Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Window Project: Stephanie Rozene--The Politics of Porcelain
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This spring, both the main gallery and Window Projects feature emerging female artists and celebrate their artistic achievements at a time that coincides with International Women's Day (March 2011). Stephanie Rozene draws upon the fine line between design and the visual arts. Her work is the result of extensive research and gifted craftsmanship. Through the medium of ceramics (and with special attention to specific patterns, ornaments, and forms) she explores the politics of European ceramics and traces international developments in this medium back to the reigns of French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This is her first solo museum show.

Annual Le Moyne College Student Art Exhibition
LeMoyne College

Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Student Art and Photography Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Davidovich in Situ: A Video Art Project
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Argentine video artist Jaime Davidovich returns to Syracuse University after an amazing year of grand-scale museum exhibitions worldwide, to work on site at The Point of Contact Gallery. Davidovich will present a series of his classic videos along with collage, photography, and a new series of paintings that he will produce on site.

Davidovich, on Painting and Video Art:

"My paintings are hybrids combining the tactile sensation of painting with the electronic pulse of video. The works are small in scale and intimate in nature. I want to do an art that speaks on a one-to-one basis with the viewer, no actors or story line, just a scale for human dialogue. In a time of video as spectacle, my work is indeed conflictive. I am interested in establishing a link (no pun intended) between Morandi and the Internet; the personal gesture and digital reproduction. These are the opposites that attract me. I use video because it is intimate, personal. I use the brush because is my gestural DNA."

Cortland County Art Exhibit
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

Price: Free
Syracuse Technology Garden
235 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists include Fred Zimmerman, David Yaman, Kathy Williams, Carl Steckler, Laurie Seamans, Meg Richardson, Lyla Phillips, Allen Phillips, Joan Niswender, Richard Mitchell, Amy Hnatko, Emily Gibbons, Serry Dans, Kathie Beale, and David Beale.

Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine & Contemporary Culture
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

On display will be pulp magazines, notably titles like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories; the typescript of Isaac Asimov's "Strange Playfellow," which introduced readers to one of science fiction's best known characters, Robbie the Robot; and correspondence with figures like Ray Bradbury.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Celebrating CNY Women in Art: 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day
Westcott Community Art Gallery

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

This group exhibit showcases both the artwork of local women artists, as well as artwork with women-focused subjects. Artists will be sharing their personal experiences in a number of areas. The artists from the CNY area and include Maria Rizzo (painting), Amanda Gormley (photography), Patricia Seitz (painting), Suzanne Masters (paint and collage), Sherry Gordon (painting), Kristie Hayes (painting and drawing), Carla Senecal (installation artwork), and Michael Moody (painting and prints).

Tonal Gestures
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Diana Godfrey: mixed media pastels and acrylic paintings
Carmel Nicoletti: bronze reliefs and glass works

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Jeffrey Henson Scales: That Year of Living
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

That Year of Living features stunning black-and-white photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales. Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Scales was forced to, in his words, weigh the possibilities of his own demise, and whether he had achieved what he felt he was put here to do. It was this diagnosis and contemplation, along with the urging of his wife, Meg Henson Scales, which led him to return to making photographs on a daily basis.

The images in That Year of Living were made in the year following his cancer diagnosis and surgery. Scales photographed mainly in and around Times Square, depicting the part of New York City that he visited every day going to and from work at The New York Times. The images capture the certain hardness mixed with joy, sadness, determination and bewilderment that is found in the faces of young and old alike in New York City. Created in the months following his own experience with mortality, the photographs explore the journey of life and death found in the faces on the streets of New York.

Thilde Jensen: Canaries
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The images in Canaries, an exhibition of photographs by Thilde Jensen, are a personal account of the life Jensen has lived with multiple chemical sensitivity, and the people she has met who suffer from the same condition. People with this sensitivity have been dubbed "human canaries," and they are the casualties of what Jensen calls a "ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture."

Jensen became so sensitive to chemicals in the air that she could not sit in traffic, read a book or sit next to someone wearing perfume. She was forced to wear a gas mask when entering banks, supermarkets and doctor's offices. She left her life in New York City, her husband and her career, and moved to the country, where she lived in a tent away from the regular chemicals such as laundry detergents, pesticides and exhaust fumes.

Read a review!

No Boundaries: Color & Landscape
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Works by Scott Bennett and Michael Matthews.

Note: Limestone Art is now in its new location next to Pascale's at 105 Brooklea Dr. in Fayetteville.

Scott Bennett's new series of vivid landscape paintings have found their inspiration close to home, or rather at his new home and studio in Jamesville, NY.  While continuing his characteristic impasto painting technique, Bennett shares his inspiration with us: "Our property has wonderful woods and views in all directions, and most of these paintings are inspired by the beauty I see everyday when I look out any window or walk out the door." His work has been exhibited in over 40 national exhibitions, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections. This is Bennett's second exhibition at Limestone.
 
Michael Matthews' landscapes are developed from sketchbook watercolors created on site during his travels, at times during below freezing temperatures as ice forms while he paints.  Back in the studio, Matthews creates large paintings from a singe sketch or an amalgamation of his watercolors. Michael Matthews lives in Syracuse, NY and in Harrogate, British Columbia.  His work is found in over 60 corporate art collections.

Toys from the 1970s
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

This year's version will feature toys from the 1970s. Do you remember playing Pong on Atari, getting your first Luke Skywalker figure, or just wishing to have your own Malibu Barbie? Then you won't want to miss this journey into the decade of Charlie's Angels, Richard Nixon and a gallon of gasoline at fifty cents.

Emerging Women of CNY: Student Gallery Show
Redhouse

Price: Free
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A selection of work from young women at Fowler, Nottingham and IT high schools.

Hands On!
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The April show, Hands On!, features paintings and vessels by two noted Central New York artists produced by applying hands and fingertips.

Artist Karen Thomas-Lillie paints atmospheric landscapes and says that all her inspiration comes from the shores of the east side of Cayuga Lake, primarily from Cayuga to Long Point. Her way of capturing this lush environment is in the tools she uses -- oil bar and her hands to blur edges between land, water and sky.

Similar to Thomas-Lillie, ceramicist Jeremy Randall is also motivated by forces of the environment; however, his hand formed vessels reference rural America, not in landscapes but in architecture and antique implements meant to evoke viewers' nostalgia of a by-gone era.

Self-Portrait Show
Gallery 54

Gallery 54
54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

The April show features self portraits by gallery members in a variety of mediums.

Orange Pulp: Works by Norman Saunders
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

A profile of pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), including 10 lush and dramatic Saunders paintings from the university collection.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Ah Leon: Memories of Elementary School
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In 2008, Ah Leon envisioned a monumental ceramic installation showcasing dozens of stoneware desks and chairs in neat rows like the classrooms of our youth. It began with a small grouping called Memories of Elementary School first exhibited in August 2008 at The Taipei Gallery Exposition and in 2009 at the Phoenix Art Museum in conjunction with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) annual conference. Ah Leon continued to make more desks which were exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in 2010. Another year has passed and Ah Leon has completed the 20 sets of desks and chairs which will be showcased in this exhibition.

His original idea was to create a classroom environment that would “lead audiences to remember their childhood stories.” Ah Leon studied elementary school desks, determined that his creations would be authentic, revealing memories through carved initials, scratches and drawings on their worn surfaces. His classroom would preserve the stories of our childhood as if they were “frozen in the museum space.”

The first two rows of tables and chairs appear new. They become progressively more dilapidated--some broken, some leaning--until the last rows where the furniture is falling over and ultimately only chips and severed parts remain on the floor. In one area the desks are arranged as if a teacher reads to a group of children. The impact of the scene is immediate: viewers are taken back to their own childhood classroom and long forgotten memories drift to the surface.

Read a review!

Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The 2011 exhibition program will continue to highlight the talented artists of New York State through a series of focused exhibitions. The season opens with Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds, an exhibition featuring more than 100 original works of art that are seriously hilarious. The small-scale drawings depicting the comedic daily lives of humans and animals alike are all rendered by hand in a variety of media, an approach that is becoming increasing rare in a world of computer-generated images.

Dan Reynolds began drawing cartoons in 1989, when he was 30. As a youth center instructor, Reynolds was surrounded by youthful energy and creative minds. He was an avid follower of popular cartoons of the time, such as Gary Larson's Far Side and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. A native of Brewerton, NY, Reynolds was inspired by his Central New York surroundings, a place where snow is abundant and cows can be found just minutes from anywhere. From the beginning, Reynolds has used farm animals as messengers of humor, particularly cows, pigs and chickens, a series that was immediately accepted by Reader's Digest in 1989. A new cartoon has appeared in every issue since then. Reynolds' cartoons have also appeared in thematic Reynolds Unwrapped book compilations featuring everything from sports to holiday special editions. American Greetings and Recycled Greeting Cards also feature Reynolds cartoons on greeting cards for every occasion.

In 2008, Reynolds was diagnosed with testicular cancer and subsequently received months of chemotherapy. While he was in treatment, he began drawing cartoons about cancer and his personal experience which he found was shared by his fellow patients. He shared the cartoons with the staff and patients at the facility and discovered the power of art to bring humor to an otherwise humorless situation.

Read a review!

Cannonball Press Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Cannonball Press, the Brooklyn-based alternative pirate press co-founded by artists Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, will present an exhibition, which includes new, large-scale graphic works, installations and sculpture. As Cannonball Press, Mazorra and Houston publish and sell limited-run editions of emerging artists' work and display it on their website, as well as at shows and festivals. The venture seeks to invite talented artists to explore the medium and make affordable, high-quality editions. Artists represented include Drew Iwaniw, Katy Seals, Joseph Velasquez, John Hitchcock, Derrick Riley, Meghan O'Connor, and Dusty Herbig, assistant professor of printmaking at VPA.

For more information, contact Dusty Herbig, 315-443-4519 or dtherbig@syr.edu, or XL Projects (during gallery hours), 315-443-2542.

Kueng Caputo: The Quadrangular Cloud
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The young female Swiss designer duo, Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo, will install a hotel in the Warehouse Gallery. The main gallery will be transformed into small ephemeral rooms where the visitor is invited to take a break from reality and to take a mini-vacation complete with a number of very simple, inexpensive and joyful elements. When seated or lying down, the public's focus is drawn to the interior space and lighting. The idea for a temporary hotel goes back to Kueng's and Caputo's 72 Hours Hotel, which was initially developed in 2006 for the train station in Zurich, Switzerland. Both artists have been widely exhibited. This is their first museum solo show in the U.S.

Read a review!

100 Years of Women Rockin' the World
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibition features the art of 35 women artists -- nine local to Syracuse, and the rest from communities across the country. These women, in keeping with the mission of ArtRage, are also activists and their work expresses a whole range of issues important to both women and the community of concerned people worldwide: self-image, hunger, collective action, war, children, the status of women, immigration, environmental crisis, alternative lifestyles and self-discovery.

Participating artists include Arlene Abend, Amy Bartell, Ellen Blalock, Marlena Buczek, Elizabeth Carter, Jen Cartwright, the Chicago Women's Graphic Collective, Sue Coe, Erin Currier, Jane Evershed, Raina Gentry, Susan Grabel, Sharon Lee Hart, Robin Hewlett, Gail Hoffman, Nancy Hom, Katherine Hughes, Lahib Jaddo, Mollie Kellogg, Kate Luscher, Dierdre Luzwick, Sofia Perez, Ruth Putter, Favianna Rodriguez, Gazelle Samizay, Nicole Schulman, Sarah Walroth, Anita Welych and Oceans Unraveled project with artists: Aviva Alter, Mary Buczek, Mary Ellen Croteau.

Jenny Holzer installation
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created a site-specific installation that streams across the façade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms" and "Survival" that challenge viewers' assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses or lamenting the struggles of daily living, Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed "Truisms" on one of Times Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her "Survival" series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Read a review!

Heartland Passage: The Oral History of the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum

Price: Free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

"Heartland Passage" is a set of nine high-definition videos -- six of them newly produced and three drawn from the New York State Museum -- that each profile a person who grew up along or worked on the Erie Canal. (24 minutes total)

Dr. Daniel Ward, Erie Canal Museum curator, will introduce the nine videos and provide some history about the project.

Heartland Passage: The Oral History of the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum

Price: Free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

"Heartland Passage" is a set of nine high-definition videos -- six of them newly produced and three drawn from the New York State Museum -- that each profile a person who grew up along or worked on the Erie Canal. (24 minutes total)

Dr. Daniel Ward, Erie Canal Museum curator, will introduce the nine videos and provide some history about the project.

