Jan 26–March 17 2024
Cherry Gallery
130 Cherry St, Ithaca
Saturdays & Sundays, 1-5 pm
Opening Reception: Fri Jan 26, 5-7 pm.
Gallery Night: Fri Feb 2, 5-7 pm
Let’s admit it, no matter the skiing, skating, and pretty icicles, for many of us winter is a pair of cold wet socks. And no substance better exemplifies this feeling than slush.
But what if we thought about winter in terms of fabulous possibility? What if we tried to find something lush in the slush?
The Cherry Gallery presents an exhibition of works from Ithaca and Central New York-based local artists that celebrate winter in any way: by finding the beauty in it, by subverting it, or by simply blocking it out and filling the family room with sand and a sunlamp.
Artists include:
- Leslie Brack
- Gwen Elizabeth Bullock
- Kaleb Hunkele
- Douglas Landau
- Barbara Mink
- Mafalda Reis Moore
- Barbara Page
- Terry Plater
- Cai Quirk
- Esmé Saccuccimorano
- Ivy Stevens-Gupta
- Julia Wright
This exhibition is funded in part with operational support to the Cherry Gallery by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, and Tompkins County Tourism.
Artist Bios
Leslie Brack
Leslie Brack is a painter living in Ithaca, NY. Her recent solo exhibitions include Brooklyn’s Cathouse Proper, Ithaca College, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell. She has organized exhibitions at New York City galleries Momenta Art and Winkleman Gallery. Brack co-researched and launched the Womanhouse website, the most popular internet resource for the influential feminist-artist collaboration from 1972. She has received support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and the Millay Arts, among others. Brack teaches painting and drawing at Cornell University, and lives in Ithaca, NY.
Gwen Elizabeth Bullock
Gwen Elizabeth Bullock is a photographer who has spent the last 40 years traveling the world and has visited as many countries. She has laid down roots through relationships, research, and a deep appreciation for how local folk inform her view on life. Her first year of Photography is highlighted in her books on Crete. More recently she has concentrated on documenting graffiti of Bogota, and its cultural support. Colombia is a country of many colors and voices, as rich and varied as her own North American home. Growing up as a daughter in a Navy family, she saw much of the United States and learned many different cultures from the East Coast to the West Coast. She holds 3 graduate degrees and continues to educate herself in Photography, Visual Arts, and its philosophy. Her most ardent supporters and critics are her daughter Caitlin and her son Bryan. She thanks Lucia and Joaquin for hosting her ventures in Colombia, and Kiki in Crete.
http://gwenelizabethbullock.org/
Kaleb Hunkele
Kaleb Hunkele is an artist working in printmaking, painting, and experimental animation/film. Pattern, simple lines, text, color, and modest materials are central to his practice.
Kaleb received his MFA from Cornell University and also studied film and animation at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and as a Fulbright Scholar to Estonia.
Douglas Landau
Douglas Landau aka DUGWAH was born March 14, 1957 in New York City. He resided for many decades in NYC’s East Village with intermittent worldly adventures. His many trips to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil add up to nearly a decade.
In 1985 he opened the infamous King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, a performance/art bar during the heyday of the East Village art scene.
Now in his mid-sixties, he moved in November of 2020 to Danby, New York outside of Ithaca.
In March of 2023, he had a successful solo show at the ArtSpace in the Tompkins Center for History & Culture run by Community Arts Partner.
Barbara Mink
Barbara Mink is an abstract artist in Ithaca, NY, working with acrylic and inks on large canvases suitable for homes and corporate settings. She was born in Buffalo, New York, moved to Ithaca in 1976, and started painting in 1999. She studied with Stan Taft, Bill Benson, and the late Bente King and Thomas Buechner. Her latest body of work features Jacquard Pinata alcohol inks on large canvases.
Mink is an active member of the Greater Ithaca Art Trail, as well as the Buffalo Society of Artists and the Western New York Artists Group. She is represented by Velvenoir Austria for European sales, and Indigo Art Consultants, in London England. Her work can be found in collections in throughout the United States and Europe.
Mafalda Reis Moore
As an artist that works with various mediums (photography, sculpture, video, drawing), my purpose is to express that which keeps me connected with life’s currents.
Snow in its many forms and in this case as (s)lush is a great inspiration in the winter days.
Barbara Page
Learning to fly was the catalyst for Barbara Page’s career as an artist. After earning her pilot’s license, she took up painting and received her MFA from Cornell University. Her artworks, many from an aerial perspective, are included in museum and corporate collections. Page has a strong interest in exploring different disciplines and recasting them in time-based visual sequences. The Museum of the Earth, in Ithaca, NY, was designed around her series of 544 paintings depicting the history of life. Her love affair with printed matter led to the Book Marks project, an ongoing pictorial survey of her reading history. Hundreds of Illustrated library charge cards housed in a library case received the “best of show” award in an international exhibition called The Art of the Book at the Rochester Central Library last year. These small artworks form the backbone of Book Marks: An Artist’s Card Catalog, her memoir published in April 2021.
