College Art Association celebrates the legacy of the late New Paltz Art Professor Benjamin Wigfall

On Feb. 13, 2025, a roundtable discussion at the College Art Association’s annual conference explored the “Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village” exhibition, originally presented by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz in 2022.

Titled “A Case Study of a Rediscovered Artist: Benjamin Wigfall, a University, a Community, and a Legacy,” the session examined how the exhibition initiated renewed recognition of Wigfall (1930-2017), an influential Hudson Valley artist and revered Professor of Printmaking at New Paltz from 1963-1991.

Reva Wolf, Professor of Art History at New Paltz, organized and chaired the discussion, emphasizing how exhibitions can revive overlooked artists through scholarship, reviews, and institutional collecting. Sarah Eckhardt, Associate Curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and co-curator of the exhibition, discussed VMFA’s role in supporting Wigfall’s early career and recent efforts to restore his legacy. Richard Frumess, arts administrator for the Wigfall estate, reflected on discovering the artist’s multifaceted career posthumously and the impact of Communications Village in Kingston, New York.

Anna Conlan, Neil C. Trager Director of The Dorsky, highlighted the museum’s community-centered approach to organizing the exhibition in collaboration with VMFA and Kingston residents. Zachary Bowman, the museum’s Manager of Education and Visitor Experience, noted that the exhibition not only reinforced Wigfall’s place in art history but also deepened the Dorsky’s engagement with its community, a relationship that continues through the Benjamin Wigfall in Perpetuity Project.

Kingston resident Dina Washington, who participated in Communications Village as a teenager in the 1970s, spoke movingly about Wigfall’s impact on her life and the broader African American community in the Ponckhockie neighborhood of Kingston. Her words resonated deeply with the audience, whose enthusiastic engagement underscored Wigfall’s enduring vision of art as a force for community empowerment.

The exhibition “Benjamin Wigfall and Communication Village” opened at the Dorsky Museum in fall 2022, tracing his development as an artist and treating Communications Village as a major conceptual artwork within his larger body of paintings, assemblages and prints. Curated by Sarah Eckhardt and Drew Thompson, Associate Professor of Visual Studies and Black Culture at Bard Graduate Center, the exhibition later traveled to VMFA in Richmond, Virginia, where it was exhibited in 2023.

Photo: “Ben Wigfall” 1993, by Nancy Donskoj.