Gregory Wood, cello; Maryna Mazhukhova, piano
Civic Morning Musicals

Price: Free
Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Distinguished SSO cellist performs Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata as well as music by Tchaikovsky.

Curse of the Starving Class
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's 1978, excoriating comedy has never seemed timelier. "The whole thing is geared to invisible money," laments Weston, the chronically soused patriarch of a family in serious financial and psychological disarray. The refrigerator's empty, the house is crumbling, the creditors are baying, and that much longed-for American idyll is unattainable. Shepard's savage fantasy on America's voraciousness only gets better with age.

Premiering at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978, Curse won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis (cousin of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis) played the matriarch Ella in the premiere. In the 1994 film version, another Academy Award winner, Kathy Bates, took on the role. Shepard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his subsequent play Buried Child, is also an Academy Award nominated actor for his supporting role in The Right Stuff (1983).

Read a Review!

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Window Project: Stephanie Rozene--The Politics of Porcelain
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This spring, both the main gallery and Window Projects feature emerging female artists and celebrate their artistic achievements at a time that coincides with International Women's Day (March 2011). Stephanie Rozene draws upon the fine line between design and the visual arts. Her work is the result of extensive research and gifted craftsmanship. Through the medium of ceramics (and with special attention to specific patterns, ornaments, and forms) she explores the politics of European ceramics and traces international developments in this medium back to the reigns of French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This is her first solo museum show.

Annual Le Moyne College Student Art Exhibition
LeMoyne College

Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Student Art and Photography Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Photography by Vincent Doody and Illustration by Aaron Lee
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

Price: Free
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium
2 Clinton Square, Syracuse

Gallery A: Vincent Doody's photographs portraying serene country landscapes, city scenes at twilight, and reflect the desolate life of Oswego's lighthouse in winter.
Gallery B highlights Aaron Lee's selection of comic illustrations from his witty, surreal and satirical series on Wesley the robot.

Cortland County Art Exhibit
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

Price: Free
Syracuse Technology Garden
235 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists include Fred Zimmerman, David Yaman, Kathy Williams, Carl Steckler, Laurie Seamans, Meg Richardson, Lyla Phillips, Allen Phillips, Joan Niswender, Richard Mitchell, Amy Hnatko, Emily Gibbons, Serry Dans, Kathie Beale, and David Beale.

Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine & Contemporary Culture
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

On display will be pulp magazines, notably titles like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories; the typescript of Isaac Asimov's "Strange Playfellow," which introduced readers to one of science fiction's best known characters, Robbie the Robot; and correspondence with figures like Ray Bradbury.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Celebrating CNY Women in Art: 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day
Westcott Community Art Gallery

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

This group exhibit showcases both the artwork of local women artists, as well as artwork with women-focused subjects. Artists will be sharing their personal experiences in a number of areas. The artists from the CNY area and include Maria Rizzo (painting), Amanda Gormley (photography), Patricia Seitz (painting), Suzanne Masters (paint and collage), Sherry Gordon (painting), Kristie Hayes (painting and drawing), Carla Senecal (installation artwork), and Michael Moody (painting and prints).

Tonal Gestures
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Diana Godfrey: mixed media pastels and acrylic paintings
Carmel Nicoletti: bronze reliefs and glass works

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Thilde Jensen: Canaries
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The images in Canaries, an exhibition of photographs by Thilde Jensen, are a personal account of the life Jensen has lived with multiple chemical sensitivity, and the people she has met who suffer from the same condition. People with this sensitivity have been dubbed "human canaries," and they are the casualties of what Jensen calls a "ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture."

Jensen became so sensitive to chemicals in the air that she could not sit in traffic, read a book or sit next to someone wearing perfume. She was forced to wear a gas mask when entering banks, supermarkets and doctor's offices. She left her life in New York City, her husband and her career, and moved to the country, where she lived in a tent away from the regular chemicals such as laundry detergents, pesticides and exhaust fumes.

Read a review!

Jeffrey Henson Scales: That Year of Living
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

There will be a gallery reception this evening 5:00-7:00 pm.

That Year of Living features stunning black-and-white photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales. Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Scales was forced to, in his words, weigh the possibilities of his own demise, and whether he had achieved what he felt he was put here to do. It was this diagnosis and contemplation, along with the urging of his wife, Meg Henson Scales, which led him to return to making photographs on a daily basis.

The images in That Year of Living were made in the year following his cancer diagnosis and surgery. Scales photographed mainly in and around Times Square, depicting the part of New York City that he visited every day going to and from work at The New York Times. The images capture the certain hardness mixed with joy, sadness, determination and bewilderment that is found in the faces of young and old alike in New York City. Created in the months following his own experience with mortality, the photographs explore the journey of life and death found in the faces on the streets of New York.

No Boundaries: Color & Landscape
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Works by Scott Bennett and Michael Matthews.

Note: Limestone Art is now in its new location next to Pascale's at 105 Brooklea Dr. in Fayetteville.

Scott Bennett's new series of vivid landscape paintings have found their inspiration close to home, or rather at his new home and studio in Jamesville, NY.  While continuing his characteristic impasto painting technique, Bennett shares his inspiration with us: "Our property has wonderful woods and views in all directions, and most of these paintings are inspired by the beauty I see everyday when I look out any window or walk out the door." His work has been exhibited in over 40 national exhibitions, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections. This is Bennett's second exhibition at Limestone.
 
Michael Matthews' landscapes are developed from sketchbook watercolors created on site during his travels, at times during below freezing temperatures as ice forms while he paints.  Back in the studio, Matthews creates large paintings from a singe sketch or an amalgamation of his watercolors. Michael Matthews lives in Syracuse, NY and in Harrogate, British Columbia.  His work is found in over 60 corporate art collections.

Toys from the 1970s
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

This year's version will feature toys from the 1970s. Do you remember playing Pong on Atari, getting your first Luke Skywalker figure, or just wishing to have your own Malibu Barbie? Then you won't want to miss this journey into the decade of Charlie's Angels, Richard Nixon and a gallon of gasoline at fifty cents.

Emerging Women of CNY: Student Gallery Show
Redhouse

Price: Free
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A selection of work from young women at Fowler, Nottingham and IT high schools.

Hands On!
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The April show, Hands On!, features paintings and vessels by two noted Central New York artists produced by applying hands and fingertips.

Artist Karen Thomas-Lillie paints atmospheric landscapes and says that all her inspiration comes from the shores of the east side of Cayuga Lake, primarily from Cayuga to Long Point. Her way of capturing this lush environment is in the tools she uses -- oil bar and her hands to blur edges between land, water and sky.

Similar to Thomas-Lillie, ceramicist Jeremy Randall is also motivated by forces of the environment; however, his hand formed vessels reference rural America, not in landscapes but in architecture and antique implements meant to evoke viewers' nostalgia of a by-gone era.

Self-Portrait Show
Gallery 54

Gallery 54
54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

The April show features self portraits by gallery members in a variety of mediums.

Forrest Lesch-Middelton: Recent Work
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

Forrest Lesch-Middelton's pottery combines historic patterns with modern-day technology. The resulting work creates a subtle narrative that references the cross-cultural influences that impact every facet of daily life. Pottery is used as a metaphor to illustrate this phenomenon. To achieve the intricate patterns, Lesch-Middelton uses silkscreen and embossment transfer techniques. He says of his artwork, "By blending form, pattern, and surface, my goal is to create an object that simultaneously elicits a visceral and intellectual response, followed by a contemplation of my work as a whole."

Lesch-Middelton received his MFA in Ceramics from Utah State University in 2006 and a BFA in Ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1998. He is currently the Ceramics Program Coordinator at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma, California and teaches at Santa Rosa Jr. College and Solano College in the San Francisco Bay area. His artwork has been shown in many venues nationally, including the Baltimore Clayworks (MD), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN), and Santa Fe Clay Center (NM). He currently lives with his wife and two daughters in Northern California.

Opening: MFA 2011
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

There will be an opening reception this evening from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

MFA 2011 presents the work of 17 visual artists and 20 musicians and composers concluding their graduate careers at Syracuse University. On view will be a wide range of traditional and contemporary media, including painting, drawing, photography, interactive and experimental sculpture and conceptual installations. Master's of Music candidates will perform thesis compositions every Thursday at 6:00 p.m. beginning April 14, for the run of the exhibition.

Manipulation of scale and environment is a clear, consistent thread in this year's exhibition. Painters engulf the viewer in their work, through an expansive 17-foot drawing and by the perspective of a 14-foot canvas projecting from the top of a gallery wall. Photographer Shimpei Shirafuji carries a narrative around the perimeter of a room, a contemporary twist on 19th century cycloramas. An installation of half-toned screen-prints by Eric Johanni initially engages the viewer from across the room, and then again once you are directly in front of the work. Other artists utilize the subtlety of scale to create an intimacy that immerses the viewer into the artwork, such as miniature architectural models and unassuming artist performances. Site-specific installations transform galleries into absorbing new environments that influence all of the viewer's senses, creating ephemeral experiences through sound, performance and media. Documentary films that deal with issues of identity and family will also be on view in the media theater.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces aren't available the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

Read a review!

Orange Pulp: Works by Norman Saunders
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

A profile of pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), including 10 lush and dramatic Saunders paintings from the university collection.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The 2011 exhibition program will continue to highlight the talented artists of New York State through a series of focused exhibitions. The season opens with Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds, an exhibition featuring more than 100 original works of art that are seriously hilarious. The small-scale drawings depicting the comedic daily lives of humans and animals alike are all rendered by hand in a variety of media, an approach that is becoming increasing rare in a world of computer-generated images.

Dan Reynolds began drawing cartoons in 1989, when he was 30. As a youth center instructor, Reynolds was surrounded by youthful energy and creative minds. He was an avid follower of popular cartoons of the time, such as Gary Larson's Far Side and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. A native of Brewerton, NY, Reynolds was inspired by his Central New York surroundings, a place where snow is abundant and cows can be found just minutes from anywhere. From the beginning, Reynolds has used farm animals as messengers of humor, particularly cows, pigs and chickens, a series that was immediately accepted by Reader's Digest in 1989. A new cartoon has appeared in every issue since then. Reynolds' cartoons have also appeared in thematic Reynolds Unwrapped book compilations featuring everything from sports to holiday special editions. American Greetings and Recycled Greeting Cards also feature Reynolds cartoons on greeting cards for every occasion.

In 2008, Reynolds was diagnosed with testicular cancer and subsequently received months of chemotherapy. While he was in treatment, he began drawing cartoons about cancer and his personal experience which he found was shared by his fellow patients. He shared the cartoons with the staff and patients at the facility and discovered the power of art to bring humor to an otherwise humorless situation.

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Ah Leon: Memories of Elementary School
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In 2008, Ah Leon envisioned a monumental ceramic installation showcasing dozens of stoneware desks and chairs in neat rows like the classrooms of our youth. It began with a small grouping called Memories of Elementary School first exhibited in August 2008 at The Taipei Gallery Exposition and in 2009 at the Phoenix Art Museum in conjunction with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) annual conference. Ah Leon continued to make more desks which were exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in 2010. Another year has passed and Ah Leon has completed the 20 sets of desks and chairs which will be showcased in this exhibition.

His original idea was to create a classroom environment that would “lead audiences to remember their childhood stories.” Ah Leon studied elementary school desks, determined that his creations would be authentic, revealing memories through carved initials, scratches and drawings on their worn surfaces. His classroom would preserve the stories of our childhood as if they were “frozen in the museum space.”

The first two rows of tables and chairs appear new. They become progressively more dilapidated--some broken, some leaning--until the last rows where the furniture is falling over and ultimately only chips and severed parts remain on the floor. In one area the desks are arranged as if a teacher reads to a group of children. The impact of the scene is immediate: viewers are taken back to their own childhood classroom and long forgotten memories drift to the surface.

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Reception: Cannonball Press Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

There will be an artist reception and and limited-edition print sale this evening 6:00-8:00 pm.

Cannonball Press, the Brooklyn-based alternative pirate press co-founded by artists Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, will present an exhibition, which includes new, large-scale graphic works, installations and sculpture. As Cannonball Press, Mazorra and Houston publish and sell limited-run editions of emerging artists' work and display it on their website, as well as at shows and festivals. The venture seeks to invite talented artists to explore the medium and make affordable, high-quality editions. Artists represented include Drew Iwaniw, Katy Seals, Joseph Velasquez, John Hitchcock, Derrick Riley, Meghan O'Connor, and Dusty Herbig, assistant professor of printmaking at VPA.

