Friday, April 29, 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

Approaches & Disclosures: Three Photographers

Price: Free
Empire State College CNY Center
6333 Route 298, East Syracuse

Approaches & Disclosures is a collection of work from three SUNY Empire State College faculty and staff members: Lee Herman, mentor at the Auburn Unit; Sue Orrell, director of academic support at the CNY Center; and Alan Stankiewicz, mentor at the CNY Center.

All three photographers approach photography from a different perspective, prompting the exhibition. The work ranges in content from urban street life, to local landscapes and constructed images of skies. As a single image or a studied series, each photograph reflects a deep rooted approach to photography based on personal experience and external influences.

The exhibition affords the Empire State College community the opportunity to view and celebrate a creative collaboration among colleagues, while broadening their own definition of photography.

For more information, contact Michael Mancini, 315-460-3176, michael.mancini@esc.edu.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

Feats of Clay Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Feats of Clay spotlights the varied and creative ceramics art education programs in our high schools throughout Onondaga County and Central New York. The continued success of Feats of Clay rests with the talented and dedicated high school art teachers and art students.

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."

Human Nature Series: Works of Maria Janina Rizzo
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Emerging artist Maria Rizzo exhibits 15 paintings that depict the human nature in an explosive combination of color and symbolism.

Maria Janina Rizzo was born and raised in Italy where she lived until 2007. She received a diploma from the High School for the Arts, and was mentored by the eclectic painter Roberto Giussani, an essential figure for the growth of her artistic development. She then continued on with her studies of painting at Syracuse University. In 2010 she opened "ART IT: Modern & Unique Art with a touch of Italian class" with the desire to offer original paintings and customized artwork. Her paintings were recently featured at the Emerging Women Artists of CNY show at the Red House Gallery, and at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society.

Annual High School Seniors Exhibit
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

High schools within a 30 mile radius of Syracuse are invited to display seniors’ artwork and have them juried by the CNY Art Guild.

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

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.

Opening: East Meets West: Works by Nikolay Mikushkin and Robert Glisson
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

There will be an opening reception this evening 6:00-8:00 pm.

Robert Glisson begins his oil paintings en plein air, and completes the work in his studio, utilizing the "push and pull" technique by incorporating color with distinct to dissolved forms. The artist also is known for turning a painting upside down to push further into abstracting the composition. The time Glisson spends working in the studio allows for a less literal and more emotive interpretation of the spirit of the Central New York landscape.

Nikolay Mikushkin, born in Kazakhstan, is a classically trained landscape painter in the style of Russian Realism that he learned while attending the St. Petersburg Academy of Painting in Russia. After moving to Syracuse from New York City following 9/11, Mikushkin found an abundance of inspiration throughout the Central New York landscape in which to continue his plein air painting style. The works in this exhibition were created from his time as artist-in-residence at Saltonstall in Ithaca, NY and at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.

Mikushkin also works as a scenic artist for the United Scenic Artists Union, working on movies and stage productions in New York City.

Hectic Eclectic Art Show
CNY Artists

Fayetteville Free Library
300 Orchard St., Fayetteville

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.

Women of CNY Student Art Show
Redhouse

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

Our year-long celebration of local women in art comes to a close as we offer this student show featuring the works of Henninger High School students.

Senior Interior Design Student Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior interior design students in the Department of Design at Syracuse University will present an exhibition of thesis work, a culmination of year-long research and design projects by 29 graduating seniors. The show will include both two- and three-dimensional works. Faculty advisors for the show are interior design faculty members Zeke Leonard and Jen Hamilton.

For more information about the exhibition, contact at mleona02@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.

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.

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."

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!

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!

The Braid of Night and Day: Works by Cayetano Valenzuela
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

24th Annual Fashion Show
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: $25 reserved seating; $15 balcony regular; $10 balcony student/senior
Goldstein Auditorium, Schine Student Center
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior fashion design students in Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts will present their collections.

Tickets can be purchased at the Schine Box Office, 315-443-4517. Parking is available in SU pay lots. For more information, contact the fashion design program office at 315-443-4644.

