Upcoming Exhibitions
Fri, Jun 14Stone RidgeJun 14, 2024, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PMStone Ridge, 178 Schoonmaker Ln, Stone Ridge, NY 12484, USA
Sat, Jun 15Stone RidgeJun 15, 2024, 11:00 AM – Jun 23, 2024, 6:00 PMStone Ridge, 178 Schoonmaker Ln, Stone Ridge, NY 12484, USA
Sat, Jun 22Stone RidgeJun 22, 2024, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDTStone Ridge, 178 Schoonmaker Ln, Stone Ridge, NY 12484, USA
Fri, Aug 23Stone RidgeAug 23, 2024, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PMStone Ridge, 178 Schoonmaker Ln, Stone Ridge, NY 12484, USA
Sat, Aug 24Stone RidgeAug 24, 2024, 11:00 AM – Sep 16, 2024, 6:00 PMStone Ridge, 178 Schoonmaker Ln, Stone Ridge, NY 12484, USA
Sat, Aug 24Stone RidgeAug 24, 2024, 7:00 PMStone Ridge, 178 Schoonmaker Ln, Stone Ridge, NY 12484, USA
2024
merge is thrilled to present this year's exhibitions:
Spring:
aCollection
Journey in the Life of an Artist
Fall:
Alchemy of Color
an exhibition that brings together the work of three artists whose intersection lies at the interplay and juxtaposition of their creative processes, exploration, and implementation of color.
spring 2024
aCollection
Journey in the Life of an Artist
Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 6-9 pm
Special Event: Saturday, June 22, 6-8 pm
Exhibition Dates:
Saturday, June 15 through June 23
Thursday - Sunday
11 am - 6pm
DEBORAH ROBERTS – SUE COE – JACK GOLDSTEIN – LORI GRINKER – DAVID GILHOOLY – RAY PARKER – RICHARD PARE – ROY DE FOREST –MAX COLE – KEVIN LARMON – GREGORY AMENOFF – RAY CAROFANO –MARGARET MCCANN – RODGER MACK – RICHARD NOTKIN - JEROME WITKIN - ELISABETH SONNECK - DEREK BOSHIER & MORE!
What is a collection? What does a collection represent and why do we as individuals accumulate…
baseball card, acorns, memorabilia, objects collected over one’s lifetime, a group of a kind?
At what point is an assemblage deemed a collection?
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DEBORAH ROBERTS. ‘Little Debbie’, 12" x 12", Mixed Media Collage on Paper, 2012
aCollection curated by Lisette Wong & Reinhold Spiegler is the reflection of one artist’s life dedicated to art, the collection, objects and mementos hyphenating ideas, beliefs and marks in time; and in this case, often a concrete trace of the person behind it. This eclectic repository of works, assembled by a life long educator, constantly curious, always learning, both absorber, retainer, and imparter of wisdom is galvanized by Francis Picabia’s invocation, “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”
This thread, a passion for art and a life as a visual artist, is the mode in which this collection was acquired over many decades. This collection of art in this exhibition provides a timeline through the onward shift of Zeitgeist and ideas; along the way, influential mentors, art movements, the everchanging winds of politics and society, technological advancement, and the effects of human activity in the natural world.
Many pieces in the collection were acquired at a time when they were created before the artwork acquired the patina of time. As with many artists, the art pieces were accumulated through a variety of inter-transactional modalities, as is often the case with artists between artists, through exchange, or as gifts in addition to the traditional transactions through art galleries.
LORI GRINKER, ‘Thirty Little Things’, 22 1/2” x 36 1/2”, ink jet on archival paper, 2020
aCollection bears witness to forward thinkers and maverick leaders of art whose ideas continue to be relevant and current artists whose new work shine as beacons today; an eclectic assortment and astounding collection of iconic pieces, a cross section of diverse artists to light our way. This eclectic repository, from significant artists, mentors, colleagues to students is stitched together through time as a visual imprint of this artist’s journey.
In sum, aCollection is an amalgam of individual pieces of artwork that embody time and memory and engages our minds and heart. This exhibition is dedicated to those who as vessels carry knowledge from our predecessors and impart it to the next, to those who bestow wisdom, to artists that care for humanity, provoke our perceptions and assumptions, awaken us from somnambulance, and challenge our beliefs and actions.