For more information, contact Dusty Herbig, 315-443-4519 or dtherbig@syr.edu, or XL Projects (during gallery hours), 315-443-2542.

Kueng Caputo: The Quadrangular Cloud
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The young female Swiss designer duo, Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo, will install a hotel in the Warehouse Gallery. The main gallery will be transformed into small ephemeral rooms where the visitor is invited to take a break from reality and to take a mini-vacation complete with a number of very simple, inexpensive and joyful elements. When seated or lying down, the public's focus is drawn to the interior space and lighting. The idea for a temporary hotel goes back to Kueng's and Caputo's 72 Hours Hotel, which was initially developed in 2006 for the train station in Zurich, Switzerland. Both artists have been widely exhibited. This is their first museum solo show in the U.S.

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100 Years of Women Rockin' the World
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibition features the art of 35 women artists -- nine local to Syracuse, and the rest from communities across the country. These women, in keeping with the mission of ArtRage, are also activists and their work expresses a whole range of issues important to both women and the community of concerned people worldwide: self-image, hunger, collective action, war, children, the status of women, immigration, environmental crisis, alternative lifestyles and self-discovery.

Participating artists include Arlene Abend, Amy Bartell, Ellen Blalock, Marlena Buczek, Elizabeth Carter, Jen Cartwright, the Chicago Women's Graphic Collective, Sue Coe, Erin Currier, Jane Evershed, Raina Gentry, Susan Grabel, Sharon Lee Hart, Robin Hewlett, Gail Hoffman, Nancy Hom, Katherine Hughes, Lahib Jaddo, Mollie Kellogg, Kate Luscher, Dierdre Luzwick, Sofia Perez, Ruth Putter, Favianna Rodriguez, Gazelle Samizay, Nicole Schulman, Sarah Walroth, Anita Welych and Oceans Unraveled project with artists: Aviva Alter, Mary Buczek, Mary Ellen Croteau.

2011 Light Work Student Invitational Gallery Reception
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Light Work is pleased to announce the award recipients for the 2011 Light Work Student Invitational exhibition: Genevieve Marshall, Best of Show; and Honorable Mention award recipients Andrew Hida and Renée Stevens. The award recipients were chosen by guest juror Amber Terranova, photo editor for Photo District News.

Fifty-two Syracuse University students responded to this year's call for submissions. The exhibition is now available for viewing on the flat panel screen at Light Work.

Students participating in the 2011 Student Invitational Exhibition include Daniel Aguilera, Sarah Anthony, Martin Biando, Danielle Carrick, Caitlin Caspersen, Luis Chimbo, Kathryn Connelly, Maureen Coyle, Ciara Crocker, Rose Cromwell, Brian Dawson, Joshua L. DeMotts, Emily Edwards, Jillian Ellis, Julia Ferrier, Amy Francisco, Andrew Frost, Anthony Garito, Andrew Hida, Mark Hoelscher, Myron Holmes, Robert Hopkins, Max Jackson, Lauren Jones, Varun Joshi, Jenna Ketchmark, John Liau, Joe Lingeman, Robert Loughlin, Annie Louton, Allie Marino, Genevieve Marshall, Varvara Mikushkina, Bob Miller, Emma Morgan Meade, Hannah Nast, John O'Toole, Arundhati Patel, Carly Piersol, Elizabeth Reyes, Jessica Scarfo, Meghan Schaetzle, Masha Snitkovsky, Renée Stevens, Leah Stiles, Alyssa Stone, Bridget Streeter, Chris Trigaux, David Trotman-Wilkins, Jennifer Turner, Tracey Wishik, and Elif Yoney.

CrossThreads Arts Journal and "Westside Through My Eyes" Photo Exhibit

Price: Free
Case Supply Building
601 W. Fayette St. , Syracuse

CrossThreads Arts Journal is a creative journal that promotes and highlights all the artists that live, work or have some relation to the Westside of Syracuse. The journal features paintings, photographs, poems, etc. from over 50 artists in the community. The journal, just published, will be available to view and will be projected at the event.

The "Westside Through My Eyes" photo exhibit features several photographs taken by Westside residents showing the beauty in the community, even during the winter months. The exhibit will display all the photographs taken, and at the conclusion of the evening, a winning photograph will be selected. The winning photographer will receive two free Delta Airline tickets to anywhere in the United States.

John Freyer: The Dress Up Portrait Project
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Freyer's series of videos connects speaker to listener, performer to viewer. His 5-year-old daughter and her friends take turns posing for the camera for periods of several minutes without moving. At first, the static video images of little girls in Cinderella skirts or mom's high heels appear as cute clichés familiar from advertising and family photo albums. However, the children's mild discomfort at standing still and silent becomes increasingly unsettling over time. The children struggle not to fidget or speak, opening a space for a more complicated reading of their self-presentation. Their chosen objects of "dress up"--the clutter of pink hair curlers and ballerina frills--become a costume that liberates, rather than obscures, the personality beneath.

Freyer is an assistant professor of studio art in the School for Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, where he teaches advanced photography and digital imaging classes. He is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow in Stockholm, Sweden.

Jenny Holzer installation
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created a site-specific installation that streams across the façade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms" and "Survival" that challenge viewers' assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses or lamenting the struggles of daily living, Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed "Truisms" on one of Times Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her "Survival" series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

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Heartland Passage: The Oral History of the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum

Price: Free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

"Heartland Passage" is a set of nine high-definition videos -- six of them newly produced and three drawn from the New York State Museum -- that each profile a person who grew up along or worked on the Erie Canal. (24 minutes total)

Dr. Daniel Ward, Erie Canal Museum curator, will introduce the nine videos and provide some history about the project.

Heartland Passage: The Oral History of the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum

Price: Free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

"Heartland Passage" is a set of nine high-definition videos -- six of them newly produced and three drawn from the New York State Museum -- that each profile a person who grew up along or worked on the Erie Canal. (24 minutes total)

Dr. Daniel Ward, Erie Canal Museum curator, will introduce the nine videos and provide some history about the project.

Book Talk: Decorative Games
Syracuse University School of Architecture
Featuring Jean-François Bédard

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Auditorium
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

Jean-François Bédard, assistant professor in the SU School of Architecture will talk about his new book Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742). A reception and book signing will follow the talk.

Exhibit Opening Piano Performance
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Featuring Patrick Behringer, piano

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Ra Ra Riot, with special guests
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Cruel April 2011
Point of Contact Gallery
Featuring Michael Burkard, Bruce Smith

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Point of Contact celebrates National Poetry Month with weekly poetry gatherings and a new poetry collection: Corresponding Voices, Vol. 4. The gallery will host multilingual poetry readings every Thursday in April. Each reading will feature poems from the new collection presented by the newly published authors and special guests. A reception will follow each reading.

Michael Burkard's most recent book of poems, lucky coat anywhere, was published this year by Nightboat Books. Among his other poetry books are Envelope of Night (Nightboat Books), Unsleeping (Sarabande), Entire Dilemma (Sarabande), and My Secret Boat (W. W. Norton). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the New York State Foundation for the Arts. His poetry has been also featured in publications like LIT, The American Poetry Review, Bat City Review, Verse, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Caketrain, and others. He has exhibited his drawings in three group shows in 2009/2010, and has self-published three books of drawings: Michael Burkard, a flower with milk in a shadow beside it, and one day my face. He also has two CDs available of his improvised songs: who do voodoo and blue stranger. He has taught in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University since 1997.

Bruce Smith is the author of five books of poems, most recently Songs for Two Voices (University of Chicago, 2005). Poems in this collection have appeared in The Best American Poetry, 2003 and 2004. His fourth book, The Other Lover (University of Chicago, 2000) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, The American Poetry Review, and many others. Essays and reviews of his have appeared in Harvard Review, Boston Review and Newsday. He has been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship as well as twice receiving grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Arts.

Palace Poetry Group
Featuring Rachael Ikins

Books and Melodies
2600 James St., Syracuse

For more info, email griggsquaker@hotmail.com.

A Wee Bit O' Murder
Acme Mystery Company

Price: $32.50 plus tax and gratuities (includes meal and show)
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Holy St. Patrick on a stick! Someone has stolen the pot of gold and now you and all the other leprechauns of Clover Union Local Number 7 have your little tails in a spin. The president of your local, Jimmy Jack Daniels O'Toole is demanding that you get your wee bottoms over to the pub as fast as your little feet can go. If the International Fellowship of Little Knickers finds out about this, you'll all be turned into garden gnomes!

For reservations, phone 315-475-1807, or email syracuse@meatballs.com.

The Miracle Worker
Syracuse Stage
Paul Barnes, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

"Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living." In her own words, Helen Keller captures the inspirational heart of William Gibson's classic American play. Between the emptiness and the rapture, though, came a fierce struggle of wills, with Helen, in her darkness and stillness, on one side, and the determined Annie Sullivan on the other, a young woman who had endured a lifetime of pain in just 20 years. Gibson's text is unsparing and unflinching in its depiction of their confrontation and mutual triumph. The hearts that will be leaping will be ours.

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Autobahn
Black Box Players
Jenny Leon, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Autobahn by Neil LaBute

On the Verge
LeMoyne College

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history, geography, feminism and fashion written by Eric Overmyer who also wrote HBO's hit drama The Wire.

The Marvelous Wonderettes
Rarely Done Productions
Dan Tursi, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

The story is set at the 1958 Springfield High School prom where we meet the Wonderettes — Betty Jean, Cindy Lou, Missy, and Suzy, four girls with hopes and dreams as big as their crinoline skirts and voices to match! As we learn about their lives and loves, we are treated to the girls performing classic 50s and 60s songs. Written by Roger Bean.

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[sic]
Redhouse
Anton Briones, director

Price: $25 regular; $20 students/seniors
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A fragmented comedy celebrating the insanity of friendship by Melissa James Gibson, [sic] explores the relationship of three neighbors as they struggle to survive in the big city. Between love affairs, writer's block, tongue twisters and a corpse, these off-the-wall characters embrace the fun in their dysfunction, illuminating the [sic] in us all.

Redhouse is thrilled to introduce New York City Director Anton Briones and Scenic/Costume Designer, Timothy Brown to the Syracuse theatre scene. In this production, the creative team will be pushing the envelope by exploring new ways to use video, music and theatricality to bring this contemporary play to life.

The cast includes John Bixler, Laura Austin, and Binaifer Dabu, who recently appeared in Odysseus DOA at Redhouse. Also featured in the cast are Matt Chiorini, Navroz Dabu, and Mary Ellen Dowling. Redhouse Technical Director, John Czajkowski completes the creative team.

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Curse of the Starving Class
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's 1978, excoriating comedy has never seemed timelier. "The whole thing is geared to invisible money," laments Weston, the chronically soused patriarch of a family in serious financial and psychological disarray. The refrigerator's empty, the house is crumbling, the creditors are baying, and that much longed-for American idyll is unattainable. Shepard's savage fantasy on America's voraciousness only gets better with age.

Premiering at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978, Curse won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis (cousin of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis) played the matriarch Ella in the premiere. In the 1994 film version, another Academy Award winner, Kathy Bates, took on the role. Shepard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his subsequent play Buried Child, is also an Academy Award nominated actor for his supporting role in The Right Stuff (1983).

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Friday, April 8, 2011

Window Project: Stephanie Rozene--The Politics of Porcelain
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This spring, both the main gallery and Window Projects feature emerging female artists and celebrate their artistic achievements at a time that coincides with International Women's Day (March 2011). Stephanie Rozene draws upon the fine line between design and the visual arts. Her work is the result of extensive research and gifted craftsmanship. Through the medium of ceramics (and with special attention to specific patterns, ornaments, and forms) she explores the politics of European ceramics and traces international developments in this medium back to the reigns of French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This is her first solo museum show.

Annual Le Moyne College Student Art Exhibition
LeMoyne College

Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Student Art and Photography Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Davidovich in Situ: A Video Art Project
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Argentine video artist Jaime Davidovich returns to Syracuse University after an amazing year of grand-scale museum exhibitions worldwide, to work on site at The Point of Contact Gallery. Davidovich will present a series of his classic videos along with collage, photography, and a new series of paintings that he will produce on site.