Terry Plater
Terry Plater earned graduate degrees in Architecture (M. Architecture, Columbia) and City and Regional Planning (MA, Ph.D.; University of Pennsylvania) and enjoyed a fulfilling career in higher education before pursuing an MFA in painting (2023) at the New York Academy of Art. She is a lifelong painter for whom making art was always essential but was also, by choice, a private matter until later in life.
A lifelong painter raised in a family that valued art, literature, and music, Plater likes to say that “art chose her.” Her natural curiosity, her wide range of professional experiences, and her extensive work-related travel in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe infuse her art practice with a sense of beauty, urgency, and a search for equanimity. Her work centers on questions of equity and aesthetics; in painting she continually asks if and how the two conditions can be reconciled.
Her work has been recognized with a solo juried exhibition, “Harriet’s World,” at the Schweinfurth Art Center and the Cayuga Historical Society in Auburn, New York (2021); a finalist citation in the 2022 AXA/Art prize cohort for “Night Picnic;” and being commissioned by Cornell University Law School to paint a six by six feet portrait of Mr. George Washington Fields, a man who, born into slavery in Virginia, was their first African American graduate, class of 1896 (2022).
Cai Quirk
Cai Quirk (they or other neutral pronouns) is a genderqueer/fluid multi-disciplinary artist who connects gender, mythology, restoration, and nature-based spirituality through photos, poems, stories, and installations. Cai’s work transcends societal binaries and barriers to reach the deeply human experience of connection. They have led hundreds of talks and workshops around the country, and their work has been exhibited in fourteen states and four countries. Cai received bachelor’s degrees in photography and music from Indiana University.
Esmé Saccuccimorano
Integrating material approaches in painting, ceramics, print and glass, I seek to explore how ‘function’ and ‘meaning’ are moveable and permeable concepts, their fluidity contingent on the perceptive lens employed when approaching them. I draw on ideas of placebo, symbology, histories of ritual and talisman, and an interest in linguistic development—all of which share the common denominator of human-imposed function. Formally, I have been amassing a visual lexicon of abstracted shapes and icons, which have found their way into almost all of my work. Many of these shapes are inspired by the ecology of my home in upstate New York—a constant influence in my work—though others arise out of specific personal experiences. Rather than producing explicit messages or imagery with these tools, I look to create spaces of vague narrative, which immerse the viewer in this sense of the ‘undefined.’ Viewers are compelled to construct meaning within the unexplained, and to examine how their perception dictates how they understand and navigate their environment.
https://www.esmesaccuccimorano.com/
Ivy Stevens-Gupta
I wear many creative hats: International award-winning contemporary artist, color theorist, marketing consultant, instructor, art columnist, and color therapist. I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York, USA, in a beautiful town called Ithaca.
After studying art at Alfred University, I received a degree in Business from SUNY CCC, a BS in Marketing, and an MS in Liberal Studies with a focus on media from Empire State University. A ‘forever student’, I next sought out a certificate in Interior Design, got certified in Color Therapy, and became an Art Therapy Life Coach. For 16 years I was an Advertising Manager for Gannett Newspaper Division and later Corporate Relations Director for the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. I now teach color theory, marketing, painting, and color therapy. My custom-designed vibrant paintings can be found in homes and offices all over the world and have appeared in several books on international contemporary artists.
Visit my Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, NY, studio by appointment. Interested in taking a class? Check out my Workshops page.
I am a member of the Finger Lakes chapter of Scientific Illustrators, Elmira Art Society, and the Greater Ithaca Art Trail. I am also part of the faculty at 171 Cedar Arts Center and an art & health columnist for What’s Hot Magazine.
Julia Wright
Textile Artist, Designer, Engineer.
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in Textiles, Julia Wright has gone on to design prints, wovens, knits, embroideries, and a wide range of industrial textile materials for the apparel, home, automotive, and biomedical textile industries in NY, LA, and Seoul. Currently she is a textile engineer at Cortland Biomedical and has a studio practice located in Ithaca NY.
Process:
Working within the long history of weaving, this piece was created through an amalgamation of modern and traditional techniques. The loom is first dressed with the warp, threaded manually one yarn at a time. The fabric pattern is programmed through a software that transmits the code through a solenoid box. Foot treadles are used to activate that code into woven fabric; the weft being manually inserted one row at a time. Through this labor of love, Julia Wright is able to create a complex working relationship with this tool to build a dialog between what is old and what is new. For interested parties, studio visits are always welcome.