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.

Satan's Closet Improv Comedy

Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

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.

2011 Rockin' the Red Cross

Price: $20 at door, $15 in advance
Onondaga County War Memorial
800 S. State St., Syracuse

Thirteen corporate bands will rock the stage to raise money for the American Red Cross of CNY. Food and cash bar available. Appearing will be:
CSB from C&S Companies
The Mosfets from Inficon
The Distributorz from Wynit
The Kings of Hospitality from Oncenter
The Bandit Band from VanBuren Elementary School
Defense Mechanism from Lockheed Martin (defending champions)
The Chillerz from Carrier
Brush from Aspen Dental
The Treblemakers from Onondaga Community College
Under the Radar from SRC
Old School from Manlius Pebble Hill School
The CXTec Dinosaurs

Slow Six at the Red House
LeMoyne College

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

In a fusion of video and audio, electronic and acoustic, Slow Six presents an evening of music that is truly unique, in the intimate space of The Red House.

Poets & Dreamers
Syracuse Gay and Lesbian Chorus
Glenn Kime, conductor

Price: $18 regular, $15 students/seniors, $9 children under 12
Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church
5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt

Pulling from the pages of some of the most world famous poets and challenging us to dream in order to succeed, Poets & Dreamers embraces the lyric quality of poetry set to music. Hear the immortal words of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" or the haunting words of Christina Rossetti's "Remember Me." Dream alongside Greg Gilpin with "Peace Song" (We Shall Overcome), ponder the life you live with Jonathan Larson's "Seasons of Love" from RENT, or join the rousing call of John Leavitt's "Impossible Dream" from the musical Man of La Mancha.

SU Symphony Band
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Justin J. Mertz, conductor

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

The band will perform Symphony No. 1: "The Lord of the Rings" by Johan de Meij.

The symphony band is open to both music majors and non-majors at SU. The ensemble performs the most outstanding traditional and contemporary wind band repertoire.

For more information, contact the University Band Office at 315-443-2194 or fmmoore@syr.edu.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage.

*SOLD OUT* Shpongle Presents The Shpongletron Experience, with Random Rab, Pax Effex
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Bruce Smith, poet
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems, including Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth), The Other Lover (which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Songs for Two Voices, and most recently, Devotions (Chicago, 2011). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and many others. His essays and reviews of his have appeared in Harvard Review, Boston Review and Newsday. In 2000 he was a Guggenheim fellow, and has twice been a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2010 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A Year With Frog and Toad
Appleseed Productions
Colin Keating, director

Price: $20 regular; $17 students/seniors
Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

A Year With Frog And Toad remains true to the spirit of the original stories as it follows two great friends, the cheerful and popular Frog and the rather grumpy Toad through four fun-filled seasons. Waking from hibernation in the spring, they proceed to plant gardens, swim, rake leaves and go sledding, learning life lessons along the way, including a most important one about friendship and rejoicing in the attributes that make each of us different and special. Book and lyrics by Willie Reale, music by Robert Reale, based on the books by Arnold Lobel.

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!

Saturday, April 30, 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.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

ArtRageous Mothers' Day Craft Show and Sale
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Give the mothers in your life the gift of art. Show features the work of: Deborah Sorrentino (original, contemporary and whimsical art tiles and tile ceramic jewelry), Judy O'Neil (hand crafted beaded necklaces, bracelets and earrings); Phyllis Vadala (original regional photography and cards); Sharon Bottle-Souva (fabric art extraordinaire -- pot holders, table mats, purses and more); Kathy Barry (ridiculously original handmade hats for all seasons). Refreshments will be served.

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

The Braid of Night and Day: Works by Cayetano Valenzuela
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

Annual High School Seniors Exhibit
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

High schools within a 30 mile radius of Syracuse are invited to display seniors’ artwork and have them juried by the CNY Art Guild.

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.

