed glass enclosure houses hundreds of green, oxygen producing plants. Long bright blue breathing tubes and comfort-fit surgical sanitary masks attached to the glass enclosure, enable participants to exchange breaths with the oxygen generating plants. Their exhaled CO2 feeds the plants which in-turn transform the CO2 into O2, overnight. On the gallery walls, projected slow motion films of people breathing from mobile FRESH AIR units in America, Switzerland, Germany and France, in the 1990’s, appear. Visitors can also watch televised news reports on monitors inside the glass sculpture.
Through this immersive experience visitors may become mindful of their interdependency with plants and each other. The FRESH AIR Sculpture and BREATHING ROOM will continue until early July.
Don’t we all need a little Breathing Room these days?
PUBLIC ART PROJECTS - SUMMER 2025 Program
The four month project includes exhibitions, artists talks, events, poetry film screenings, yoga & meditation.
“The Institute”
is a non-profit art project utilizing socially engaged art and cultural practices in the service of creative and social evolution (cultural activism). To activate regional and international conversations among a diverse cross section of society “Institute” leverages the following cultural communication models:
A bi-weekly, WIOX Radio Show: TUNING FORK FM Regional & online (40 shows since 2023)
Weekly articles for Mountain Eagle Newspaper: the ICAI column WHY ART? (45+ articles since 2023)
Monthly TUNING FORK LIVE Zoom broadcasts with artists – bringing regional artists and audiences in dialogue with international artists (50 episodes since 2020)
Catskill Film Series: Film screenings & special cross-silo conversations with people from different walks of life, not limited to conventional art/culture & spirituality communities;
Public Participatory Art Events: regionally & internationally;
In-Person & Online Meditation Classes and Retreats, bringing contemplative cultural communities together regionally, & internationally;
Artist-led Workshops & Residencies: by regional & international artists.
Institute Backstory
ICAI’s collaborative work began in 2018 with a series of public art interactions related to works of both founder/creator, artist/filmmaker John Halpern from 1977-2015 and the sculptor Emily Marie Harris - collaborator and ICAI founder. Triggered by the necessity for community engagement during the Covid Pandemic Lockdown. In 2022, “Institute” was legally established as a 501 (C) 3.
Institute in Delhi
Harris and Halpern first held meditation retreats at William Duke’s Streamside Yoga, in Andes, before the pandemic. Their last retreat at Streamside ended three days before the pandemic broke out. They thenfound a 5 acre property with beautiful barns and stable built by locals Betsy and Brian Clark for their material art and ICAI events and moved in in 2022. They are SUNY Delhi advisory board members to the Liberal Arts Department, they collaborate with regional organizations and venues like Bushel, Delhi, Good Taste Epicurean, Franklin, Delhi Community Church, Osmos Station, Stamford, Walton’s Ogden and Franklin Free Public libraries, AMR Open Studios - and maintain ongoing work and exchange with organizations like: Culture Declares Emergency, Great Britain; Free International University, Europe; Art for Impact Program, Amsterdam, Holland, International Buddhist Film Festival & Archive, US; Emily Harvey Foundation, NYC; Upstate Art Weekend; John Halpern is a recipient for a $3000 grant from the Roxbury Arts Group for: WE DO SURFING THE APOCALYPSE KARAOKE - an event at Birdsong for Upstate Art Weekend, July 18th.
For more information about ICAI’s PUBLIC ART SUMMER ARTS PROJECTS - WWW.STUDIOICAI.ORG
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Mixed Media Assemblage with Jamie Banes at the Headwaters Arts Center July 12
STAMFORD — Headwaters Arts Center will host a dynamic mixed media assemblage workshop Saturday, July 12, 2023, 1a–4p. Accomplished artist Jamie Banes will guide participants in creating three-dimensional works using found objects and other eclectic materials from Banes’s studio. For more information and to register visit roxburyartsgroup.org. The cost is $15–35 with tiered equity pricing.
Participants will gain essential skills in material selection, construction methods and the effective use of adhesives and hardware. The workshop will also cover the application of formal design elements, such as scale, color, texture, line, pattern and rhythm to enhance their compositions. A key focus will be on imbuing structures with meaning and symbolism, transforming everyday materials into powerful narrative expressions.
This workshop offers a unique opportunity to cultivate an individual creative voice through the rewarding and versatile technique of assemblage. All skill levels are welcome. This workshop requires fine motor skills and use of adhesives and solvents. Please email headwaters@roxburyartsgroup.org if you require any accommodations to participate in the workshop.