JACK GOLDSTEIN, ‘The Six Minute Drown’, vinyl record 45 rpm, 7inches, 1977
Focus on Jack Goldstein
Special Event: Saturday, June 22, 6-8 pm
Join us for an evening of art with a focus on Jack Goldstein with moving images and sound.
Aficionados welcome!
SUE COE, ‘New World Order’, Lithograph, 17"x13", 1991
SUE COE, 'New World Order’, Lithograph, 17"x13", 1991
Deborah Roberts (American, b 1962) critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her art practice takes on social commentary, questioning perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in her work through a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity. ‘Little Debbie’ seen above is a seminal piece in her current exploration. In her own words,
“Wading through my work, you must look through multiple layers, double meanings and symbols. My process combines found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures. These figures often take the form of young girls and increasingly Black boys, whose well being and futures are equally threatened because of the double standard of boyhood and criminality that is projected on them at such a young age. The boys and girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity. Each child has character and agency to find their own way amidst the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history.”
Her work has been exhibited internationally across the USA and Europe. Roberts' work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, among several other institutions. She was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and was a finalist for the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, as well as the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2018), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016). Texas Metal of Arts Award (2023) Roberts received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Two of her works can currently be viewed in the sensational exhibition, ‘Giants’, from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys at the Brooklyn Museum Art.
Lori Grinker is a native New Yorker, is an award-winning photographer, artist, educator and filmmaker. Author of MIKE TYSON (power House fall 2022), Afterwar; Veterans from a World in Conflict, and The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women. Two additional books and a documentary film are also in progress.
Her projects, which revolve around the themes of history, culture, and identity have garnered many awards, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fellowship, the Ernst Hass Grant, an Open Society Audience Engagement Grant, Hasselblad Foundation Grant, the Center (Santa Fe) Project Grant, a World Press Foundation First Prize, and is a 2005 Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma.
Internationally published and exhibited in solo and group exhibits in such diverse venues as the United Nations, secondary schools and universities, art galleries, and recently in War/Photography, at the Brooklyn Museum(2013-14). Her work is held in many private and public collections including: Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Centre National de l'audiovisuel, Dudelange, Luxembourg, International Center of Photography, NYC; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Jewish Museum, NYC City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New York Historical Society, The Museum of Modern Art, Portland Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam; US Embassy to Kenya, Nairobi.
Grinker received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Design at The New School University, an adjunct professor of photography at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Graduate Journalism program, and teaches workshops around the world. Lori Grinker has been a member of Contact Press Images since 1988.
Jack Goldstein (Canadian, b 1945 - d 2003) a much admired and enigmatic artist, who was a California based performance and conceptual artist with roots in minimalist sculpture, earned his fine arts degree from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1970 and a master’s degree from the California Institute of Arts in 1972. Goldstein was a student and teaching assistant of John Baldessari and along with some of his classmates became known as the Cal Arts Mafia which led the transition from conceptualism to Pictures Generation utilizing images from movies and television that represented power and mechanisms in mass culture which gained traction through Helene Winer and Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City. In the early 70’s, Goldstein made experimental films and audio equivalents on vinyl records, translating images to sound, such as ’Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer’, ‘Two Wrestling Cats’, and ‘The Six Minute Drown’ gained particular attention. Much of Goldstein's work questions our memory of experiences and confusing it with the recording of it and whether in fact the documentation has become our primary experience.
A central figure of the 1980’s art scene, he never achieved the commercial or institutional acceptance of his peers, disappeared from the scene in the last decade of his life and tragically died by suicide just as his art was regaining new found interest with young artists in the early 2000s. With this revived relevance, The Orange County Museum of Art, OCMA organized a large scale retrospective ‘Jack Goldstein x 10,000’ in 2012 which travelled to the Jewish Museum in New York in 2013. His works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the Broad in Los Angeles, amongst others.
Sue Coe (English, b 1951) Born in England in 1951, she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and made it her home; in 2012 she became an American citizen.
Since the 1970s, Sue Coe has worked at the juncture of art and social activism to expose injustices and abuses of power. Coe has always been ahead of the curve on social issues, her art a conduit for her progressive politics. Thinking of herself as an activist first and artist second, she has trained her gaze on a wide variety of ills, translating such diverse topics as the perils of apartheid, the life of Malcolm X, and the horror that is the American meat industry into artworks, exhibitions, and books. Coe’s graphic art, filled with unblinking politics, struck nerves when it appeared throughout the 1980s and continues to do so today. Coe is a graphic artist and visual essayist.
