Dorsky Museum announces call for Hudson Valley Artists 2015

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz invites artists working in all media to submit proposals for its annual exhibition of work by artists from the Hudson Valley. The Stories We Tell, the 2015 edition of the Hudson Valley Artists series, will be curated by Mary-Kay Lombino. An award-winning curator of contemporary art, Lombino is The Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator and Assistant Director for Strategic Planning of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

The deadline for artist submissions to The Stories We Tell: Hudson Valley Artists 2015 is Monday, March 23, 2015, midnight.

The Stories We Tell: Hudson Valley Artists 2015 takes as its focus the narrative form of contemporary art and examines how stories shape our experience and our understanding of the world. Instinctively, we are all storytellers merging fiction with non-fiction and conflating the real with the imagined.

The Hudson Valley has become known not only for its rich visual art but also for its strength in the literary arts. The region is steeped in its own narrative tales such as Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” T.C. Boyle’s novel World’s End, and factual accounts of Henry Hudson’s voyage.

The Stories We Tell provides a rare opportunity to examine the ways in which art and literature are closely related—both reflecting artistic practices of today as well as the role of the narrative structure in contemporary art. For Hudson Valley Artists 2015, artists are invited to submit work that considers the following questions. What is the difference between illustration and art that is shaped by narrative structure? How much is narrative a conscious or unconscious factor in an artist’s practice? How do stories factor into abstract art in which the narrative might be known only by the artist?

The exhibition will run from June 20–Nov. 8, 2015, in the Dorsky Museum’s Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery and North Gallery. This is the seventh year that the Hudson Valley Artists Annual Purchase Award of $3,000 will be used to acquire one or more artworks from the exhibition for the museum’s permanent collection. This Purchase Award is made possible through the Alice and Horace Chandler Art Acquisition Fund. Artists who work has been purchased in the past include Holly Hughes, Stephen Niccolls, Patrick Kelley, Adie Russell, Elisa Pritzker, Charles Geiger, and Curt Belshe and Lise Prown, among others.

GUIDELINES
The Hudson Valley Artists exhibition is open to all emerging and mid-career artists with a permanent mailing address and active art practice in Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster, and Westchester counties who have not had a major one-person museum exhibition and who do not have an exclusive contract with a commercial gallery. Students are not eligible. There is no application fee.

Artists are invited to submit a maximum of six images or files of work created in 2013 or later. Artworks created in traditional media as well as audio, video, film, and performance are welcome. Brief proposals for new works (including installation or performance) to be created for this exhibition may also be submitted.

Deadline: Monday, March 23, 2015, midnight.

Artists’ submissions must be made online only through the following website: http://dorskymuseum.submittable.com/submit/39262.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM
Through its collections, exhibitions, and public programs, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, located at SUNY New Paltz, supports and enriches the academic programs at the college, presents a broad range of world art for study and enjoyment, and serves as a center for Hudson Valley arts and culture. The museum is gaining wide recognition as the premier public showplace for exhibition, education, and cultural scholarship about the Hudson Valley region’s art and artists from yesterday and today. With more than 9,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed over six galleries, The Dorsky Museum is one of the largest museums within the SUNY system. The Dorsky was officially dedicated on Oct. 20, 2001. Since then it has presented over one hundred exhibitions, including commissions, collection-based projects, and in-depth studies of contemporary artists including Robert Morris, Alice Neel, Judy Pfaff, Carolee Schneemann, and Ushio Shinohara, historic Woodstock artists Eugene Speicher and Charles Rosen, and Hudson Valley luminaries Russel Wright and Dick Polich.

Museum Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, Holidays, and Intersessions.

For more information about The Dorsky Museum and its programs, visit http://www.newpaltz.edu/museum, or call (845) 257-3844.