Jamie Banes is an Upstate New York-based artist recognized for his mixed media creations evoking dystopian architectural models and cityscape dioramas. Primarily working with found and collected materials, he crafts works that possess a dual nature—familiar yet strange, specific yet mysterious. These assemblages function as snapshots of our present reality, symbolizing the complexities of difficult and uncertain times.
For over two decades, Banes has cultivated a diverse professional career spanning visual art and architecture. He has contributed to esteemed institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, and the Graduate School of Architecture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
This event is sponsored by Margaretville Telephone Company. All programs offered by the Roxbury Arts Group are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the NYS Legislature, the A. Lindsay and Olive B. O’Connor Foundation, the Robinson Broadhurst Foundation, The Community Foundation for South Central New York, the Tianaderrah Foundation, The Delaware National Bank of Delhi, and individual supporters.
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Whittling Away with Dick Brooks - Blast from the Past
I was sitting in my recliner the other day doing my exercises. I’m into surfing, mostly the educational type channels. Sure, it’s tiring and sometimes my thumb cramps up but I usually fight through the pain and get right back to my usual three to five channel changes a minute.
I came upon a real blast from the past when Bert and Ernie appeared on the screen. It’s been years since I had seen my old pals. They brought back fond memories of The Princess curled up on my lap. I watched for a while hoping to see my personal favorite put in an appearance but Cookie Monster was nowhere to be seen. Elmo did something with that big yellow chicken and the Count counted, all was right with the world.
I wondered how many of our old favorites were still to be seen. I know Babar is still around, I stumbled onto him a few weeks back. I suppose and hope that Mister Rogers still lives somewhere in the back of my television set. I know that to the youth of today that he’s kind of hokie and old fashioned but I trusted him with my children and he never let me down. In these days of computer graphics and special effects, his sock puppets don’t have the dazzle that kids have come to expect, but the last time I saw young ones watching one of his reruns, they were watching with their mouths open as the Trolley took them to The Land of Make Believe. You never got reality confused with the imaginary with Mr. Rogers. The Trolley separated the real world from the imagined in a clear and tangible way and for a small child, there was comfort in that.
I never really got into Barney, an overweight dancing blue dinosaur with a weird voice just didn’t turn me on. I don’t think it was Barney so much as the plastic kids he hung out with that irritated me. A bigger bunch of goodie- goodie two shoes has never been assembled in the same place in the history of entertainment. They all had impeccable manners, sang and danced on cue and were always smiling about something. As a teacher, they made me nervous. They probably will grow up to become serial killers or politicians.
I got thinking about some of the kid’s shows that I grew up listening to—no pictures just words. We gathered around the radio and listened to Sky King, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers and my favorite, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B. I wonder whatever happened to Bobby, the other three made the jump to television and I was able to follow their adventures but Bobby Benson just sort of disappeared. He probably took over the ranch when his dad retired and raised cattle until beleaguered with terminal saddle sores, he retired and today rocks on the ranch’s front porch and watched his grandchildren roar across the range on their four wheelers.
I can still name all the major characters that appeared on the Howdy Dowdy Show. He was the first real truly television kid’s show character that I can remember. He looked a lot like my brother Bud who used to do an amazing impersonation of Howdy. He even got a Howdy Dowdy puppet for Christmas. It was hard to tell them apart although the puppet did have more freckles, a better personality and a higher IQ.
I haven’t watched any of the latest string of kids’ shows. They just don’t interest me. I like the ones that I can identify with, the ones that meant something to me and my little ones. God love you Mr. Rogers, where ever you are.
Thought for the week—We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress. –Will Rogers
Until next week-may you and yours be happy and well.
Whittle12124@yahoo.com
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THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Willows VI: Lake Albany’s Sediments
We want to tell you something about the popular science writing business. Sometimes you, the writer, can get in way over your head. That’s going to happen this week. That it may sound bad but’s not only confined to popular writing; it’s common in professional research too, very common. So, it’s something that we should admit too and see how it is dealt with. In recent weeks we have been exploring the 65-acre landscape of the Willows, an old farm site south of Athens. We knew that we needed to run a column about the sediments of Glacial Lake Albany that underlay all of the farm and its fertile soils. So, we were on the lookout for exposures of that sediment. We commonly noticed that many stretches of the trails had been footworn down into those sediments. See our first photo. That shows a trail that exposed light-colored, uniformly fine-grained silts and clays without any pebbles or cobbles. We immediately recognized them as lake deposits, just exactly as we had expected.