East Meets West: Works by Nikolay Mikushkin and Robert Glisson
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Robert Glisson begins his oil paintings en plein air, and completes the work in his studio, utilizing the "push and pull" technique by incorporating color with distinct to dissolved forms. The artist also is known for turning a painting upside down to push further into abstracting the composition. The time Glisson spends working in the studio allows for a less literal and more emotive interpretation of the spirit of the Central New York landscape.

Nikolay Mikushkin, born in Kazakhstan, is a classically trained landscape painter in the style of Russian Realism that he learned while attending the St. Petersburg Academy of Painting in Russia. After moving to Syracuse from New York City following 9/11, Mikushkin found an abundance of inspiration throughout the Central New York landscape in which to continue his plein air painting style. The works in this exhibition were created from his time as artist-in-residence at Saltonstall in Ithaca, NY and at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.

Mikushkin also works as a scenic artist for the United Scenic Artists Union, working on movies and stage productions in New York City.

Hectic Eclectic Art Show
CNY Artists

Fayetteville Free Library
300 Orchard St., Fayetteville

Spring Show and Sale
Onondaga Art Guild

Emmanuel Episcopal Church
400 Yates St., East Syracuse

From the Earth Arts and Crafts Show

Price: Free
Onondaga Nation School
Route 11A, Onondaga Nation

Featuring food, music, jewelry, sculpture, baskets, painting, and beadwork. For more information, phone 315-469-6991.

Senior Interior Design Student Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior interior design students in the Department of Design at Syracuse University will present an exhibition of thesis work, a culmination of year-long research and design projects by 29 graduating seniors. The show will include both two- and three-dimensional works. Faculty advisors for the show are interior design faculty members Zeke Leonard and Jen Hamilton.

For more information about the exhibition, contact at mleona02@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.

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.

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."

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!

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.

Read a review!

Central New York Bluegrass Association Benefit
Kellish Hill Farm

Price: $10 regular, 16 and under free with paying adult
Kellish Hill Farm
3192 Pompey Center Rd., Pompey

All-star old time country, gospel, and bluegrass music Benefit, to support Central New York Bluegrass Association and the mission to continue sharing and promoting the music. Enjoy the talent of The Delaney Bros, Salt City Ramblers, Lake Effect Bluegrass, Boots n' Shorts, Marcellus Jammers, and John Cadley. Includes spaghetti dinner, great country, bluegrass, and gospel music, wholesome family fun, and an opportunity to jam after the day's events.

For more information, phone Joy at 315-593-1646 or visit CNYBA.com.

SU Concert Band
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Justin J. Mertz, conductor

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

The band will perform works by Hazo, Leemans, O'Donnell, Tin, Shimamura, Mackey, Grainger, and Holst. Brent R. Paris and Michelle C. Wofford will appear as graduate conducting associates.

The Concert Band is a concert ensemble open to both music majors and non-majors at SU. It offers an opportunity to perform outstanding large-band works.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage.

Senior Vocal Recital
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Featuring David Artz, tenor

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

Tenor David Artz, a senior vocal performance major, will perform works by John Dowland, Robert Schumann, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Giuseppe Verdi, Jules Massenet, Gaetano Donizetti and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Guest artists are pianist Samuel Emanuel and soprano Jill Brenner.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage.

Explore the Corridor After-Party
Everson Museum of Art
Featuring Stir Up the Gravy

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

A party following the afternoon Explore the Corridor Treasure Hunt, where searchers can redeem the tokens they found during the search for prizes. (Clues are available at The Warehouse beginning at 2:00 pm.)

Jazz Ensemble and Jazzuits play Count Basie and Manhattan Transfer
LeMoyne College

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Join the Jazzuits and Jazz Ensemble with the Young Lions of CNY for an evening of music by the Manhattan Transfer and the Count Basie Band with such hits as "Boy from New York City," "Birdland," "Route 66" and more.

Dusty Pas'cal and Tom Stahl
Words and Music Songwriter Showcase

Price: $10
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Skaneateles songsmith Dusty Pas'cal, Buffalo-based folk-rocker Tom Stahl, and John Lennon Songwriting Contest winner Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers--all onstage together. Also appearing is Emmery Brakke, a rising young songwriter and Syracuse University student.

