Past Artists-in-Residence
Orly Cogan
Summer Lovin’
The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA) in Peekskill NY welcomes work from a leader in the current fiber arts movement, artist Orly Cogan, for her solo exhibition Summer Lovin’. The exhibit will run from June 10th to July 31 an opening reception at the museum on Sunday, June 10th from 4 -7 p.m. preceded by the artist panel, “Home: A State of Mind,” featuring Orly Cogan, Susan Obrant, Jayoung Yoon, and Erika Harrsch with a special reading by Sharon Samuel and Celia Reissig-vasile.
Cogan reinvigorates vintage materials including tablecloths and baby linen through embroidery, crochet, and paint to create unabashed depictions of her experience as a twenty-first century woman.
HVCCA Co-Founder and Director Livia Straus says Cogan’s pieces “bring back memories of visiting grandparents’ homes, women creating trousseaus for their marital life, but upon investigating, the imagery is raw, feminist, and family-based—domestication stripped of second- skin clothing.”
Cey Adams: Pop Revolution
April 14th through June 3rd, 2018
Opening reception: Saturday, April 14, 2018, 5 – 7 PM
Cey Adams, celebrated fine artist and legendary art director of Def Jam Records, brings his evocative and political collage works to the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in a solo exhibition, “Pop Revolution.” By shaping contemporary images within known brand logos, Adams layers meanings onto his work, inviting the viewer to examine their own relationship to these iconic brands that have shaped our culture. “I’ve always had a fascination with Pop Art and brand identity. My recent paintings invite the viewer to re-examine familiar symbols of traditional American values, hopefully sparking dialogue that leads to communication and a better understanding of who we are.” says Adams.
Leslie Pelino
Sky, Earth, and In-Between: Gathering the Threads
January 28th through March 18th, 2018
HVCCA is proud to present a solo installation by fiber artist Leslie Pelino. Working with salvaged materials- loose thread, ribbon, beads, buttons, flamboyant fabrics of silk, wool and chenille, plastic tubing and metal, Pelino creates a world steeped in memory and nostalgia. Pelino’s installation, in its spirit, its complexity and its connections between elements that defy relationality, speaks to the spirit of the overarching exhibition ‘Between I & Thou’. Based on the thesis of the great 20th century philosopher Martin Buber, and drawing on Kabalistic beliefs in the future restoration of a world united and at peace, ‘Between I & Thou’ incorporates interchanging solo presentations that speak to this hope for the future.
Pelino’s installation is one of these individual statements/installations, designed to instigate poetry, discussion, thought, dialogue and performance as she weaves a new, whimsical and perfect world where disparate elements live together to create something new, something harmonious: beauty with a twist of the grim, humorous while emphatic, playful yet grounded, soulful while dour, frenetic yet narrative rich and awesomely silent.
Press Release PDF
Spring 2017 Artist in Residence,
Jinsu Han
“Liquid Memory”
June 4 – September, 30 2017
Opening reception:
Sunday, June 4, 2017, 5 – 7 PM
The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art is excited to announce two site- specific installations, Liquid Memory, by Korean artist Jinsu Han that directly involve the Peekskill community and the Manitou School in Cold Spring, NY. Both iterations speak to the nature of memory.
For the construction of the installations, Jinsu is asking members of the community to bring in bowls or containers that have a family memory or storyattached and lend them to Jinsu for the installation, which will honor our collective memories. Robotic elements will create a gentle movement.
Metaphorically, the objects, water, and the repetitive movement of the robotics connect the idea of how gradual change alters memory and how objects and story relate to the persistence of memory.
Jinsu Han has been making robotic sculptures for over 20 years. His work uses different materials varying from custom-made parts to found objects. The sculptures evoke poetic nostalgia, ‘offerings to memory.’ Community memory containers will be returned after the exhibition, with yet another story attached.
Jinsu Han (b. 1971) is a multimedia artist from Seoul, Korea. He received his BFA and MFA from Hongik University, Seoul, Korea and earned another MFA in sculpture and an Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition“Fantasy Factor” (Force Gallery, Beijing. China) in 2016 and a group show “The Apotheosis of The Ex-Fish Market” in New York, 2016.
Spring 2017 Artist in Residence,
Elisa Pritzker
“Selknam: Spirit, Ceremony, Selves”
May 13 – September 30, 2017
The Selknam, an extinct aborigine tribe of Tierra del Fuego, is the inspiration for Elisa Pritzker’s installation at the HVCCA. Over ten years ago when Pritzker visited Patagonia, she felt an urgency to discover the people who had lived in Tierra del Fuego “before all the tourists came, speaking all different languages, from many cultures,” except for that of the Selknam, whose voices were gone.
Pritzker has created an installation that honors the tribe, gathered into reservations in the 1940’s and eradicated by diseases and cultures not their own. She began an in-depth study of the Selknam Tribe, using source materials from anthropologists and photographers, among them Anne Chapman. In the 1950’s and 1960’s Chapman documented the Selknam’s unique culture and recorded their language and chants. Chapman was cured of a life threatening ailment by Lola Kiepkja, the last Selknam shaman alive. After intensive research, Pritzker realized how much the ancient cultures and traditions had to teach and her solo show at HVCCA brings the viewer – stone by stone – into the Selknam realm.