But worn-out trails do not constitute good geological exposures; we needed something better. At last, we climbed down to the steep slope at the north headland of that pocket beach we talked about recently. And there it was, an exposure of lake sediment about six feet (Oops! This is science – two meters high). It was again all silty clay lake sediment. See our second photo. We were pretty happy about all that - until we started thinking about it. How many times have we said it: “The hardest thing to see in science is that which is not there.” You see all up and down the Hudson, wherever you see the sediments of Lake Albany, they are beautifully stratified. Every winter the old lake froze over and very dark clays settled to the bottom, forming a black stratum. Every summer, the ice melted, the lake currents were stirred up, and light colored, silty, sometimes sandy strata formed. Over time, light and dark strata alternated as something we call glacial varves – but not here. We didn’t notice that at first, but there it was. We couldn’t find any stratifications; it all seemed to be one very thick and continuous summer varve. Our Lake Albany strata seemed to have been deposited during one very improbably long summer. We had a problem.
So, that gets us back to where we started this column. That’s where we found ourselves in well over our heads. How are we going to explain this? As of right now – we can’t. We are pretty well educated and experienced scientists, but we have a mystery here. That happens in all sciences. What do we do? Yep, we ask for help. We know that there is a good sprinkling of PhD geologists who read our columns. Do any of you have a good hypothesis?
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”
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A Conversation about ...Small Victories
Blue eyed grass
Japanese Iris with Elderberry
By Jean Thomas
It has rained every weekend for the last umptyump weeks. I'm enjoying the same mix of emotions as everyone else. Yuck for the lack of opportunity to mow the lawn. Yay for the gorgeous green it is right now. Yuk for the missed games and other events along with the sad attempts to reschedule. Yay for the sudden opportunities to spend unorganized time with the family and friends (sarcasm alert there.)
The most recent weekend was, for me, the mother of all wrecked weekends. From Friday night through Saturday noon there was about an inch and a half of rain. I set myself the goal of finding the victories in a failure of a day. Phase one was to list what the day wasn't: it wasn't going to be a drought any time soon; It wasn't going to be record breaking temperatures... including a late frost. I could live with that. So what were my victories?
The first thing I'm especially proud of is the fact that that I had mowed the lawn on Friday just before the rain started. I almost didn't, because I had already had a full day and wasn't really feeling it. But my better angels prevailed, for once. That's a great big Yay, and I'm calling it a victory, if only over my own laziness.
Then on Saturday morning I had the usual argument with the dog. He really wanted to go outside, but his transmission kept kicking into reverse once he saw the rain hammering on the deck. I dressed up to go out, hoping to lure him out for at least a brief walk. He didn't fall for the trick, and stared at me from inside the doorway.
But if I hadn't tried to fool him, I wouldn't have seen the hummingbird. I have a pair of sheltered pavilions just outside the front door. Each has a hummingbird feeder under a roof. Now, I will confess that convenience, not shelter, was the purpose of that location. I will still declare a victory... that hummingbird spent the day hunkered down by those feeders, out of the rain.
And there are always things to celebrate among the flowers. My many varieties of Iris are bursting with joy. They are a water tolerating family of plants, and have chosen to all explode at once in their namesake rainbow of colors. I am claiming one victory among the Iris... I planted a clump of Japanese Iris between two lace leafed elderberries, one almost black in foliage and the other a bright gold. The iris bloom is a deep purple with a golden eye, and both its colors reflect off the colors of the elderberry leaves. All three are thriving and complementing one another.
There are always other small things I can claim no credit for, but call a win when I spot one of the subtle, tiny miracles around us that we so often rush past and don't notice. Like a meadow wildflower, the Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium). These tiny beauties consist of a blue six petaled single star flower with a bright yellow eye. The flower is only a half inch across, and grows on a stem that looks like a blade of grass. They thrive in wet areas and will make clumps if left undisturbed. But they are so tiny, it's easy to miss them among the other grasses. I'm calling it a victory to see them earlier than I expected.
So there.
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Cocktails for Culture: An Elegant Evening Supporting Creative Culture in the Western Catskills June 14
ROXBURY — Cocktails for Culture, a benefit event for the Roxbury Arts Group at the exquisite Villa Sposa property in Roxbury, will be an unforgettable evening celebrating creativity and community while raising funds for the critical programs that the Roxbury Arts Group offers in our rural communities. This elegant affair will take place on Saturday, June 14 at 7p. Tickets for this event are available for purchase on the Roxbury Arts Group website at roxburyartsgroup.org or by calling the Roxbury Arts Group at 607.326.7908.