The Words and Music Songwriter Showcase, hosted by singer-songwriter, author, and NPR contributor Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, is a celebration of original music from Central New York and beyond, featuring established and emerging artists of all genres in an up-close-and-personal acoustic setting.

Poets & Dreamers
Syracuse Gay and Lesbian Chorus
Glenn Kime, conductor

Price: $18 regular, $15 students/seniors, $9 children under 12
Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church
5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt

Pulling from the pages of some of the most world famous poets and challenging us to dream in order to succeed, Poets & Dreamers embraces the lyric quality of poetry set to music. Hear the immortal words of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" or the haunting words of Christina Rossetti's "Remember Me." Dream alongside Greg Gilpin with "Peace Song" (We Shall Overcome), ponder the life you live with Jonathan Larson's "Seasons of Love" from RENT, or join the rousing call of John Leavitt's "Impossible Dream" from the musical Man of La Mancha.

Senior Composition Recital
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Featuring Chris Cresswell

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

Chris Cresswell, a senior composition major, will present a recital, which will include the world premiere of a collaboration with video artist Jessica Schreindl and choreographer Becky Richardson, a premiere of a piece by Melissa Widzinski for baritone saxophone and electronics, a premiere by Setnor faculty member Jon English, and a performance by the Syracuse University Wind Ensemble.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage.

John Popper and the Duskray Troubadors
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Snow White
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

Price: $5
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive retelling of the classic children's story.

Colour Me Streisand
Dan Tursi, director
Featuring Jimmy Wachter

Price: $12
Twist Ultra Lounge
252 W. Genesee St., Syracuse

The award-winning cabaret, written by Josh Smith and Jimmy Wachter, that pays tribute to the one and only Barbra Streisand. Jimmy Wachter portrays Barbra Streisand as you have never seen her before. He and Josh take you on a journey in the day and life of Babs herself! Singing many of Barbra's well known hits as well as original material, medleys, and montages.

Jimmy also brings his celebrity impressions to the stage - everyone from Lena Horne to Willie Nelson and Cher to Judy Garland.

A Year With Frog and Toad
Appleseed Productions
Colin Keating, director

Price: $20 regular; $17 students/seniors
Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

A Year With Frog And Toad remains true to the spirit of the original stories as it follows two great friends, the cheerful and popular Frog and the rather grumpy Toad through four fun-filled seasons. Waking from hibernation in the spring, they proceed to plant gardens, swim, rake leaves and go sledding, learning life lessons along the way, including a most important one about friendship and rejoicing in the attributes that make each of us different and special. Book and lyrics by Willie Reale, music by Robert Reale, based on the books by Arnold Lobel.

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, May 1, 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.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

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

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.

Senior Interior Design Student Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior interior design students in the Department of Design at Syracuse University will present an exhibition of thesis work, a culmination of year-long research and design projects by 29 graduating seniors. The show will include both two- and three-dimensional works. Faculty advisors for the show are interior design faculty members Zeke Leonard and Jen Hamilton.

For more information about the exhibition, contact at mleona02@syr.edu.

Closing: Hands On!
Szozda Gallery

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

Jeremy Randall will be in attendance this afternoon 12:00-3:00 pm.
Karen Thomas-Lillie will be in attendance this afternoon 1:30-4:00 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.

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.

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."

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!

Spring Show and Sale
Onondaga Art Guild

Emmanuel Episcopal Church
400 Yates St., East Syracuse

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

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.

Vision of Sound
Society for New Music

Price: $15 regular; $12 students/seniors
Plymouth Church
232 E. Onondaga St., Syracuse

New music with dance, performed in collaboration with the SUNY Brockport Dance Department.

Composers include Ping Jin (premiere), Mark Olivieri, David Liptak, Bret Bohman, 'Doctuh' Michael Woods (premiere), and Marc Mellits.