Davidovich, on Painting and Video Art:

"My paintings are hybrids combining the tactile sensation of painting with the electronic pulse of video. The works are small in scale and intimate in nature. I want to do an art that speaks on a one-to-one basis with the viewer, no actors or story line, just a scale for human dialogue. In a time of video as spectacle, my work is indeed conflictive. I am interested in establishing a link (no pun intended) between Morandi and the Internet; the personal gesture and digital reproduction. These are the opposites that attract me. I use video because it is intimate, personal. I use the brush because is my gestural DNA."

Photography by Vincent Doody and Illustration by Aaron Lee
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

Price: Free
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium
2 Clinton Square, Syracuse

Gallery A: Vincent Doody's photographs portraying serene country landscapes, city scenes at twilight, and reflect the desolate life of Oswego's lighthouse in winter.
Gallery B highlights Aaron Lee's selection of comic illustrations from his witty, surreal and satirical series on Wesley the robot.

Cortland County Art Exhibit
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

Price: Free
Syracuse Technology Garden
235 Harrison St., Syracuse

Artists include Fred Zimmerman, David Yaman, Kathy Williams, Carl Steckler, Laurie Seamans, Meg Richardson, Lyla Phillips, Allen Phillips, Joan Niswender, Richard Mitchell, Amy Hnatko, Emily Gibbons, Serry Dans, Kathie Beale, and David Beale.

Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine & Contemporary Culture
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

On display will be pulp magazines, notably titles like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories; the typescript of Isaac Asimov's "Strange Playfellow," which introduced readers to one of science fiction's best known characters, Robbie the Robot; and correspondence with figures like Ray Bradbury.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Celebrating CNY Women in Art: 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day
Westcott Community Art Gallery

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

This group exhibit showcases both the artwork of local women artists, as well as artwork with women-focused subjects. Artists will be sharing their personal experiences in a number of areas. The artists from the CNY area and include Maria Rizzo (painting), Amanda Gormley (photography), Patricia Seitz (painting), Suzanne Masters (paint and collage), Sherry Gordon (painting), Kristie Hayes (painting and drawing), Carla Senecal (installation artwork), and Michael Moody (painting and prints).

Tonal Gestures
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Diana Godfrey: mixed media pastels and acrylic paintings
Carmel Nicoletti: bronze reliefs and glass works

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

You Are Here
Community Folk Art Center

Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

"You Are Here" explores various intersections of citizenship and art practice. The show grew out of a year-long graduate seminar titled Art and Civic Dialogue, led by Carrie Mae Weems, an artist of international renown, and David A. Ross, the former director of the Whitney Museum and The San Francisco Museum of Art, and currently the chairman of the MFA in art practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

The exhibition represents a roster of dynamic artists working in Syracuse and beyond whose works are concerned with varying notions of social engagement. In that spirit, the words citizenship and art are both carefully reconsidered through a diverse group of works, each bringing a sense of urgency to the complex task of defining the role of art in civic dialogue.

The exhibit includes photographic installations, performance, sculpture, web-based projects, video and a study center that anchors the ideas across disciplines.

A study center, designed by COLAB Director Chris McCray, Weems, Lauren Boldon and Jennifer Hsu, includes books, videos, a bibliography and a timeline highlighting seminal moments and artists in the history of art and social practice.

Participating in the show are Weems, Anneka Herre, Hsu, Boldon, Nathaniel Sullivan, Jay Muhlin, Adrienne Buccella, Rose Marie Cromwell, James Wang, Susannah Sayler, Ed Morris, Marion Wilson, McCray, Siebern Versteeg, Joanna Spitzner, Duke & Battersby, Young_Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Sze Lin Pang, Paula Johnson, Doug DuBois and Hank Willis Thomas.

Jeffrey Henson Scales: That Year of Living
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

That Year of Living features stunning black-and-white photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales. Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Scales was forced to, in his words, weigh the possibilities of his own demise, and whether he had achieved what he felt he was put here to do. It was this diagnosis and contemplation, along with the urging of his wife, Meg Henson Scales, which led him to return to making photographs on a daily basis.

The images in That Year of Living were made in the year following his cancer diagnosis and surgery. Scales photographed mainly in and around Times Square, depicting the part of New York City that he visited every day going to and from work at The New York Times. The images capture the certain hardness mixed with joy, sadness, determination and bewilderment that is found in the faces of young and old alike in New York City. Created in the months following his own experience with mortality, the photographs explore the journey of life and death found in the faces on the streets of New York.

Thilde Jensen: Canaries
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The images in Canaries, an exhibition of photographs by Thilde Jensen, are a personal account of the life Jensen has lived with multiple chemical sensitivity, and the people she has met who suffer from the same condition. People with this sensitivity have been dubbed "human canaries," and they are the casualties of what Jensen calls a "ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture."

Jensen became so sensitive to chemicals in the air that she could not sit in traffic, read a book or sit next to someone wearing perfume. She was forced to wear a gas mask when entering banks, supermarkets and doctor's offices. She left her life in New York City, her husband and her career, and moved to the country, where she lived in a tent away from the regular chemicals such as laundry detergents, pesticides and exhaust fumes.

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No Boundaries: Color & Landscape
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Works by Scott Bennett and Michael Matthews.

Note: Limestone Art is now in its new location next to Pascale's at 105 Brooklea Dr. in Fayetteville.

Scott Bennett's new series of vivid landscape paintings have found their inspiration close to home, or rather at his new home and studio in Jamesville, NY.  While continuing his characteristic impasto painting technique, Bennett shares his inspiration with us: "Our property has wonderful woods and views in all directions, and most of these paintings are inspired by the beauty I see everyday when I look out any window or walk out the door." His work has been exhibited in over 40 national exhibitions, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections. This is Bennett's second exhibition at Limestone.
 
Michael Matthews' landscapes are developed from sketchbook watercolors created on site during his travels, at times during below freezing temperatures as ice forms while he paints.  Back in the studio, Matthews creates large paintings from a singe sketch or an amalgamation of his watercolors. Michael Matthews lives in Syracuse, NY and in Harrogate, British Columbia.  His work is found in over 60 corporate art collections.

Toys from the 1970s
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

This year's version will feature toys from the 1970s. Do you remember playing Pong on Atari, getting your first Luke Skywalker figure, or just wishing to have your own Malibu Barbie? Then you won't want to miss this journey into the decade of Charlie's Angels, Richard Nixon and a gallon of gasoline at fifty cents.

Emerging Women of CNY: Student Gallery Show
Redhouse

Price: Free
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A selection of work from young women at Fowler, Nottingham and IT high schools.

"Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" and "Creativity through Exhibition Design"
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Design Gallery at The Warehouse will host two concurrent exhibitions of student work: "Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" and "Creativity through Exhibition Design."

"Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" features the work of students enrolled in weaving classes taught by faculty member Sarah Saulson and explores the creative potential of weaving with repurposed materials, both recycled and new. The students were inspired by and found meaning in sources as diverse and commonplace as newspaper, bottle caps, paper bags, zippers, candy wrappers, wire, pantyhose and feathers. The project provides a rich arena for the artists to comment on their lives and the environment, as well as for fun and surprising color and texture exploration. The exhibition includes a loom, and visitors to the gallery are encouraged to sit down and experience weaving.

Presented by museum studies graduate students who are completing their first year of gallery experience in the Practicum course, "Creativity through Exhibition Design" features computer-aided drawings and three-dimensional models of the Design Gallery. Students employed universal design concepts including color selection, spatial arrangement and lighting techniques to put their individual creativity into a theoretical exhibition based on a collection of Tibetan works of art.

For more information about the "Handwoven" show, contact Saulson at sfsaulso@syr.edu. For more information about the "Creativity through Exhibition Design" show, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Opening: Hands On!
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

There will be an artist reception this evening 5:00-8:00 pm.

The April show, Hands On!, features paintings and vessels by two noted Central New York artists produced by applying hands and fingertips.

Artist Karen Thomas-Lillie paints atmospheric landscapes and says that all her inspiration comes from the shores of the east side of Cayuga Lake, primarily from Cayuga to Long Point. Her way of capturing this lush environment is in the tools she uses -- oil bar and her hands to blur edges between land, water and sky.

Similar to Thomas-Lillie, ceramicist Jeremy Randall is also motivated by forces of the environment; however, his hand formed vessels reference rural America, not in landscapes but in architecture and antique implements meant to evoke viewers' nostalgia of a by-gone era.

Self-Portrait Show
Gallery 54

Gallery 54
54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

The April show features self portraits by gallery members in a variety of mediums.

Forrest Lesch-Middelton: Recent Work
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

Forrest Lesch-Middelton's pottery combines historic patterns with modern-day technology. The resulting work creates a subtle narrative that references the cross-cultural influences that impact every facet of daily life. Pottery is used as a metaphor to illustrate this phenomenon. To achieve the intricate patterns, Lesch-Middelton uses silkscreen and embossment transfer techniques. He says of his artwork, "By blending form, pattern, and surface, my goal is to create an object that simultaneously elicits a visceral and intellectual response, followed by a contemplation of my work as a whole."

Lesch-Middelton received his MFA in Ceramics from Utah State University in 2006 and a BFA in Ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1998. He is currently the Ceramics Program Coordinator at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma, California and teaches at Santa Rosa Jr. College and Solano College in the San Francisco Bay area. His artwork has been shown in many venues nationally, including the Baltimore Clayworks (MD), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN), and Santa Fe Clay Center (NM). He currently lives with his wife and two daughters in Northern California.

MFA 2011
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

MFA 2011 presents the work of 17 visual artists and 20 musicians and composers concluding their graduate careers at Syracuse University. On view will be a wide range of traditional and contemporary media, including painting, drawing, photography, interactive and experimental sculpture and conceptual installations. Master's of Music candidates will perform thesis compositions every Thursday at 6:00 p.m. beginning April 14, for the run of the exhibition.

Manipulation of scale and environment is a clear, consistent thread in this year's exhibition. Painters engulf the viewer in their work, through an expansive 17-foot drawing and by the perspective of a 14-foot canvas projecting from the top of a gallery wall. Photographer Shimpei Shirafuji carries a narrative around the perimeter of a room, a contemporary twist on 19th century cycloramas. An installation of half-toned screen-prints by Eric Johanni initially engages the viewer from across the room, and then again once you are directly in front of the work. Other artists utilize the subtlety of scale to create an intimacy that immerses the viewer into the artwork, such as miniature architectural models and unassuming artist performances. Site-specific installations transform galleries into absorbing new environments that influence all of the viewer's senses, creating ephemeral experiences through sound, performance and media. Documentary films that deal with issues of identity and family will also be on view in the media theater.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces aren't available the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

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Orange Pulp: Works by Norman Saunders
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

A profile of pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), including 10 lush and dramatic Saunders paintings from the university collection.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Ah Leon: Memories of Elementary School
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In 2008, Ah Leon envisioned a monumental ceramic installation showcasing dozens of stoneware desks and chairs in neat rows like the classrooms of our youth. It began with a small grouping called Memories of Elementary School first exhibited in August 2008 at The Taipei Gallery Exposition and in 2009 at the Phoenix Art Museum in conjunction with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) annual conference. Ah Leon continued to make more desks which were exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in 2010. Another year has passed and Ah Leon has completed the 20 sets of desks and chairs which will be showcased in this exhibition.

His original idea was to create a classroom environment that would “lead audiences to remember their childhood stories.” Ah Leon studied elementary school desks, determined that his creations would be authentic, revealing memories through carved initials, scratches and drawings on their worn surfaces. His classroom would preserve the stories of our childhood as if they were “frozen in the museum space.”

The first two rows of tables and chairs appear new. They become progressively more dilapidated--some broken, some leaning--until the last rows where the furniture is falling over and ultimately only chips and severed parts remain on the floor. In one area the desks are arranged as if a teacher reads to a group of children. The impact of the scene is immediate: viewers are taken back to their own childhood classroom and long forgotten memories drift to the surface.

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Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The 2011 exhibition program will continue to highlight the talented artists of New York State through a series of focused exhibitions. The season opens with Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds, an exhibition featuring more than 100 original works of art that are seriously hilarious. The small-scale drawings depicting the comedic daily lives of humans and animals alike are all rendered by hand in a variety of media, an approach that is becoming increasing rare in a world of computer-generated images.

Dan Reynolds began drawing cartoons in 1989, when he was 30. As a youth center instructor, Reynolds was surrounded by youthful energy and creative minds. He was an avid follower of popular cartoons of the time, such as Gary Larson's Far Side and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. A native of Brewerton, NY, Reynolds was inspired by his Central New York surroundings, a place where snow is abundant and cows can be found just minutes from anywhere. From the beginning, Reynolds has used farm animals as messengers of humor, particularly cows, pigs and chickens, a series that was immediately accepted by Reader's Digest in 1989. A new cartoon has appeared in every issue since then. Reynolds' cartoons have also appeared in thematic Reynolds Unwrapped book compilations featuring everything from sports to holiday special editions. American Greetings and Recycled Greeting Cards also feature Reynolds cartoons on greeting cards for every occasion.