The Roxbury Arts Group was founded in 1979 by a group of community members with the aim to make high-quality arts engagement opportunities available in the rural communities that it serves. That mission continues today, through their year-round programming, including concerts, workshops, and exhibits, at three venues in Roxbury, Stamford, and the Denver-Vega Valley. The Roxbury Arts Group also delivers arts programming to students throughout the school year in a four-county region and supports the local creative community with professional development workshops, grant opportunities and a micro-loan program.
The proprietors of Villa Sposa, Mercedes and Aldo Gonzalez have generously offered to host Cocktails for Culture in support of the Roxbury Arts Group and their important work. Guests will enjoy curated cocktails, champagne, wine and non-alcoholic beverages while listening to live music performed by Cuban Walt’s Blues and Adam Ippolito. An extensive menu will also be available featuring a variety of hors d'oeuvres, main dishes, interactive food stations that include items such as quail egg spoons, ceviche shrimp on parmesan toast, shrimp cocktail, vegan jambalaya, fondue, raspberry cream puffs, and more! “The warm hospitality and unwavering support from our friends at Villa Sposa is a reminder that championing the arts enriches our communities and provides critical spaces for inspiration and creativity to thrive,” says Jenny Rosenzweig, Executive Director of the Roxbury Arts Group.
To purchase tickets to Cocktails for Culture, a benefit event for the Roxbury Arts Group taking place at Villa Sposa in Roxbury on Saturday, June 14 at 7p, visit roxburyartsgroup.org or call 607.326.7908.
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Culture Reviews - Prophet Song, our 1984
By Susan Yelavich, Professor Emerita, Parsons School of Design, The New School
Recently, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song was highly, not to say forcefully, recommended to me both as an extraordinary work of fiction and as the 21st century’s successor to George Orwell’s 1984. My first reaction was that its premise—a mother’s dilemmas in an authoritarian state—was too obviously grabbed from the headlines. Yes, if you count all the headlines of the last decade—think just of Syria, Gaza, and Yemen. (The book was published in 2023 and won the Booker Prize that year.) But, no, once you recognize that none of what its protagonist Eilish Stack experiences has ever been the stuff of headlines.
Paul Lynch’s dystopia is personal, not social. Unlike George Orwell’s 1984, which shows the mechanisms of mind control, Lynch’s Prophet Song immerses us in the subjective terror of living in a state of exception invoked by a government’s imposition of “Emergency Powers.” Instead of situating the crisis within a fictitious super-state as Orwell does, Lynch rejects allegory for the recognizable streets and houses of Dublin, where Eilish lives with her four children and her husband, Larry, the story’s fulcrum.
Larry, arrested for leading a teachers’ union protest, effectively disappears. His extra-legal banishment gives Eilish both reason to stay—he might walk in the door any day and what if they weren’t there—and reason to leave, as she slowly realizes that his absence is part of a more pervasive and threatening pattern which will subsume what’s left of her life. First, there are inconveniences: the water in their faucets turns brown, but then there are the intrusions into her psyche. Eilish becomes invisible when her butcher ignores her while serving other customers. A wedding becomes an occasion for party fealty, effectively excommunicating her from her larger family of aunts and cousins. However, it would be missing the point to read the book as a litany of slights and insults.
Prophet Song is less a portrait of the workings of tyranny than it is a portrait of what being tyrannized feels like, smells like, looks like, sounds like, even tastes like. Looking for a paint scraper to remove the graffiti that has vandalized her house, Eilish “meets instead her humiliation as though it were on the shelf before her, the shame and pain and grief moving freely through her body.” Even more recognizable is the confusion of how to think and act under such conditions. Eilish drifts between feeling she has agency—that hope and survival remain possible—and feeling disoriented and powerless. Desperate for signs of continuity with the world as she knew it, Eilish observes that “trees keep counting the time by ringing the time in their wood.” And later, that there is “memory in the weather.” These things cannot be defeated. The disjuncture between the events that threaten to overwhelm her and the constancy of nature is not entirely unfamiliar, albeit in less fraught circumstances. It’s like having a bad flu and looking out the window at people going about their business on a sunny day, and being vaguely (and absurdly) astonished that life is moving on without you.