Musicians include Cristina Buciu, violin; Rob Auler, piano, Tim Feeney and Eric Lutters, percussion.

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!

Silverwood Clarinet Choir
Arts Alive in Liverpool

Price: Free
Liverpool Public Library
310 Tulip St., Liverpool

Music for clarinet choir.

Sunday Musicale: Voices Alive Oasis Chorus
Fayetteville Free Library

Price: Free
Fayetteville Free Library
300 Orchard St., Fayetteville

Voices Alive Oasis Chorus with Linda Williams and Karen Retchless, accompanist

Jazz Fest VIII

Price: $25 adults, $15 students
Manlius Pebble Hill School
5300 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt

Guest artists include Walter White, trumpet; Dino Losito, keyboard; and Tom Killian, drums; along with student musicians in the MPH Jazz Lab Band and The Oh Man! Band.

There will also be an art invitational opening reception at 5:00 pm, featuring the works of 12 CNY artists.

Spring Concert I
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Storer Auditorium
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Syracuse University Oratorio Society
Elisa Dekaney, conductor

Price: Free
Park Central Presbyterian Church
504 E. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Syracuse University Oratorio Society, a vocal ensemble comprised of SU students and Syracuse community members, will present a concert featuring Haydn's Mass in D minor with accompaniment by Susan Crocker, piano. The choir will be joined by soprano Laura Enslin, mezzo-soprano Evgeniya Krachmarova-Sotirov, tenor Jim Shults, and bass Eric Johnson.

Originally scored for organ, strings, three trumpets and timpani, Mass in D minor (Missa in Angustiis, later nicknamed the Nelson Mass) combines the drama and sophistication of Haydn's instrumental style with the intensity and fluidity of his choral writing. Also on the program will be Anton Bruckner's Locus iste.

The Oratorio Society was previously scheduled to perform this concert with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra (SSO) on this date. Donations to the SSO Musicians' Fund will be accepted.

30 Years of Premieres
Syracuse Children's Chorus

Hendricks Chapel
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Commemorate the rich history of the Syracuse Children's Chorus as we conclude our 30th anniversary season with an afternoon of joyful singing. Choristers will perform selections from over 85 works commissioned and premiered by the Chorus throughout its history. Works by renowned composers Joseph Downing, Vijay Singh, Ernst Bacon, and Crystal LaPoint will be featured alongside world premieres by Diego Davidenko and Deborah Cunningham. Join us for the finale as we bring together choristers, alumni, composers, family, and friends in the singing of the SCC favorite, My Own Song.

*CANCELLED* Stained Glass Series: Royal Fireworks Music
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Syracuse University Oratorio Society

Most Holy Rosary Church
111 Roberts Ave., Syracuse

Bruckner Locus iste
Handel Overture to "Music for the Royal Fireworks"
Mozart Symphony No. 33
Haydn Mass in D minor, Hob. XXII:11, "Lord Nelson Mass"

A Year With Frog and Toad
Appleseed Productions
Colin Keating, director

Price: $20 regular; $17 students/seniors
Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

A Year With Frog And Toad remains true to the spirit of the original stories as it follows two great friends, the cheerful and popular Frog and the rather grumpy Toad through four fun-filled seasons. Waking from hibernation in the spring, they proceed to plant gardens, swim, rake leaves and go sledding, learning life lessons along the way, including a most important one about friendship and rejoicing in the attributes that make each of us different and special. Book and lyrics by Willie Reale, music by Robert Reale, based on the books by Arnold Lobel.

Read a Review!

Colour Me Streisand
Dan Tursi, director
Featuring Jimmy Wachter

Price: $12
Twist Ultra Lounge
252 W. Genesee St., Syracuse

The award-winning cabaret, written by Josh Smith and Jimmy Wachter, that pays tribute to the one and only Barbra Streisand. Jimmy Wachter portrays Barbra Streisand as you have never seen her before. He and Josh take you on a journey in the day and life of Babs herself! Singing many of Barbra's well known hits as well as original material, medleys, and montages.