In 2008, Reynolds was diagnosed with testicular cancer and subsequently received months of chemotherapy. While he was in treatment, he began drawing cartoons about cancer and his personal experience which he found was shared by his fellow patients. He shared the cartoons with the staff and patients at the facility and discovered the power of art to bring humor to an otherwise humorless situation.

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Cannonball Press Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Cannonball Press, the Brooklyn-based alternative pirate press co-founded by artists Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, will present an exhibition, which includes new, large-scale graphic works, installations and sculpture. As Cannonball Press, Mazorra and Houston publish and sell limited-run editions of emerging artists' work and display it on their website, as well as at shows and festivals. The venture seeks to invite talented artists to explore the medium and make affordable, high-quality editions. Artists represented include Drew Iwaniw, Katy Seals, Joseph Velasquez, John Hitchcock, Derrick Riley, Meghan O'Connor, and Dusty Herbig, assistant professor of printmaking at VPA.

For more information, contact Dusty Herbig, 315-443-4519 or dtherbig@syr.edu, or XL Projects (during gallery hours), 315-443-2542.

Kueng Caputo: The Quadrangular Cloud
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The young female Swiss designer duo, Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo, will install a hotel in the Warehouse Gallery. The main gallery will be transformed into small ephemeral rooms where the visitor is invited to take a break from reality and to take a mini-vacation complete with a number of very simple, inexpensive and joyful elements. When seated or lying down, the public's focus is drawn to the interior space and lighting. The idea for a temporary hotel goes back to Kueng's and Caputo's 72 Hours Hotel, which was initially developed in 2006 for the train station in Zurich, Switzerland. Both artists have been widely exhibited. This is their first museum solo show in the U.S.

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100 Years of Women Rockin' the World
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibition features the art of 35 women artists -- nine local to Syracuse, and the rest from communities across the country. These women, in keeping with the mission of ArtRage, are also activists and their work expresses a whole range of issues important to both women and the community of concerned people worldwide: self-image, hunger, collective action, war, children, the status of women, immigration, environmental crisis, alternative lifestyles and self-discovery.

Participating artists include Arlene Abend, Amy Bartell, Ellen Blalock, Marlena Buczek, Elizabeth Carter, Jen Cartwright, the Chicago Women's Graphic Collective, Sue Coe, Erin Currier, Jane Evershed, Raina Gentry, Susan Grabel, Sharon Lee Hart, Robin Hewlett, Gail Hoffman, Nancy Hom, Katherine Hughes, Lahib Jaddo, Mollie Kellogg, Kate Luscher, Dierdre Luzwick, Sofia Perez, Ruth Putter, Favianna Rodriguez, Gazelle Samizay, Nicole Schulman, Sarah Walroth, Anita Welych and Oceans Unraveled project with artists: Aviva Alter, Mary Buczek, Mary Ellen Croteau.

John Freyer: The Dress Up Portrait Project
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Freyer's series of videos connects speaker to listener, performer to viewer. His 5-year-old daughter and her friends take turns posing for the camera for periods of several minutes without moving. At first, the static video images of little girls in Cinderella skirts or mom's high heels appear as cute clichés familiar from advertising and family photo albums. However, the children's mild discomfort at standing still and silent becomes increasingly unsettling over time. The children struggle not to fidget or speak, opening a space for a more complicated reading of their self-presentation. Their chosen objects of "dress up"--the clutter of pink hair curlers and ballerina frills--become a costume that liberates, rather than obscures, the personality beneath.

Freyer is an assistant professor of studio art in the School for Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, where he teaches advanced photography and digital imaging classes. He is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow in Stockholm, Sweden.

Thumbs UPstate Improv Festival

Price: $10 to perform and participate in workshops, $5 to watch
St. Clare Auditorium
Lodi and Isabella Streets, Syracuse

Schedule:

Satan's Closet - Syracuse
Village Idiots Improv Comedy - Rochester
10 min. break
Vibrant But Deadly - Geneseo
RIT Improv - Rochester
10 min. break
Kathy's Fur Coat - Syracuse
Pappy Parker Players - Binghamton
10 min. break
30 Scenes in 30 Minutes
Instructor Show
Open Improv Jam

The Thumbs UPstate Improv Festival seeks to unite upstate New York comedy improv troupes and increase community awareness of improv comedy. Thumbs UPstate Improv is co-directed by Ken Keech, Vanessa Rose, Joe Blum, and Mike Intaglietta.

Improv is an increasingly popular form of comedy where performers create scenes based on audience
suggestions. The Festival will consist of performances from attending groups, beginners' workshops for those looking to try something new, and advanced workshops in both short form and long form improv led by veteran improv educators.

For more information, visit upstateimprov.blogspot.com or email thumbsupstate@gmail.com.

The Shaun Cassidy Fan Club
Salt City Improv Theater

Price: Free
Salt City Improv Theatre
Shoppingtown Mall, Sears Wing, Dewitt

To celebrate our one-year anniversary and National Humor Month, the Salt City Improv Theatre is having a special free show this week. This short-form college team from SUNY Oswego returns to perform their hilarious "Whose Line Is It, Anyway"-style games. This free performance is a way of saying "thanks" to all our loyal fans.

Seating is limited. 18 and over, unless accompanied by a parent.

Puente Flamenco

Laci's Tapas Bar
304 Hawley Ave, Syracuse

Dinner reservations required, 315-218-5903. For more information, visit www.puenteflamenco.com.

Puente Flamenco

Laci's Tapas Bar
304 Hawley Ave, Syracuse

Dinner reservations required, 315-218-5903. For more information, visit www.puenteflamenco.com.

Jenny Holzer installation
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created a site-specific installation that streams across the façade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms" and "Survival" that challenge viewers' assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses or lamenting the struggles of daily living, Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed "Truisms" on one of Times Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her "Survival" series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

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Heartland Passage: The Oral History of the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum

Price: Free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

"Heartland Passage" is a set of nine high-definition videos -- six of them newly produced and three drawn from the New York State Museum -- that each profile a person who grew up along or worked on the Erie Canal. (24 minutes total)

Dr. Daniel Ward, Erie Canal Museum curator, will introduce the nine videos and provide some history about the project.

Heartland Passage: The Oral History of the Erie Canal
Erie Canal Museum

Price: Free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

"Heartland Passage" is a set of nine high-definition videos -- six of them newly produced and three drawn from the New York State Museum -- that each profile a person who grew up along or worked on the Erie Canal. (24 minutes total)

Dr. Daniel Ward, Erie Canal Museum curator, will introduce the nine videos and provide some history about the project.

Piano Majors Recital
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Storer Auditorium
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Bringing the World Together

Price: $25
Palace Theater
2384 James St., Syracuse

An evening of music, dance, and food sponsored by Partners in Learning, Inc. This celebration of cultures will benefit the West Side Learning Center and MANOS Early Education Program

Performers include Grupo Pagan, SU Brazilian Ensemble, and Light of the World Ballet.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Price: $42.50, $52.50
War Memorial at Oncenter
800 S. State St., Syracuse

DJ Battle
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Featuring DJ Stove, Pacman, James Sulsky, The Cloud Club, Chemicals Of Creation, Andrew Taggart, Mike The Smiroldo, Greg Golterman. Ages 16+ admitted.

The Pearl Fishers
Syracuse Opera

Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Passion and relationships are tested in this opera by Bizet. The friendship of Zurga, leader of the pearl fishers, and Nadir is unintentionally torn asunder by a virgin priestess, Leila. She also shares a past with both men. Set in Ceylon in ancient times. Sung in French with projected English translation. A Syracuse premiere.

Alicia Ostriker, poet
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Alicia Ostriker has become one of those brilliantly provocative and imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression, whether in prose or poetry, is essential to understanding our American selves. --Joyce Carol Oates
Alicia Ostriker's The Book of Seventy won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Earlier poetry collections have received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation; she has twice been a finalist for a National Book Award. Her 1980 anti-war poem sequence The Mother/Child Papers was reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and a chapbook, At the Revelation Restaurant, came out in spring 2010. Ostriker's poetry has been translated into many languages including Hebrew and Arabic. As a critic, Ostriker is the author of several books on poetry and on the Bible. She is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University, teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Poetry program of Drew University.

The Last Five Years
Encore Presentations

Price: $37.25 dinner theater (includes tax and tip); $20 show only
Glen Loch Restaurant
4626 North St., Jamesville

Dinner at 7:00 pm; show follows at 8:00 pm.

The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown, starring Molly Brown and Robert G. Searle

For tickets, phone 315-469-6969.

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Les Miserables
Fayette-Manlius Performing Arts Program

Price: $10
Fayetteville-Manlius High School
8201 E. Seneca Tpke., Manlius

For more information, phone 315-692-1916.

Bye, Bye Birdie

Price: $8
Liverpool High School Auditorium
4338 Wetzel Rd., Liverpool

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged
Syracuse Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Nora O'Dea, director

Price: $10 regular, $5 with SU ID (students, faculy, staff, alumni)
The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This ridiculously funny show covers every play Shakespeare ever wrote in 110 hilarious minutes of side-splitting fun, a witty and wonderful romp through the histories, tragedies and comedies. It's intelligent, insane, interactive, inclusive, irreverent and strictly aimed at adults. See Shakespearean football and a complete audience rendition of Ophelia's psyche. This is the Bard as you've never seen him before.

The show stars Jim Uva, Alan Stillman and Dan Rowlands.

PLEASE NOTE: This show contains adult material and is not recommended for children under 16. For more information, phone 315-476-1835.

Autobahn
Black Box Players
Jenny Leon, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Autobahn by Neil LaBute

On the Verge
LeMoyne College

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history, geography, feminism and fashion written by Eric Overmyer who also wrote HBO's hit drama The Wire.

*SOLD OUT* The Marvelous Wonderettes
Rarely Done Productions
Dan Tursi, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

The story is set at the 1958 Springfield High School prom where we meet the Wonderettes — Betty Jean, Cindy Lou, Missy, and Suzy, four girls with hopes and dreams as big as their crinoline skirts and voices to match! As we learn about their lives and loves, we are treated to the girls performing classic 50s and 60s songs. Written by Roger Bean.

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[sic]
Redhouse
Anton Briones, director

Price: $25 regular; $20 students/seniors
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A fragmented comedy celebrating the insanity of friendship by Melissa James Gibson, [sic] explores the relationship of three neighbors as they struggle to survive in the big city. Between love affairs, writer's block, tongue twisters and a corpse, these off-the-wall characters embrace the fun in their dysfunction, illuminating the [sic] in us all.

Redhouse is thrilled to introduce New York City Director Anton Briones and Scenic/Costume Designer, Timothy Brown to the Syracuse theatre scene. In this production, the creative team will be pushing the envelope by exploring new ways to use video, music and theatricality to bring this contemporary play to life.

The cast includes John Bixler, Laura Austin, and Binaifer Dabu, who recently appeared in Odysseus DOA at Redhouse. Also featured in the cast are Matt Chiorini, Navroz Dabu, and Mary Ellen Dowling. Redhouse Technical Director, John Czajkowski completes the creative team.

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Curse of the Starving Class
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's 1978, excoriating comedy has never seemed timelier. "The whole thing is geared to invisible money," laments Weston, the chronically soused patriarch of a family in serious financial and psychological disarray. The refrigerator's empty, the house is crumbling, the creditors are baying, and that much longed-for American idyll is unattainable. Shepard's savage fantasy on America's voraciousness only gets better with age.

Premiering at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978, Curse won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis (cousin of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis) played the matriarch Ella in the premiere. In the 1994 film version, another Academy Award winner, Kathy Bates, took on the role. Shepard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his subsequent play Buried Child, is also an Academy Award nominated actor for his supporting role in The Right Stuff (1983).

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Wrong Window!
The Talent Company
Christine Lightcap, director

Price: $25 regular, $23 students/seniors, $20 children 12 and under
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

In a rare departure from big musicals, The Talent Company presents the CNY premiere of Wrong Window!, a hilarious comedy "whodunnit" that pays homage to master of horror, Alfred Hitchcock. Aside from the obvious Hitchcock film reference to the classic film Rear Window, authors Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore own up to a set of influences that include To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, The Birds, North by Northwest, Torn Curtain, The 39 Steps and Psycho.