Eilish’s circumstances are beyond fraught. She is subject to relentless intrusions without defenses, only children who need defending. A professional woman, a scientist, she is not prone to paranoia and keeps a strong maternal front. She continues to send the children to school, stubbornly maintaining the importance of soon-to-be-obsolete rites of passage like playing hockey and getting into university. When her daughter Molly accuses her of doing nothing to get Larry back, Eilish says, “Sometimes not doing something is the best way to get what you want.” Yet, she does wear the white scarf that marks her as a dissident—and gets her fired. In her vacillations, Lynch captures that uncanny state of being simultaneously aware and in disbelief when reality is no longer solid.
So, while Orwell has enjoyed a justly deserved revival since the first Trump presidency, Lynch’s is the book for this moment. His story operates with an immediacy that would have been foreign to readers in 1949, when Orwell’s book was published. Those readers would have recognized the allusions to Stalin’s regime and its bureaucracy of cruelty but they would have the distance of observers, of readers. Since Orwell set it thirty-five years in the future, 1984 would have been read as ‘not yet, perhaps never.’ That luxury is stripped away in the claustrophobic pages of Prophet Song. Its events happen in real time and from innocuous beginnings—a party wins an election. Lynch’s prose doesn’t leave any space to catch your breath. There are almost no paragraph breaks and sentences grow like panic, as when Eilish runs into Rory, an old acquaintance.
He is quick to speak about old times and she watches his face hurrying him along with her eyes, a bus pulls away expelling hot diesel smoke and Rory steps back, his scarf stirring to reveal the party pin on the lapel of his jacket. She takes a step backwards, swallows and closes her eyes, Rory smiling with his teeth.
This is an early hint of ostracization that will ultimately turn violent. When vigilantes turn from neighborly scorn to lethal force, Eilish’s oldest son joins the rebels to fight the government. (He won’t be seen again.) Soon after, her twelve-year-old son is abducted from his school. After an agonizing search, she finds him in a state morgue bearing unmistakable marks of torture and murder. Utterly devastated, she has no time to mourn. She’s still caring for her father, daughter, and toddler amidst accelerating assaults.
In setting Prophet Song in the Republic of Ireland (instead of Northern Ireland, where the violence of the Troubles is within living memory), Lynch makes real the truth that a domestic Armageddon can happen anywhere and at any time. As he remarked in a PBS Interview, “the civilized world is a thin veneer, so fragile and easily lost.” He claims, however, not to be writing a polemic of grievance—as tempting as it is to think he’s holding up a mirror to any number of authoritarian governments. Instead, he calls Prophet Song a story of grief. It is a story about the pain that follows when society segregates those it deems normal from those it condemns and terrorizes as abnormal.
Terror isn’t an abstraction when you’re tensed for the next assault, when it infiltrates the lives of your family and your colleagues. Just ask around. It’s hard to find someone unaffected, if only indirectly. In fact, it is the indirect affects that are the most insidious, spurring pre-emptive censorship and equivocations between compliance with and rejection of the new status quo. This is a tightrope act that Eilish ultimately refuses to perform.
Lynch’s novel does more than prophesize a tragedy brought on by authoritarian muzzle and muscle. It rehearses its execution. Its characters are as recognizable as our own kith and kin, as recognizable as us. This is its potency. Prophet Song makes terror intimate.
Bio
Susan Yelavich is Professor Emerita, Design Studies, Parsons School of Design, The New School. A Fellow of the American Academy of Rome (2004) and the Bogliasco Foundation (2018), she is a member of Scientific Committee for Design at Politecnico di Milano and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw’s FAIR Design conferences. Her contributions to design scholarship span over four decades, including 15 years at Parsons and 25 years at Cooper Hewitt Museum. She is the author of Thinking Design through Literature (2019), Design as Future-Making (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Contemporary World Interiors (Phaidon, 2007). Her writing is archived at www.susanyelavich.com
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Exploring Intimacy and Identity in Some Bodies at the Roxbury Arts Group
Curator Ursula Haden, Creative Opportunities Coordinator at Roxbury Art Group receiving praise for an amazing group exhibition ‘Some Bodies’ comprised of 33 female artists.
By Robert Brune
ROXBURY — The Roxbury Arts Group’s latest exhibition, Some Bodies, is an ambitious and poignant exploration of the human figure, intimacy, and identity. Bringing together thirty-three artists, this multidisciplinary show spans painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, and video, asking timely and timeless questions: What does it mean to be human? How do we connect with others emotionally and physically? What does it mean to be seen, or objectified? And what makes a body ‘somebody’?