Jimmy also brings his celebrity impressions to the stage - everyone from Lena Horne to Willie Nelson and Cher to Judy Garland.

Monday, May 2, 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.

Approaches & Disclosures: Three Photographers

Price: Free
Empire State College CNY Center
6333 Route 298, East Syracuse

Approaches & Disclosures is a collection of work from three SUNY Empire State College faculty and staff members: Lee Herman, mentor at the Auburn Unit; Sue Orrell, director of academic support at the CNY Center; and Alan Stankiewicz, mentor at the CNY Center.

All three photographers approach photography from a different perspective, prompting the exhibition. The work ranges in content from urban street life, to local landscapes and constructed images of skies. As a single image or a studied series, each photograph reflects a deep rooted approach to photography based on personal experience and external influences.

The exhibition affords the Empire State College community the opportunity to view and celebrate a creative collaboration among colleagues, while broadening their own definition of photography.

For more information, contact Michael Mancini, 315-460-3176, michael.mancini@esc.edu.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

Feats of Clay Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Feats of Clay spotlights the varied and creative ceramics art education programs in our high schools throughout Onondaga County and Central New York. The continued success of Feats of Clay rests with the talented and dedicated high school art teachers and art students.

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.

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."

Human Nature Series: Works of Maria Janina Rizzo
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Emerging artist Maria Rizzo exhibits 15 paintings that depict the human nature in an explosive combination of color and symbolism.

Maria Janina Rizzo was born and raised in Italy where she lived until 2007. She received a diploma from the High School for the Arts, and was mentored by the eclectic painter Roberto Giussani, an essential figure for the growth of her artistic development. She then continued on with her studies of painting at Syracuse University. In 2010 she opened "ART IT: Modern & Unique Art with a touch of Italian class" with the desire to offer original paintings and customized artwork. Her paintings were recently featured at the Emerging Women Artists of CNY show at the Red House Gallery, and at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society.

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

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.

Women of CNY Student Art Show
Redhouse

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

Our year-long celebration of local women in art comes to a close as we offer this student show featuring the works of Henninger High School students.

Senior Interior Design Student Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior interior design students in the Department of Design at Syracuse University will present an exhibition of thesis work, a culmination of year-long research and design projects by 29 graduating seniors. The show will include both two- and three-dimensional works. Faculty advisors for the show are interior design faculty members Zeke Leonard and Jen Hamilton.

For more information about the exhibition, contact at mleona02@syr.edu.

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.

Read a review!

Beauty For Sale (1933)
Syracuse Cinephile Society

Price: $3 regular, $2.50 members
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Director: Richard Boleslawsky. Cast: Madge Evans, Alice Brady, Otto Kruger, Una Merkel, May Robson, Eddie Nugent, Hedda Hopper, Charles Grapewin. Pre-Code drama (with comedic overtones) about a girl (Evans) whose job at an exclusive beauty salon leads to an affair with the husband of one of her wealthy customers. An entertaining and rare gem with a snappy script and great cast.

Tuesday, May 3, 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.

Approaches & Disclosures: Three Photographers

Price: Free
Empire State College CNY Center
6333 Route 298, East Syracuse

Approaches & Disclosures is a collection of work from three SUNY Empire State College faculty and staff members: Lee Herman, mentor at the Auburn Unit; Sue Orrell, director of academic support at the CNY Center; and Alan Stankiewicz, mentor at the CNY Center.

All three photographers approach photography from a different perspective, prompting the exhibition. The work ranges in content from urban street life, to local landscapes and constructed images of skies. As a single image or a studied series, each photograph reflects a deep rooted approach to photography based on personal experience and external influences.

The exhibition affords the Empire State College community the opportunity to view and celebrate a creative collaboration among colleagues, while broadening their own definition of photography.

For more information, contact Michael Mancini, 315-460-3176, michael.mancini@esc.edu.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

Feats of Clay Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Feats of Clay spotlights the varied and creative ceramics art education programs in our high schools throughout Onondaga County and Central New York. The continued success of Feats of Clay rests with the talented and dedicated high school art teachers and art students.