Off-and-on New York couple Marnie and Jeff enter an even more complicated phase of their relationship when they think they spy their cross-courtyard neighbor do away with his wife. When the lady vanishes, suspicion places murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. With their best friends Robbie and Midge, Jeff and Marnie sneak into their neighbor's apartment--39 steps away--and the fun begins! Among multiple door slammings, body snatching, and a frantic flashlight chase are Detective Thomas and handyman Loomis who round out the zany cast of characters who try to sort out what has happened as two questions remain: Who killed Lila Larswald? And...if she's not dead...then who is?

This hilarious spoof has fever-pitched one liners and gag-filled dialogue from start to finish. The story plays out on a set designed by Navroz Dabu that allows the audience to be present in one apartment while viewing the action in its mirror-image unit across the way. Light design by Cindy Shippers and sound design by Tony Vadala add to the zaniness.

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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Window Project: Stephanie Rozene--The Politics of Porcelain
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This spring, both the main gallery and Window Projects feature emerging female artists and celebrate their artistic achievements at a time that coincides with International Women's Day (March 2011). Stephanie Rozene draws upon the fine line between design and the visual arts. Her work is the result of extensive research and gifted craftsmanship. Through the medium of ceramics (and with special attention to specific patterns, ornaments, and forms) she explores the politics of European ceramics and traces international developments in this medium back to the reigns of French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This is her first solo museum show.

Annual Le Moyne College Student Art Exhibition
LeMoyne College

Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Student Art and Photography Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The 2011 exhibition program will continue to highlight the talented artists of New York State through a series of focused exhibitions. The season opens with Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds, an exhibition featuring more than 100 original works of art that are seriously hilarious. The small-scale drawings depicting the comedic daily lives of humans and animals alike are all rendered by hand in a variety of media, an approach that is becoming increasing rare in a world of computer-generated images.

Dan Reynolds began drawing cartoons in 1989, when he was 30. As a youth center instructor, Reynolds was surrounded by youthful energy and creative minds. He was an avid follower of popular cartoons of the time, such as Gary Larson's Far Side and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. A native of Brewerton, NY, Reynolds was inspired by his Central New York surroundings, a place where snow is abundant and cows can be found just minutes from anywhere. From the beginning, Reynolds has used farm animals as messengers of humor, particularly cows, pigs and chickens, a series that was immediately accepted by Reader's Digest in 1989. A new cartoon has appeared in every issue since then. Reynolds' cartoons have also appeared in thematic Reynolds Unwrapped book compilations featuring everything from sports to holiday special editions. American Greetings and Recycled Greeting Cards also feature Reynolds cartoons on greeting cards for every occasion.

In 2008, Reynolds was diagnosed with testicular cancer and subsequently received months of chemotherapy. While he was in treatment, he began drawing cartoons about cancer and his personal experience which he found was shared by his fellow patients. He shared the cartoons with the staff and patients at the facility and discovered the power of art to bring humor to an otherwise humorless situation.

Read a review!

Ah Leon: Memories of Elementary School
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In 2008, Ah Leon envisioned a monumental ceramic installation showcasing dozens of stoneware desks and chairs in neat rows like the classrooms of our youth. It began with a small grouping called Memories of Elementary School first exhibited in August 2008 at The Taipei Gallery Exposition and in 2009 at the Phoenix Art Museum in conjunction with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) annual conference. Ah Leon continued to make more desks which were exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in 2010. Another year has passed and Ah Leon has completed the 20 sets of desks and chairs which will be showcased in this exhibition.

His original idea was to create a classroom environment that would “lead audiences to remember their childhood stories.” Ah Leon studied elementary school desks, determined that his creations would be authentic, revealing memories through carved initials, scratches and drawings on their worn surfaces. His classroom would preserve the stories of our childhood as if they were “frozen in the museum space.”

The first two rows of tables and chairs appear new. They become progressively more dilapidated--some broken, some leaning--until the last rows where the furniture is falling over and ultimately only chips and severed parts remain on the floor. In one area the desks are arranged as if a teacher reads to a group of children. The impact of the scene is immediate: viewers are taken back to their own childhood classroom and long forgotten memories drift to the surface.

Read a review!

Self-Portrait Show
Gallery 54

Gallery 54
54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

The April show features self portraits by gallery members in a variety of mediums.

"Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" and "Creativity through Exhibition Design"
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Design Gallery at The Warehouse will host two concurrent exhibitions of student work: "Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" and "Creativity through Exhibition Design."

"Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" features the work of students enrolled in weaving classes taught by faculty member Sarah Saulson and explores the creative potential of weaving with repurposed materials, both recycled and new. The students were inspired by and found meaning in sources as diverse and commonplace as newspaper, bottle caps, paper bags, zippers, candy wrappers, wire, pantyhose and feathers. The project provides a rich arena for the artists to comment on their lives and the environment, as well as for fun and surprising color and texture exploration. The exhibition includes a loom, and visitors to the gallery are encouraged to sit down and experience weaving.

Presented by museum studies graduate students who are completing their first year of gallery experience in the Practicum course, "Creativity through Exhibition Design" features computer-aided drawings and three-dimensional models of the Design Gallery. Students employed universal design concepts including color selection, spatial arrangement and lighting techniques to put their individual creativity into a theoretical exhibition based on a collection of Tibetan works of art.

For more information about the "Handwoven" show, contact Saulson at sfsaulso@syr.edu. For more information about the "Creativity through Exhibition Design" show, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Hands On!
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The April show, Hands On!, features paintings and vessels by two noted Central New York artists produced by applying hands and fingertips.

Artist Karen Thomas-Lillie paints atmospheric landscapes and says that all her inspiration comes from the shores of the east side of Cayuga Lake, primarily from Cayuga to Long Point. Her way of capturing this lush environment is in the tools she uses -- oil bar and her hands to blur edges between land, water and sky.

Similar to Thomas-Lillie, ceramicist Jeremy Randall is also motivated by forces of the environment; however, his hand formed vessels reference rural America, not in landscapes but in architecture and antique implements meant to evoke viewers' nostalgia of a by-gone era.

You Are Here
Community Folk Art Center

Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

"You Are Here" explores various intersections of citizenship and art practice. The show grew out of a year-long graduate seminar titled Art and Civic Dialogue, led by Carrie Mae Weems, an artist of international renown, and David A. Ross, the former director of the Whitney Museum and The San Francisco Museum of Art, and currently the chairman of the MFA in art practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

The exhibition represents a roster of dynamic artists working in Syracuse and beyond whose works are concerned with varying notions of social engagement. In that spirit, the words citizenship and art are both carefully reconsidered through a diverse group of works, each bringing a sense of urgency to the complex task of defining the role of art in civic dialogue.

The exhibit includes photographic installations, performance, sculpture, web-based projects, video and a study center that anchors the ideas across disciplines.

A study center, designed by COLAB Director Chris McCray, Weems, Lauren Boldon and Jennifer Hsu, includes books, videos, a bibliography and a timeline highlighting seminal moments and artists in the history of art and social practice.

Participating in the show are Weems, Anneka Herre, Hsu, Boldon, Nathaniel Sullivan, Jay Muhlin, Adrienne Buccella, Rose Marie Cromwell, James Wang, Susannah Sayler, Ed Morris, Marion Wilson, McCray, Siebern Versteeg, Joanna Spitzner, Duke & Battersby, Young_Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Sze Lin Pang, Paula Johnson, Doug DuBois and Hank Willis Thomas.

Forrest Lesch-Middelton: Recent Work
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

Forrest Lesch-Middelton's pottery combines historic patterns with modern-day technology. The resulting work creates a subtle narrative that references the cross-cultural influences that impact every facet of daily life. Pottery is used as a metaphor to illustrate this phenomenon. To achieve the intricate patterns, Lesch-Middelton uses silkscreen and embossment transfer techniques. He says of his artwork, "By blending form, pattern, and surface, my goal is to create an object that simultaneously elicits a visceral and intellectual response, followed by a contemplation of my work as a whole."

Lesch-Middelton received his MFA in Ceramics from Utah State University in 2006 and a BFA in Ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1998. He is currently the Ceramics Program Coordinator at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma, California and teaches at Santa Rosa Jr. College and Solano College in the San Francisco Bay area. His artwork has been shown in many venues nationally, including the Baltimore Clayworks (MD), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN), and Santa Fe Clay Center (NM). He currently lives with his wife and two daughters in Northern California.

Toys from the 1970s
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

This year's version will feature toys from the 1970s. Do you remember playing Pong on Atari, getting your first Luke Skywalker figure, or just wishing to have your own Malibu Barbie? Then you won't want to miss this journey into the decade of Charlie's Angels, Richard Nixon and a gallon of gasoline at fifty cents.

MFA 2011
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

MFA 2011 presents the work of 17 visual artists and 20 musicians and composers concluding their graduate careers at Syracuse University. On view will be a wide range of traditional and contemporary media, including painting, drawing, photography, interactive and experimental sculpture and conceptual installations. Master's of Music candidates will perform thesis compositions every Thursday at 6:00 p.m. beginning April 14, for the run of the exhibition.

Manipulation of scale and environment is a clear, consistent thread in this year's exhibition. Painters engulf the viewer in their work, through an expansive 17-foot drawing and by the perspective of a 14-foot canvas projecting from the top of a gallery wall. Photographer Shimpei Shirafuji carries a narrative around the perimeter of a room, a contemporary twist on 19th century cycloramas. An installation of half-toned screen-prints by Eric Johanni initially engages the viewer from across the room, and then again once you are directly in front of the work. Other artists utilize the subtlety of scale to create an intimacy that immerses the viewer into the artwork, such as miniature architectural models and unassuming artist performances. Site-specific installations transform galleries into absorbing new environments that influence all of the viewer's senses, creating ephemeral experiences through sound, performance and media. Documentary films that deal with issues of identity and family will also be on view in the media theater.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces aren't available the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

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Orange Pulp: Works by Norman Saunders
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

A profile of pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), including 10 lush and dramatic Saunders paintings from the university collection.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

100 Years of Women Rockin' the World
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibition features the art of 35 women artists -- nine local to Syracuse, and the rest from communities across the country. These women, in keeping with the mission of ArtRage, are also activists and their work expresses a whole range of issues important to both women and the community of concerned people worldwide: self-image, hunger, collective action, war, children, the status of women, immigration, environmental crisis, alternative lifestyles and self-discovery.

Participating artists include Arlene Abend, Amy Bartell, Ellen Blalock, Marlena Buczek, Elizabeth Carter, Jen Cartwright, the Chicago Women's Graphic Collective, Sue Coe, Erin Currier, Jane Evershed, Raina Gentry, Susan Grabel, Sharon Lee Hart, Robin Hewlett, Gail Hoffman, Nancy Hom, Katherine Hughes, Lahib Jaddo, Mollie Kellogg, Kate Luscher, Dierdre Luzwick, Sofia Perez, Ruth Putter, Favianna Rodriguez, Gazelle Samizay, Nicole Schulman, Sarah Walroth, Anita Welych and Oceans Unraveled project with artists: Aviva Alter, Mary Buczek, Mary Ellen Croteau.

No Boundaries: Color & Landscape
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Works by Scott Bennett and Michael Matthews.

Note: Limestone Art is now in its new location next to Pascale's at 105 Brooklea Dr. in Fayetteville.

Scott Bennett's new series of vivid landscape paintings have found their inspiration close to home, or rather at his new home and studio in Jamesville, NY.  While continuing his characteristic impasto painting technique, Bennett shares his inspiration with us: "Our property has wonderful woods and views in all directions, and most of these paintings are inspired by the beauty I see everyday when I look out any window or walk out the door." His work has been exhibited in over 40 national exhibitions, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections. This is Bennett's second exhibition at Limestone.
 
Michael Matthews' landscapes are developed from sketchbook watercolors created on site during his travels, at times during below freezing temperatures as ice forms while he paints.  Back in the studio, Matthews creates large paintings from a singe sketch or an amalgamation of his watercolors. Michael Matthews lives in Syracuse, NY and in Harrogate, British Columbia.  His work is found in over 60 corporate art collections.

Cannonball Press Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Cannonball Press, the Brooklyn-based alternative pirate press co-founded by artists Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, will present an exhibition, which includes new, large-scale graphic works, installations and sculpture. As Cannonball Press, Mazorra and Houston publish and sell limited-run editions of emerging artists' work and display it on their website, as well as at shows and festivals. The venture seeks to invite talented artists to explore the medium and make affordable, high-quality editions. Artists represented include Drew Iwaniw, Katy Seals, Joseph Velasquez, John Hitchcock, Derrick Riley, Meghan O'Connor, and Dusty Herbig, assistant professor of printmaking at VPA.