Though she primarily works in printmaking and illustration, she also practices in other visual media, including painting
Since 2016, the artist has focused on documenting the misdeeds of the Trump administration as well as the continued undermining of democracy and slide into fascism guided by the Trump-led Republican party.
Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Harvard Art Museums, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, and a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2018.
summer 2024
ALCHEMY OF COLOR
Eva Lundsager | Patricia Sonnino | Janine Wong
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 6-9 pm
Dinner with the Artists: Saturday, August 24, 7-10 pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, August 25
Exhibition Dates:
August 24 - Sept 15
Thursday - Sunday
11 am - 6pm
Eva Lundsager
Eva Lundsager's abstract paintings evoke expansiveness and a sense of watchful waiting. Structured as an imagined, changing space, imagery simultaneously specific and indeterminate suggests life forms moving through atmosphere, over a planet's surface, and deep into solid ground. The paintings are built of varied processes of paint application; layers of pours, drips, glazes, and brushstrokes, and use complex color, sometimes seductive, sometimes alienating. Paint becomes animated forms on the edge of recognition. Lundsager's paintings describe unfamiliar territory in the midst of transition as events of indeterminate consequence unfold.
Growing up in semi-rural Maryland in the 1960s and ‘70s, Lundsager was free to roam the surrounding farms, woods and fields, and made regular visits to the museums of Washington, DC. As a young teenager, she enrolled as an unaccredited student at Antioch College, taking studio and art history courses in ceramics, alongside students getting their MFA. She received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Maryland, where she studied with Ann Truitt, Sam Gilliam, and the art historian and theorist Jack Burnham. Moving to New York in 1985 to attend the MFA program at Hunter College, Lundsager worked with painters Ralph Humphrey, Susan Crile, and Marcia Hafif. She also began working at the legendary Gracie Mansion Gallery, then located in the East Village. She lived in New York for fifteen years before decamping to St. Louis with her family. For a decade there she watched Missouri’s fast changing sky, often beautiful, occasionally frightening. She now lives and works in Boston.
Lundsager has been exhibiting her art for more than three decades, including multiple solo shows in New York at the Greenberg Van Doren, Jack Tilton, and Van Doren Waxter galleries. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Whanki Foundation in Seoul, and has been covered in Art in America, Artforum, Bomb, the Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Time Out New York.
Patricia Sonnino
Patricia Sonnino creates an abstract architecture of color, pattern, and textures, occupying a painterly space between accident and structure. Sonnino seeks to capture unexpected juxtapositions pushing these towards a moment of convergence.
For the artist, some colors and forms are iconic and carry with them memories and sense of place. Like the madeleine in Proust, they are sensory portmanteaus of gone images and places visited, instantly present. Her hope is that the viewer may invoke personal associations to move past a response to surface activity and find a unique reading and connection, a personal resonance.
Sonnino is living and working in San Francisco. She holds a MA and BA in Architecture from Washington University in Saint Louis. Sonnino has taught design at the Boston Architectural Center and been a visiting artist at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and the University of Birmingham in the U.K. She has been awarded residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Clearmont Wyoming, the Willapa Bay AIR, Oysterville Washington, Playa, Summer Lake, Oregon, the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson Vermont, and Penland in the Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina.
Janine Wong
Janine Wong's artistic practice seamlessly combines disciplines, navigating the realms of art, craft, design, and architecture in a constant exploration. Central to her exploration is a fascination with typologies—the intricate frameworks through which we organize our thoughts and categorize the complexities of the world.
Wong masterfully weaves together elements, creating systems that strike a delicate equilibrium between the fortuitous and the planned. Her abstract prints serve as captivating visual meditations, delving into the poetics of place and the nuances of color theory. Wong’s work invites the viewer to wander through a world where the boundaries between intentionality and randomness blur, and where the poetics of place are eloquently captured in the vibrant shapes of color that fill each print.
Wong is a Professor Emerita in Design at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her area of expertise is in color, book arts and printmaking. Her work is represented in several collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond and the Yale Art Gallery, and in special collection libraries at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Oberlin College, Bowdoin College and the University of California Santa Barbara. She is a recipient of a Regional NEA award in works on paper and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. She received the CBAA Exhibition Awards for her artist’s books.