At its heart, Some Bodies challenges conventional representations of the human form by focusing on the tension between subject and object, a conversation that has long shaped the history of art. The curatorial impulse of Ursula Haduk behind the show stems from research into the reclining nudes of Matisse and Modigliani, which highlighted a persistent problem in art: the tendency to objectify the body, especially women’s bodies, stripping subjects of their agency and interior life. In this exhibition, the curatorial framework seeks to re-center the figure as both seen and seeing, as both body and being.
A Glimpse of the Artists
Jessica Farrell’s dreamlike paintings are a profound embodiment of this mission. Her work fuses the mythic with the rural, tapping into the interconnectedness of all living things. Through lush depictions of nature and myth-infused figures, Farrell’s pieces offer a vision of the human condition that is both grounded and spiritual. There is a quiet reverence for the body as both vessel and presence, echoing themes of vulnerability, strength, and communion with the natural world.
Cena Pohl Crane’s paintings, on the other hand, vibrate with emotional and chromatic intensity. Her bold, expressive brushwork reflects a restless dissonance with contemporary life. Her figures, often dissolving into their surroundings, articulate the internal fragmentation experienced in a digitally saturated society. The body, here, is both a site of resistance and collapse, especially under the pressures of modern womanhood. Through this tension, Crane invites viewers to reckon with their own dissociation and yearning for embodiment.
David De Lira’s photography brings a lens-based, perspective to the conversation around intimacy. His portraits of lovers, friends, and chosen family exude emotional depth and a sense of sacred vulnerability. Each photograph is not merely a record of a body but a tender archive of connection. By consciously employing light, gesture, and gaze, De Lira transforms his subjects into co-authors of the image, subverting the typical dynamic of artist and model. His work resists objectification through radical empathy.
Susanne Ausnit’s self-portraits offer a deeply personal window into aging, maternity, and emotional states. Through watercolor and subtle compositional nods to Renaissance imagery, her work evokes both the maternal tenderness of the Madonna and Child and the sorrow of the Pietà . In one striking piece, a self-portrait with her dog, the emotional register is layered—there is devotion, fragility, and a profound sense of temporality. These images do not just depict a body, but the act of becoming, retreating, and reclaiming it over time.
Aurora Andrews, meanwhile, centers the maternal experience in her work, painting motherhood from the inside out. Her use of invented color and embodied brushwork asserts a mother’s voice often absent from visual discourse. Her paintings counter the cultural flattening of motherhood into symbol or stereotype, offering instead deeply subjective, visceral perspectives. They affirm motherhood as a valid, complex, and often unseen dimension of identity.
Michelle Silver’s emotional landscapes balance abstraction and figuration, memory and motion. Her work draws from personal experience trauma, mental health, and desire, yet speaks to broader human experiences of navigating inner worlds. In the space between the conscious and subconscious, Silver’s figures often appear as echoes or spirits—perhaps not fully present, but unmistakably real. Her pieces remind us that the body carries more than physical form; it bears memory, pain, joy, and resilience.
Across the exhibition, viewers encounter bodies in transition, bodies in communion, bodies reclaimed. Whether in the fractured energy of a brushstroke, the tender line of a photograph, or the meditative stillness of a textile or sculpture, Some Bodies reclaims the figure from the gaze and returns it to a place of personhood. These are not bodies for consumption, they are bodies with agency, bodies in relationship, bodies that feel.
A full list of the artists exhibiting: Aurora Andrews, Suzanne Ausnit, Elizabeth de Bethune, Harris Billeci, Lauren Blankstein, Lynne Breitfeller, Samantha Brinkley, Louis Chavez, Sue Collier, Cena Pohl Crane, Leah DeVun, Jessica Farrell, Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes, Isa Goico, Zena C Gurbo, Monica Hamilton, Jody Isaacson, Scott Keidong, Erin Kuhn, David De Lira, Mary Katherine McFerran, Lesley A. Powell, Joel Clifford Rhymer, Laura Wasson Schneider, Michelle Silver, Kathleen Sweeney, Mika Taga, Kate Taverna, Ella Tunis, Jane Westrick, Caitlin Winner, Lindsey A. Wolkowicz, and Simeon Youngmann.
Some Bodies is a necessary exhibition in our current moment. It does not pretend to offer definitive answers but creates space for reflection and dialogue. In a world where bodily autonomy and identity are increasingly politicized, the act of representing, and witnessing the human form becomes revolutionary. The artists in this show remind us that a body is not just a thing to be looked at; it is a life to be seen, heard, and understood. In doing so, Some Bodies transforms the gallery into a space of empathy, intimacy, and radical visibility.
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