For more information, contact Dusty Herbig, 315-443-4519 or dtherbig@syr.edu, or XL Projects (during gallery hours), 315-443-2542.

Kueng Caputo: The Quadrangular Cloud
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The young female Swiss designer duo, Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo, will install a hotel in the Warehouse Gallery. The main gallery will be transformed into small ephemeral rooms where the visitor is invited to take a break from reality and to take a mini-vacation complete with a number of very simple, inexpensive and joyful elements. When seated or lying down, the public's focus is drawn to the interior space and lighting. The idea for a temporary hotel goes back to Kueng's and Caputo's 72 Hours Hotel, which was initially developed in 2006 for the train station in Zurich, Switzerland. Both artists have been widely exhibited. This is their first museum solo show in the U.S.

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John Freyer: The Dress Up Portrait Project
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Freyer's series of videos connects speaker to listener, performer to viewer. His 5-year-old daughter and her friends take turns posing for the camera for periods of several minutes without moving. At first, the static video images of little girls in Cinderella skirts or mom's high heels appear as cute clichés familiar from advertising and family photo albums. However, the children's mild discomfort at standing still and silent becomes increasingly unsettling over time. The children struggle not to fidget or speak, opening a space for a more complicated reading of their self-presentation. Their chosen objects of "dress up"--the clutter of pink hair curlers and ballerina frills--become a costume that liberates, rather than obscures, the personality beneath.

Freyer is an assistant professor of studio art in the School for Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, where he teaches advanced photography and digital imaging classes. He is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow in Stockholm, Sweden.

Thumbs UPstate Improv Festival

Price: $10 to perform and participate in workshops, $5 to watch
St. Clare Auditorium
Lodi and Isabella Streets, Syracuse

Workshop sessions begin at 11:00 am and 2:00 pm today.

Evening schedule:
Wit & Will - Albany
Phil in the Blank - Buffalo
10 min. break
Oregon Fail - Syracuse
Search Engine Improv - Rochester
10. min. break
Dinosaur Society - Syracuse
Outside The Realm of Destiny - Syracuse/Los Angeles
10 min. break
Don't Feed the Actors - Syracuse
5 min. break
Open Improv Jams

The Thumbs UPstate Improv Festival seeks to unite upstate New York comedy improv troupes and increase community awareness of improv comedy. Thumbs UPstate Improv is co-directed by Ken Keech, Vanessa Rose, Joe Blum, and Mike Intaglietta.

Improv is an increasingly popular form of comedy where performers create scenes based on audience
suggestions. The Festival will consist of performances from attending groups, beginners' workshops for those looking to try something new, and advanced workshops in both short form and long form improv led by veteran improv educators.

For more information, visit upstateimprov.blogspot.com or email thumbsupstate@gmail.com.

Jenny Holzer installation
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created a site-specific installation that streams across the façade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms" and "Survival" that challenge viewers' assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses or lamenting the struggles of daily living, Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed "Truisms" on one of Times Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her "Survival" series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

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The Southerner
ArtRage Gallery

Price: $5 suggested donation
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Sam Tucker, a poor cotton picker in the Ozarks tries to better his family's lot by starting his own farm only to face natural and man-made odds. Often hailed as Jean Renoir's best American work, and highly acclaimed for its lyrical yet candid depiction of the region and its people. Featuring Zachary Scott and Betty Field. (1945) Best Director, National Board of Review.

Graduate Voice Recital
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Featuring Sangeetha Ekambaram, soprano

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Sangeetha Ekambaram, a soprano and graduate vocal performance student, will perform a recital that includes works by Albinoni, Donizetti, Debussy, Massenet, Delibes, and Valerie Capers. The recital will feature Jianan Yu, piano and harpsichord; Lian Qiao, cello; and Sierra Fox, mezzo-soprano.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage.

John Cadley and The Lost Boys
Steeple Coffeehouse

Price: $10 suggested donation
United Church of Fayetteville
310 E. Genesee St., Fayetteville

For more information, phone 315-637-3186.

Adam Miller, autoharp and guitar
Kellish Hill Farm

Kellish Hill Farm
3192 Pompey Center Rd., Pompey

Adam Miller, premier autoharpist, renowned American folksinger and natural-born storyteller is coming back to the farm! An accomplished folklorist, historian, and song-collector, he has amassed an impressive repertoire of over 5,000 songs. He accompanies his rich, resonant baritone voice with lively fingerpicking acoustic guitar and stunningly beautiful autoharp melodies. In a contemporary musical landscape peopled with singer/songwriters and their often short-lived offerings, his time-honored traditional folksongs and ballads are a breath of fresh air. A masterful entertainer who never fails to get his audience singing along, he has distinguished himself as one of the great interpreters of American folktales and folksongs, and as a performer who appeals to audiences of all ages.

Eve Goldberg
Westcott Community Center

Price: $10 regular, $8 for WCC members
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

A versatile musician whose pure vocals bring a comforting aura to her concerts, Eve Goldberg performs a seamless blend of folk, blues, country, bluegrass, old-time music and jazz. Her performances are intimate and relaxed, moving effortlessly from folk classics to original gems. She runs the stylistic gamut with her clear voice, nifty fingerpicking and thoughtful songs at the center. As an interpreter, Goldberg knows how to pick good songs and how to deliver them. Her original songs tap a deeper vein, seeing a bright potential to the most daunting tribulations, even when the odds against us are strongest.

DJ David Berrie
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Ages 16+ admitted.

Einstein's Amazin' Equation
Open Hand Theater

Price: $8 adults, $6 children
International Mask and Puppet Museum
518 Prospect Ave., Syracuse

Open Hand Theater's newest performance focuses on the fun of fundamental mathematical concepts, as the elements of Albert Einstein's famous theory emerge in the form of characters, dance and puppetry. We follow the events of Einstein's life as he ponders the wonders of the physical world. A fantastic performance for school age children and their parents. Free teacher preview!

Autobahn
Black Box Players
Jenny Leon, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Autobahn by Neil LaBute

Curse of the Starving Class
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's 1978, excoriating comedy has never seemed timelier. "The whole thing is geared to invisible money," laments Weston, the chronically soused patriarch of a family in serious financial and psychological disarray. The refrigerator's empty, the house is crumbling, the creditors are baying, and that much longed-for American idyll is unattainable. Shepard's savage fantasy on America's voraciousness only gets better with age.

Premiering at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978, Curse won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis (cousin of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis) played the matriarch Ella in the premiere. In the 1994 film version, another Academy Award winner, Kathy Bates, took on the role. Shepard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his subsequent play Buried Child, is also an Academy Award nominated actor for his supporting role in The Right Stuff (1983).

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The Miracle Worker
Syracuse Stage
Paul Barnes, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

"Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living." In her own words, Helen Keller captures the inspirational heart of William Gibson's classic American play. Between the emptiness and the rapture, though, came a fierce struggle of wills, with Helen, in her darkness and stillness, on one side, and the determined Annie Sullivan on the other, a young woman who had endured a lifetime of pain in just 20 years. Gibson's text is unsparing and unflinching in its depiction of their confrontation and mutual triumph. The hearts that will be leaping will be ours.

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The Last Five Years
Encore Presentations

Price: $37.25 dinner theater (includes tax and tip); $20 show only
Glen Loch Restaurant
4626 North St., Jamesville

Dinner at 7:00 pm; show follows at 8:00 pm.

The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown, starring Molly Brown and Robert G. Searle

For tickets, phone 315-469-6969.

Read a review!

Bye, Bye Birdie

Price: $8
Liverpool High School Auditorium
4338 Wetzel Rd., Liverpool

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged
Syracuse Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Nora O'Dea, director

Price: $10 regular, $5 with SU ID (students, faculy, staff, alumni)
The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This ridiculously funny show covers every play Shakespeare ever wrote in 110 hilarious minutes of side-splitting fun, a witty and wonderful romp through the histories, tragedies and comedies. It's intelligent, insane, interactive, inclusive, irreverent and strictly aimed at adults. See Shakespearean football and a complete audience rendition of Ophelia's psyche. This is the Bard as you've never seen him before.

The show stars Jim Uva, Alan Stillman and Dan Rowlands.

PLEASE NOTE: This show contains adult material and is not recommended for children under 16. For more information, phone 315-476-1835.

Autobahn
Black Box Players
Jenny Leon, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Autobahn by Neil LaBute

On the Verge
LeMoyne College

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history, geography, feminism and fashion written by Eric Overmyer who also wrote HBO's hit drama The Wire.

*SOLD OUT* The Marvelous Wonderettes
Rarely Done Productions
Dan Tursi, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

The story is set at the 1958 Springfield High School prom where we meet the Wonderettes — Betty Jean, Cindy Lou, Missy, and Suzy, four girls with hopes and dreams as big as their crinoline skirts and voices to match! As we learn about their lives and loves, we are treated to the girls performing classic 50s and 60s songs. Written by Roger Bean.

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[sic]
Redhouse
Anton Briones, director

Price: $25 regular; $20 students/seniors
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A fragmented comedy celebrating the insanity of friendship by Melissa James Gibson, [sic] explores the relationship of three neighbors as they struggle to survive in the big city. Between love affairs, writer's block, tongue twisters and a corpse, these off-the-wall characters embrace the fun in their dysfunction, illuminating the [sic] in us all.

Redhouse is thrilled to introduce New York City Director Anton Briones and Scenic/Costume Designer, Timothy Brown to the Syracuse theatre scene. In this production, the creative team will be pushing the envelope by exploring new ways to use video, music and theatricality to bring this contemporary play to life.

The cast includes John Bixler, Laura Austin, and Binaifer Dabu, who recently appeared in Odysseus DOA at Redhouse. Also featured in the cast are Matt Chiorini, Navroz Dabu, and Mary Ellen Dowling. Redhouse Technical Director, John Czajkowski completes the creative team.

Read a review!

The Miracle Worker
Syracuse Stage
Paul Barnes, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

"Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living." In her own words, Helen Keller captures the inspirational heart of William Gibson's classic American play. Between the emptiness and the rapture, though, came a fierce struggle of wills, with Helen, in her darkness and stillness, on one side, and the determined Annie Sullivan on the other, a young woman who had endured a lifetime of pain in just 20 years. Gibson's text is unsparing and unflinching in its depiction of their confrontation and mutual triumph. The hearts that will be leaping will be ours.

Read a Review!

Curse of the Starving Class
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's 1978, excoriating comedy has never seemed timelier. "The whole thing is geared to invisible money," laments Weston, the chronically soused patriarch of a family in serious financial and psychological disarray. The refrigerator's empty, the house is crumbling, the creditors are baying, and that much longed-for American idyll is unattainable. Shepard's savage fantasy on America's voraciousness only gets better with age.

Premiering at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978, Curse won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis (cousin of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis) played the matriarch Ella in the premiere. In the 1994 film version, another Academy Award winner, Kathy Bates, took on the role. Shepard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his subsequent play Buried Child, is also an Academy Award nominated actor for his supporting role in The Right Stuff (1983).

Read a Review!

Wrong Window!
The Talent Company
Christine Lightcap, director

Price: $25 regular, $23 students/seniors, $20 children 12 and under
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

In a rare departure from big musicals, The Talent Company presents the CNY premiere of Wrong Window!, a hilarious comedy "whodunnit" that pays homage to master of horror, Alfred Hitchcock. Aside from the obvious Hitchcock film reference to the classic film Rear Window, authors Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore own up to a set of influences that include To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, The Birds, North by Northwest, Torn Curtain, The 39 Steps and Psycho.

Off-and-on New York couple Marnie and Jeff enter an even more complicated phase of their relationship when they think they spy their cross-courtyard neighbor do away with his wife. When the lady vanishes, suspicion places murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. With their best friends Robbie and Midge, Jeff and Marnie sneak into their neighbor's apartment--39 steps away--and the fun begins! Among multiple door slammings, body snatching, and a frantic flashlight chase are Detective Thomas and handyman Loomis who round out the zany cast of characters who try to sort out what has happened as two questions remain: Who killed Lila Larswald? And...if she's not dead...then who is?

This hilarious spoof has fever-pitched one liners and gag-filled dialogue from start to finish. The story plays out on a set designed by Navroz Dabu that allows the audience to be present in one apartment while viewing the action in its mirror-image unit across the way. Light design by Cindy Shippers and sound design by Tony Vadala add to the zaniness.