Elisa Pritzker, born in Argentina, now lives in upstate New York. Her work has appeared in exhibitions and museums worldwide. Brian K. Mahoney, Chronogram Magazine editor, said, Pritzker “… has helped to shape the evolution of the regional arts scene.” Certainly, Pritzker’s work, installations and objects, has reshaped how we think about culture, ancient, urban, natural or spiritual. Looking anew at the old, Elisa Pritzker’s installation at the HVCCA, provides a contemporary artist’s view of an ancient world.
An original performance piece, which uses Elisa Pritzker’s vision, integrates music, dance, and narration, giving the Selknam voice through the perspectives of three women, a female shaman, an ethnographer, and a mythological moon woman. The performance is at 5PM, Saturday, May 13th as part of the opening reception of Pritzker’s show. Performance collaborators are Marcy B. Freedman, art historian and performance artist; musicians/composers Nannette Garcia, Maurice Minichino; and dancers Marsi Burns and Nomi Bachar.
Mark Berghash
HVCCA’s 2017 Spring Artist-in-Residence
“I’s Closed, I’s Open: Aspects of the True Self”
On view: April 23 – Sept 30, 2017
Mark Berghash was born in Buffalo, NY in 1935, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1957.
Berghash’s Aspects of the True Self challenges the notion that it is the photographer rather than the subject who determines the success of a photographic production by selecting the moment when the subject’s character or personality is fully revealed. By presenting his participants with questions that explore their history and their psyche and giving them the ability to work the shutter and thus self-record their reactions, he places the power of the exploration into the hands of the subject.
I’s Opened I’s Closed is a series of head and shoulder photographic diptychs, each one accompanied by a Haiku-like poem. In creating each portrait the subjects are requested to think about their inner life. The first image is with their eyes closed, the second image with their eyes open. After the photo session, the subject wrote down his or her thoughts and feelings. From these, Berghash and his wife Rachel, a poet, composed a Haiku-like poem for each subject. Berghash’s intention in making these portraits is to record aspects of a person’s true inner self.
In an article for Art F City in 2016, Rom Vaughan said, “Whether Berghash succeeds in truthfully plumbing his subjects’ minds is known for certain only by them; but there is no doubt that he strikes to the core of the precept that photography is significantly related to memory. Photographs are often saved simply because they revive the past. Berghash has pushed the process of reviving the past to its most extreme and nearly un-photographable point by producing work that is the manifestation of memory, not just an instrument of recollection.”
Livia Straus, Director of HVCCA spoke of Berghash’s work saying, “His combination of words and images create a powerful confessional mode that both reveals and hides. His other Authentic Self projects such as ‘Twin Selves’, ‘Galut’, and portraits of Holocaust survivors explored the different aspects of personality that we reveal in public and that, born of hidden desires, that remains unseen.”
Among other institutions, Berghash’s work is included in collections of and has been exhibited at The California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio; Franklin Furnace Archive, NYC; International Center of Photography, NYC; International Polaroid Collection; the Jewish Museum; NYC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; MOMA NYC; Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel; and Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. The Berghash opening will
As part of his exhibition at HVCCA, Mark Berghash photographed subjects from the Peekskill community, on April 1st – 2nd, 2017. Photographs taken for this project have been hung with exhibition of I’s Opened I’s Closed photographs, which opened April 23rd, 2017.
There are two other events at HVCCA are related to the Berghash show. Donna Barkman’s new play, Viewfinder, which is based on the work of Emma Rivers, opened with the Berghash exhibit at 4:00PM on April 23rd. On October 15th at 3:00 pm, Sol Miranda’s play, I am Here, I Belong, which was written by and for Peekskill’s immigrant residents under the What Matters Project will be presented.
Remy Jungerman
HVCCA’s 2017 Winter Artist-in-Residence
On view: Feb 4 – April 26, 2017
Opening reception February 4th, 2017 from 5 to 7 pm.
Remy Jungerman’s work was featured in numerous publications and has been acquired by various institutions and private collectors worldwide including: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Museum Het Domein Sittard; Zeeuws Museum Middelburg; NAI Rotterdam; Fries Museum Leeuwarden; Africa Museum Berg en Dal; Museum for Modern Art, Arnhem; Rennies Collection, Vancouver; Art Omi Collection, NY; and The Francis J. Greenburger Collection, NY. He attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname), before moving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.Remy Jungerman, a Netherlands based multi-media artist, is the Winter 2017 artist in residence at HVCCA. Born 1959 in the small Maroon community of Moengo in Surinam, on the northern Atlantic coast of South America, Jungerman has, for the last two and a half decades, made his home in the Netherlands. His work is an intersection between the African textile designs of Surinam and Dutch artists of the De Stijl movement, including Mondrian. Afro-Surinamese spirituality, or Winti, is his dominant theme.
Jungerman attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname), beforemoving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. With his art, Remy tries to connect continents, weaving Surinamese traditional rituals textiles with the geometrical lines of Modernism.
The installation is in conjunction with the museum’s main exhibition, “Between I and Thou.”
This exhibition and residency is sponsored, in part, by NEA, the Dutch Consulate, Mondriaan Fund, and the Netherland-America Foundation.
*Photos by Bibiana Mattheis
HVCCA has two types of resident artist programs:Exhibiting artists-in-residence and Teaching artists-in-residence.
Exhibiting artists-in-residence are invited as part of an exhibition to create site-specific work for installation at HVCCA, interacting with the community and hosting educational workshops and lectures/panel discussions. We don’t currently have an application process for exhibiting artists-in-residence, as it is strictly by invitation only.