Wong received an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Art and a BArch from School of Art, Architecture and Planning, Cornell University. Janine has also served as Assistant Dean of the College of Visual and Performing. She has been visiting artist and critic at institutions including MIT, Brown University, Harvard, RISD, Boston Architectural League and Mass College of Art and Design.
Past Exhibtions
fall 2023
ALTER ALTAR | 20 Years
Millicent Young
Sculpture and Site Responsive Installation
Artist Talk
accompanied by Gerald Ross
Exhibition Walk-through & Conversation with the artist and acclaimed art director Gerald Ross who headed two decades at the Maryland Institute College of Art, through the Upper & Lower barn spaces, in an open dialogue about Young's site responsive pieces.
Millicent Young's sculptures are evocative on all levels from their conception, to how they are made and how they are experienced. Emotional, provocative, visceral, her pieces are spatial, to be only truly understood by interacting with them through their invitation to question and reflect. Her expansive talent of weaving, stitching and threading to nailing, casting and joining her pieces into art forms is a delight for wonder; to react, and ponder our human experience and our engagement with the world and our environment. Young's talent to fold memory and history into materiality is transformative. In all of her sculptures, one senses the human hand that forms, touches and engages.
A compendium of her work over 20 years exploring Alter Altars responded to the array of our agrarian spaces, coaxing a dialogue with her pieces and the historical barn structures, that in contrast to the paradigm of a neutral white box space, and perhaps bridging the time and space the buildings themselves have known.
Artist’s Statement
My works ask of the viewer a slowness of seeing and offer in return, visual poems about vulnerability, brutality, fragility, resilience, and the confounding, irreconcilable endurance of awe and beauty amidst the unfolding catastrophes of the Sixth Extinction. They ask the viewer to become witness: to become still, permeable: to be with what we wish to turn from. In this regard my artwork is a liminal space between what has been and what could be. They are forms in search of a new mythology in the time of apocalypse. Each is an altar: a site for listening: a space for the possibility of transmissions, however incomplete, to occur.
I make my forms by hand with simple tools and invented processes. Some of my methods are informed by vernacular ways of crafting that I have learned through observation and apprenticeship. All labor is a powerful ritual, a physical engagement with the unknown and as such is a contemplative practice. The record of this labor becomes content.
My materials are in equal measure substance and symbol, ecological and cultural. Many are gathered, salvaged or repurposed. All are ordinary and mostly of my specific place. Their intrinsic qualities and the memory they posses are central to the content.
My artworks respond to specific events: wildfires and burning oceans; the wars in Syria and Ukraine; billions of dead birds; indigenous language extinction; refugees; South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Bosnian rape camps. As outcomes of our disastrous paradigms and long in the making, they are also and equally matters of soul. My work is concerned with unbuckling the boundaries that, falsely defined as immutable, separate us from imagination and the possibility of healing.
What divides us – within our own being and kind; other beings from our own; our own existence from the telluric - the paradigms that foster this splitting, the violent outcomes, and the possibilities of different ones has been the focus of my work for the past 28 years. Natural processes of transformation, practices and principles of conflict healing, spiritual ecology, and the notion that the source of change is from within undergird my practice. To be changed is to create change.
summer 2023
Midsummer Art Evenings
Three Women Artists from Stone Ridge
Paintings and Sculpture Exhibition
Midsummer Art Evenings, an exhibition format for paintings and sculpture which highlights that cherishes the seasonality of the late summer afternoon through the early golden hours of sunset, a framework for the gallery visitor to experience the art in an intimate relationship with the landscape and barns.
unveiled & untapped paintings from S. Lillian Horst aka Susan L. Ross
oil paintings from Kathleen Shaver
sneak preview of Millicent Young's upcoming fall exhibition
S. Lillian Horst aka Susan L. Ross large scale oil and acrylic paintings, an all new ensemble to follow her Spring Exhibition. Her sage works are a torrent of color that will astound, thrill, and engage you.
Kathleen Shaver’s abstract large scale oil paintings on canvas and smaller paintings on evolon. Her paintings, a symphony deft brushwork and color evoke the primal experience of sensory perception.
Millicent Young’s work, installed in the Upper Barn offered a preview of the Fall Exhibition. Her evocative sculptures have a timeless quality and quietude that challenges; the hand is present to thread, stitch, join, forge, hammer, weave, and enrapture you in its mythology.
spring 2023
BEHIND THE SCENES
S. Lillian Horst aka Susan L. Ross
MERGE was thrilled at the reception of the retrospective of the work of a multi-talented tour-de-force, (Susan) Lillian is not only an accomplished painter but whose illustrious career at George Lucas Digital Films, ILM - Industrial Light and Magic as a lead viewpainter, supervisor, texture mapper, and modelmaker has created images sealed in our imaginations.