Read a review!

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Window Project: Stephanie Rozene--The Politics of Porcelain
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

This spring, both the main gallery and Window Projects feature emerging female artists and celebrate their artistic achievements at a time that coincides with International Women's Day (March 2011). Stephanie Rozene draws upon the fine line between design and the visual arts. Her work is the result of extensive research and gifted craftsmanship. Through the medium of ceramics (and with special attention to specific patterns, ornaments, and forms) she explores the politics of European ceramics and traces international developments in this medium back to the reigns of French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This is her first solo museum show.

Student Art and Photography Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Jeffrey Henson Scales: That Year of Living
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

That Year of Living features stunning black-and-white photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales. Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Scales was forced to, in his words, weigh the possibilities of his own demise, and whether he had achieved what he felt he was put here to do. It was this diagnosis and contemplation, along with the urging of his wife, Meg Henson Scales, which led him to return to making photographs on a daily basis.

The images in That Year of Living were made in the year following his cancer diagnosis and surgery. Scales photographed mainly in and around Times Square, depicting the part of New York City that he visited every day going to and from work at The New York Times. The images capture the certain hardness mixed with joy, sadness, determination and bewilderment that is found in the faces of young and old alike in New York City. Created in the months following his own experience with mortality, the photographs explore the journey of life and death found in the faces on the streets of New York.

Thilde Jensen: Canaries
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The images in Canaries, an exhibition of photographs by Thilde Jensen, are a personal account of the life Jensen has lived with multiple chemical sensitivity, and the people she has met who suffer from the same condition. People with this sensitivity have been dubbed "human canaries," and they are the casualties of what Jensen calls a "ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture."

Jensen became so sensitive to chemicals in the air that she could not sit in traffic, read a book or sit next to someone wearing perfume. She was forced to wear a gas mask when entering banks, supermarkets and doctor's offices. She left her life in New York City, her husband and her career, and moved to the country, where she lived in a tent away from the regular chemicals such as laundry detergents, pesticides and exhaust fumes.

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"Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" and "Creativity through Exhibition Design"
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Design Gallery at The Warehouse will host two concurrent exhibitions of student work: "Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" and "Creativity through Exhibition Design."

"Handwoven: Transforming the Familiar" features the work of students enrolled in weaving classes taught by faculty member Sarah Saulson and explores the creative potential of weaving with repurposed materials, both recycled and new. The students were inspired by and found meaning in sources as diverse and commonplace as newspaper, bottle caps, paper bags, zippers, candy wrappers, wire, pantyhose and feathers. The project provides a rich arena for the artists to comment on their lives and the environment, as well as for fun and surprising color and texture exploration. The exhibition includes a loom, and visitors to the gallery are encouraged to sit down and experience weaving.

Presented by museum studies graduate students who are completing their first year of gallery experience in the Practicum course, "Creativity through Exhibition Design" features computer-aided drawings and three-dimensional models of the Design Gallery. Students employed universal design concepts including color selection, spatial arrangement and lighting techniques to put their individual creativity into a theoretical exhibition based on a collection of Tibetan works of art.

For more information about the "Handwoven" show, contact Saulson at sfsaulso@syr.edu. For more information about the "Creativity through Exhibition Design" show, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Hands On!
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The April show, Hands On!, features paintings and vessels by two noted Central New York artists produced by applying hands and fingertips.

Artist Karen Thomas-Lillie paints atmospheric landscapes and says that all her inspiration comes from the shores of the east side of Cayuga Lake, primarily from Cayuga to Long Point. Her way of capturing this lush environment is in the tools she uses -- oil bar and her hands to blur edges between land, water and sky.

Similar to Thomas-Lillie, ceramicist Jeremy Randall is also motivated by forces of the environment; however, his hand formed vessels reference rural America, not in landscapes but in architecture and antique implements meant to evoke viewers' nostalgia of a by-gone era.

Self-Portrait Show
Gallery 54

Gallery 54
54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

The April show features self portraits by gallery members in a variety of mediums.

Forrest Lesch-Middelton: Recent Work
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

Forrest Lesch-Middelton's pottery combines historic patterns with modern-day technology. The resulting work creates a subtle narrative that references the cross-cultural influences that impact every facet of daily life. Pottery is used as a metaphor to illustrate this phenomenon. To achieve the intricate patterns, Lesch-Middelton uses silkscreen and embossment transfer techniques. He says of his artwork, "By blending form, pattern, and surface, my goal is to create an object that simultaneously elicits a visceral and intellectual response, followed by a contemplation of my work as a whole."

Lesch-Middelton received his MFA in Ceramics from Utah State University in 2006 and a BFA in Ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1998. He is currently the Ceramics Program Coordinator at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma, California and teaches at Santa Rosa Jr. College and Solano College in the San Francisco Bay area. His artwork has been shown in many venues nationally, including the Baltimore Clayworks (MD), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN), and Santa Fe Clay Center (NM). He currently lives with his wife and two daughters in Northern California.

Toys from the 1970s
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

This year's version will feature toys from the 1970s. Do you remember playing Pong on Atari, getting your first Luke Skywalker figure, or just wishing to have your own Malibu Barbie? Then you won't want to miss this journey into the decade of Charlie's Angels, Richard Nixon and a gallon of gasoline at fifty cents.

MFA 2011
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

MFA 2011 presents the work of 17 visual artists and 20 musicians and composers concluding their graduate careers at Syracuse University. On view will be a wide range of traditional and contemporary media, including painting, drawing, photography, interactive and experimental sculpture and conceptual installations. Master's of Music candidates will perform thesis compositions every Thursday at 6:00 p.m. beginning April 14, for the run of the exhibition.

Manipulation of scale and environment is a clear, consistent thread in this year's exhibition. Painters engulf the viewer in their work, through an expansive 17-foot drawing and by the perspective of a 14-foot canvas projecting from the top of a gallery wall. Photographer Shimpei Shirafuji carries a narrative around the perimeter of a room, a contemporary twist on 19th century cycloramas. An installation of half-toned screen-prints by Eric Johanni initially engages the viewer from across the room, and then again once you are directly in front of the work. Other artists utilize the subtlety of scale to create an intimacy that immerses the viewer into the artwork, such as miniature architectural models and unassuming artist performances. Site-specific installations transform galleries into absorbing new environments that influence all of the viewer's senses, creating ephemeral experiences through sound, performance and media. Documentary films that deal with issues of identity and family will also be on view in the media theater.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces aren't available the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

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Orange Pulp: Works by Norman Saunders
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

A profile of pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), including 10 lush and dramatic Saunders paintings from the university collection.

Named for the cheap and abundant wood pulp that publishers after 1850 began using to print reading materials for a mass audience, pulp magazines sported eye-catching covers and included detective, adventure, western, horror, romance, and science fiction stories. According to co-curator Sean Quimby, director of SCRC, "This was literature tailored to specific tastes, intended to entertain in predictable ways." He notes that "even while the form of the pulp magazine died by 1960, the concept of pulp lives on in glossy photo-dense magazines, paperback novels, comic books, and film." Quimby maintains that pulp magazines, with their intensely involved readership, "helped make possible contemporary interactive media culture."

Ah Leon: Memories of Elementary School
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In 2008, Ah Leon envisioned a monumental ceramic installation showcasing dozens of stoneware desks and chairs in neat rows like the classrooms of our youth. It began with a small grouping called Memories of Elementary School first exhibited in August 2008 at The Taipei Gallery Exposition and in 2009 at the Phoenix Art Museum in conjunction with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) annual conference. Ah Leon continued to make more desks which were exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in 2010. Another year has passed and Ah Leon has completed the 20 sets of desks and chairs which will be showcased in this exhibition.

His original idea was to create a classroom environment that would “lead audiences to remember their childhood stories.” Ah Leon studied elementary school desks, determined that his creations would be authentic, revealing memories through carved initials, scratches and drawings on their worn surfaces. His classroom would preserve the stories of our childhood as if they were “frozen in the museum space.”

The first two rows of tables and chairs appear new. They become progressively more dilapidated--some broken, some leaning--until the last rows where the furniture is falling over and ultimately only chips and severed parts remain on the floor. In one area the desks are arranged as if a teacher reads to a group of children. The impact of the scene is immediate: viewers are taken back to their own childhood classroom and long forgotten memories drift to the surface.

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Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The 2011 exhibition program will continue to highlight the talented artists of New York State through a series of focused exhibitions. The season opens with Reynolds Unwrapped: The Cartoon Art of Dan Reynolds, an exhibition featuring more than 100 original works of art that are seriously hilarious. The small-scale drawings depicting the comedic daily lives of humans and animals alike are all rendered by hand in a variety of media, an approach that is becoming increasing rare in a world of computer-generated images.

Dan Reynolds began drawing cartoons in 1989, when he was 30. As a youth center instructor, Reynolds was surrounded by youthful energy and creative minds. He was an avid follower of popular cartoons of the time, such as Gary Larson's Far Side and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. A native of Brewerton, NY, Reynolds was inspired by his Central New York surroundings, a place where snow is abundant and cows can be found just minutes from anywhere. From the beginning, Reynolds has used farm animals as messengers of humor, particularly cows, pigs and chickens, a series that was immediately accepted by Reader's Digest in 1989. A new cartoon has appeared in every issue since then. Reynolds' cartoons have also appeared in thematic Reynolds Unwrapped book compilations featuring everything from sports to holiday special editions. American Greetings and Recycled Greeting Cards also feature Reynolds cartoons on greeting cards for every occasion.

In 2008, Reynolds was diagnosed with testicular cancer and subsequently received months of chemotherapy. While he was in treatment, he began drawing cartoons about cancer and his personal experience which he found was shared by his fellow patients. He shared the cartoons with the staff and patients at the facility and discovered the power of art to bring humor to an otherwise humorless situation.

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Annual Le Moyne College Student Art Exhibition
LeMoyne College

Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Cannonball Press Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Cannonball Press, the Brooklyn-based alternative pirate press co-founded by artists Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, will present an exhibition, which includes new, large-scale graphic works, installations and sculpture. As Cannonball Press, Mazorra and Houston publish and sell limited-run editions of emerging artists' work and display it on their website, as well as at shows and festivals. The venture seeks to invite talented artists to explore the medium and make affordable, high-quality editions. Artists represented include Drew Iwaniw, Katy Seals, Joseph Velasquez, John Hitchcock, Derrick Riley, Meghan O'Connor, and Dusty Herbig, assistant professor of printmaking at VPA.

For more information, contact Dusty Herbig, 315-443-4519 or dtherbig@syr.edu, or XL Projects (during gallery hours), 315-443-2542.

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Hectic Eclectic Art Show
CNY Artists

Fayetteville Free Library
300 Orchard St., Fayetteville

John Freyer: The Dress Up Portrait Project
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Freyer's series of videos connects speaker to listener, performer to viewer. His 5-year-old daughter and her friends take turns posing for the camera for periods of several minutes without moving. At first, the static video images of little girls in Cinderella skirts or mom's high heels appear as cute clichés familiar from advertising and family photo albums. However, the children's mild discomfort at standing still and silent becomes increasingly unsettling over time. The children struggle not to fidget or speak, opening a space for a more complicated reading of their self-presentation. Their chosen objects of "dress up"--the clutter of pink hair curlers and ballerina frills--become a costume that liberates, rather than obscures, the personality beneath.

Freyer is an assistant professor of studio art in the School for Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, where he teaches advanced photography and digital imaging classes. He is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow in Stockholm, Sweden.

Jenny Holzer installation
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created a site-specific installation that streams across the façade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms" and "Survival" that challenge viewers' assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses or lamenting the struggles of daily living, Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed "Truisms" on one of Times Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her "Survival" series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

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From Altar Cloths to Lost Socks: The Fabric of Life
University Neighbors Lecture Series
Featuring Sarah Saulson

Price: $10 regular, $5 with student ID
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Sarah Saulson, a weaver since childhood, teaches weaving in the School of Art at SU. She also works with Syracuse-area elementary-age children teaching them to weave through artist's residencies and sells her work at Eureka Crafts in Armory Square. She has maintained an active dyeing and weaving studio near the Westcott Nation for many years. Her interactive lecture will include spinning and weaving demonstrations and a world tour of weaving through space and time.

Operatic Arias
Featuring Luba Lesser, mezzo-soprano; Maryna Mazhukhova, piano

Price: Free (registration required)
Dewitt Community Library
Shoppingtown Mall, Dewitt