HVCCA: Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art

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Open on Saturdays & Sundays
12 - 6PM and by appointment

Tours available upon request

1701 Main Street
PO Box 209
Peekskill, NY 10566

tel: 914.788.0100
fax: 914.788.4531

email: info@hvcca.org

HVCCA exhibitions and programs are generously supported by:

EXHIBITIONS

First Look

Grandpa
Miki Carmi

First Look permited us to take a snapshot of work coming out of MFA programs at a moment when there was a burgeoning number of graduate art programs and increased enrollment.

Concomitantly the interest in new art and the opportunities for new artists have increased dramatically though still only a small percentage of artists will ever achieve sufficient art sales to support themselves. It is especially interesting that at a time when there is less government support for the arts and social services in the US, more young people are choosing to embark on careers as artists.

There have always been critics who posit that the art of the moment has lost its vitality, that painting is dead, that something or other is what everyone is doing. But if one takes a longer view there will be acknowledgment that there are no such dicta, that artists will always defy predictions and most importantly, that there is always good new work.

Untitled
Skyler Brickley

The only prerequisite for inclusion in First Look was excellence. Our selection committee surveyed over 500 students in nearly 25 programs, most in the northeast, but ranging as far as LA. Eighty-two students were invited to submit material. From among these submissions, fifteen students were selected without regard to the program attended or to the media. As it turned out the selection committee chose work in a cross section of media: painters, sculptors, photographers and video artists. The selected artists are mostly in their early thirties but are as young as twenty-three. They originally come from Canada, Israel, Korea and all areas of the US. Most have attended an art program before their MFA. They have interesting and varied academic and work histories: one has a graduate degree in Physics from Harvard.

Art provides a barometer of our condition as a society and in many instances presages the directions it may take. Our graduating students provided some insight into the focus that the next generation of artists is taking.

First Look artists and their respective graduate schools:

Tamy Ben-Tor - Columbia, Skyler Brickley - Yale, Miki Carmi - Columbia, Anjali Deshmukh - RISD, Francesca DiMattio - Columbia, Ramon Fernandez-Bofill - RISD, Allison Gildersleeve - Bard, Gabe Hillebrand - Cranbrook, Hang-Jin Kim - Brooklyn, Andrea Landau - Cranbrook, Cal Lane - SUNY Purchase, Julio Romano - ICP, Greg Smith - Hunter, Kimi Weart - NYU, Fritz Westman - Rutgers

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