Paired perfectly in the barn setting , her exuberant and powerful large scale paintings enthralled the gallery visitors. We are thrilled to showcase further unseen works during Midsummmer Art Evenings;
The retrospective covered her career as an artist, the early years and the later years hyphenated and influenced by her prodigious and creative years at ILM.
The early years
Lillian, was an early experimenter of Acrylic Rhoplex and worked often in large format 6' x 6'.
Artist statement
My interest lies in the interior world, how we process thought, the decisions we make. Knowing that we take in all we see, hear, and feel, initially with no censorship, and out of this information we develop a story which may or may not make sense, based often on little or no preceding information or from beliefs or feelings we already have, provides the starting point of my inquiry.
George Lucas Film- the ILM Years
Lillian's career at ILM, then known as Susan Ross, began in the model room and she was promoted to lead viewpainter of digital textures in the paint department at a nascent time of digital animation, of which Lucasfilms was at the forefront and the pioneer of the technology.
Lillian created the painting texture maps that brought to life the digital Chewbacca of Star Wars fame and the dinosaurs from Lost World and worked in the visual effect department creating fantastical worlds for Star Wars and many others.
The Later Years
For twenty years I worked in the special effects industry, first building models using real materials and for the last twelve of those years I painted creatures for the movies using the computer. By zooming in for greater realistic detail, I found at some point the pixel paint became completely abstract but within the abstraction, recognizable images emerged.
In my own work, I find scribbling with brush and paint while continually turning the canvas, encourages the same unconscious behavior, and out of this, the images appear that with a few strokes become visible to a wider audience. When this happens, the seeming disparate elements that form are already speaking clearly to an issue before I have become cognizant of it. This is the moment that fascinates me, the discovery that my unconscious state has already organized the information in a particular way that makes sense.
A completed painting confronts and explores issues that I am concerned with. The characters are not so much referential to humans as to a working thought process that allows me to explore questions concerning family relationships, and our relationship to the culture and world within which we live. The issues focus on the state of things, how we communicate, live, and love. My paintings are the visceral connection I have with the questions and exploration of what it means to be human.
The viewer, when confronted with my work, brings their own unique experiences and history which informs the way in which they perceive and understand my painting. I am not interested in them having my experience but rather that together we inform each other in another way of seeing. I hope that my painting brings questions, dialog, elicits an emotional response that makes one think.
fall 2022
REFRACTED LIGHT
John McDevitt King
MERGE presented the exquisite work of John McDevitt King in a solo exhibition. The show, encompassing his encaustic paintings and works on paper allowed the gallery visitor a window into the unique gaze of the artist who has a led a parallel life as an expert in precious gems for over many decades. His enigmatic and exquisite pieces evolve from the eminence of light to bright crescendos to the near absence of light and evoke an otherworldliness and intensity of a wise and discerning eye.
John McDevitt King lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York and holds a Graduate Gemologist diploma from the Gemological Institute of America. Mr. King exhibits regularly in the United States and abroad and his work can be found in numerous public and private collections, notably the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Harvard University Art Museums, Zimmerli Art Museum and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, and a Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency. In his gemological work he has written and lectured extensively on colored diamonds and laboratory practice and has graded some of the world’s most famous diamonds, including the 45-carat blue Hope diamond at the Smithsonian Institution, the 128-carat yellow Tiffany and the 273-carat Internally Flawless and Colorless Centenary Diamond.
In Your Moment, 2021 Colored pencil on paper
Quality of Light. Light reveals itself through a myriad of gradations and glimmers from shadowed hints to shining in bold clarity, counterpoints that form the foundation of King’s work. Through many layers of translucent encaustic wax, depths of color and scintillation are created that alters appearance with physical movement, its relay back and forth, near and far, never still and different from every vantage point. King’s drawings in graphite, black lead or colored pencil, carry this same quality by employing the roughness of the paper with the chosen drawing medium. This sharp, edgy, vivid, honed quality of light has been long present in King’s art, as meditation on light as transmitted through diamonds.
spring 2022
Prelude: FEAR NOT
FEAR NOT - The Stone Gallery
FEAR NOT
Stephen Zaima
Works from 1984 - 2021
In the spring oof 2022, Merge presented an exhibition of selected artworks by Stephen Zaima curated by Reinhold Spiegler and Lisette Wong.
Merge was very pleased to present a local artist, from Stone Ridge. Stephen Zaima has lived in the Hudson Valley for the past three decades and we are fortunate to have him as part of our cultural landscape. We enjoyed the opportunity to enrich the community through presenting his artworks at Merge in a forum where people learned about his work and engaged in discussion with him, people of all ages!
Zaima was born and raised in California and received his BA from California State University at San Jose and his MFA from the University of California at Davis. He also studied at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt. Zaima’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows in the US and abroad. He has been an educator at several art schools across the United States and since 1980 at Syracuse University where he was head of painting and also served as associate dean for global programs and initiatives.
As a graduate student in art at UC Davis from 1969 to 1971, Zaima was taught by an eclectic faculty of influential working artists such as William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, and Wayne Thiebaud, along with semester composer-in-residence John Cage. Significantly, there were no set disciplines, allowing students to explore different art forms and methods, and instilling in Zaima a flexibility that allowed him to avoid being wedded to any particular style, method or approach to making art. As Zaima has recalled, it was a heady time that he likes to think of as a “Black Mountain College moment”, best exemplified by one of his favorite quotes, from Francis Picabia: “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”
Through these grounding influences in art, Zaima has never been confined to a box, either in his medium or his ideas. He works in a wide a variety of mediums from oil on linen, paper, wood, and jute to encaustic painting, mixed media, collages, installation works on scrim, photo composites on translucent fabric, and dye-sublimation photos on aluminum.
Center Street Studio
35 Years of Printmaking 2021
Prints, Paintings, and Sculpture 2022
Merge hosted the renowned Center Street Studio, in Fall 2021, New England's premier printer and publisher of contemporary prints. 35 years of printmaking were presented in the Stone gallery and Pass-through.
Thrilled for the return of Center Street Studio in the summer of 2022, it was a fascinating show which delved into the group of Center Street Artists' relationship of each artist's printmaking pieces to their primary mediums which was met with great enthusiasm.
Featured CSS Artists:
MARK COOPER - BILL THOMPSON - CARRIE MOYER - CHARLIE RITCHIE -ELTONO - EVA LUNDSAGER -
EVA MUELLER - GEORGE WHITMAN - JAMES STROUD -JANINE WONG -JEFF PERROTT - JOHN WALKER -
JOHN WILSON - LAUREL SPARKS - LESTER JOHNSON - MARKUS LINNENBRINK - MARK COOPER -
MATTHEW CARTER - NELL BLAINE - PARKEHARRISON - RAUL GONZALEZ III - RACHEL PERRY (WELTY) - '
RICHARD RYAN - ROBERT TIBBETTS - TEO GONZALES - WILLIAM STEIGER
A brief ode
For Font Aficionados, a selection from Center Street Studio
on Matthew Carter's work produced in collaboration with Center Street Studio
a-z (2017) Mathew Carter
Past Highlights
Andy Freeberg Photographs
Guardians | Art Fare
Curated by Reinhold Spiegler & Lisette Wong with Andy Freeberg
Performance Dinner
spring 2012
Feast at Stone Ridge
Convergence
convergence is a site specific collaborative concept developed by Marina Sartori of which the Feast at Stone Ridge was the third happening in a series.
Curated by Marina Sartori with co-curators Lisette Wong and Reinhold Spiegler, the happening is an immersive participatory performance dinner created by a collaboration of artists. The dinner and the guests are integral to the performance and the art. The point of departure is the specificity of the space and its sense of place; the compound of barns and its agrarian setting. Themes explored are inspired by the traditional harvest and the seasonal cycle of four seasons through food and gathering, hand-crafted ceramics, art, video, poetry readings, and sound design.
Serlachius Museum in Finland acquired 12 of Andy Freeberg's pieces of work following his solo exhibition this in March of 2022.
Joenniementie 47, 35800 Mänttä, Finland
MERGE is an alternative art space and gallery in the Hudson Valley that supports artists by providing a platform to encourage discussion, collaboration and community in a rural landscape of restored historical farm outbuildings.
MERGE Stone Ridge © 2024
BARNS AS STAGES FOR SHELTERS OF ART & GATHERING