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.

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."

Human Nature Series: Works of Maria Janina Rizzo
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Emerging artist Maria Rizzo exhibits 15 paintings that depict the human nature in an explosive combination of color and symbolism.

Maria Janina Rizzo was born and raised in Italy where she lived until 2007. She received a diploma from the High School for the Arts, and was mentored by the eclectic painter Roberto Giussani, an essential figure for the growth of her artistic development. She then continued on with her studies of painting at Syracuse University. In 2010 she opened "ART IT: Modern & Unique Art with a touch of Italian class" with the desire to offer original paintings and customized artwork. Her paintings were recently featured at the Emerging Women Artists of CNY show at the Red House Gallery, and at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society.

Annual High School Seniors Exhibit
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

High schools within a 30 mile radius of Syracuse are invited to display seniors’ artwork and have them juried by the CNY Art Guild.

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

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.

East Meets West: Works by Nikolay Mikushkin and Robert Glisson
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Robert Glisson begins his oil paintings en plein air, and completes the work in his studio, utilizing the "push and pull" technique by incorporating color with distinct to dissolved forms. The artist also is known for turning a painting upside down to push further into abstracting the composition. The time Glisson spends working in the studio allows for a less literal and more emotive interpretation of the spirit of the Central New York landscape.

Nikolay Mikushkin, born in Kazakhstan, is a classically trained landscape painter in the style of Russian Realism that he learned while attending the St. Petersburg Academy of Painting in Russia. After moving to Syracuse from New York City following 9/11, Mikushkin found an abundance of inspiration throughout the Central New York landscape in which to continue his plein air painting style. The works in this exhibition were created from his time as artist-in-residence at Saltonstall in Ithaca, NY and at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.

Mikushkin also works as a scenic artist for the United Scenic Artists Union, working on movies and stage productions in New York City.

Women of CNY Student Art Show
Redhouse

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

Our year-long celebration of local women in art comes to a close as we offer this student show featuring the works of Henninger High School students.

Senior Interior Design Student Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior interior design students in the Department of Design at Syracuse University will present an exhibition of thesis work, a culmination of year-long research and design projects by 29 graduating seniors. The show will include both two- and three-dimensional works. Faculty advisors for the show are interior design faculty members Zeke Leonard and Jen Hamilton.

For more information about the exhibition, contact at mleona02@syr.edu.

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.

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."

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!

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!

The Braid of Night and Day: Works by Cayetano Valenzuela
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

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.

Read a review!

Rock in Harmony
LeMoyne College
Le Moyne College Chamber Orchestra and College Singers

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

In this collaborative concert, the LCCO will be joined by the Le Moyne College Singers to celebrate songs that we all love to harmonize with, including the music of Billy Joel, The Byrds, Led Zeppelin, and much more.

Beauty and the Beast
Broadway in Syracuse

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

The lush, romantic smash hit Broadway musical for all generations, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, is based on the Academy Award-winning animated feature film. This eye-popping spectacle has won the hearts of over 35 million people worldwide. The classic musical love story is filled with unforgettable characters, lavish sets and costumes, and dazzling production numbers including "Be Our Guest" and the beloved title song.

Read a review!

Wednesday, May 4, 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.

Approaches & Disclosures: Three Photographers

Price: Free
Empire State College CNY Center
6333 Route 298, East Syracuse

Approaches & Disclosures is a collection of work from three SUNY Empire State College faculty and staff members: Lee Herman, mentor at the Auburn Unit; Sue Orrell, director of academic support at the CNY Center; and Alan Stankiewicz, mentor at the CNY Center.

All three photographers approach photography from a different perspective, prompting the exhibition. The work ranges in content from urban street life, to local landscapes and constructed images of skies. As a single image or a studied series, each photograph reflects a deep rooted approach to photography based on personal experience and external influences.

The exhibition affords the Empire State College community the opportunity to view and celebrate a creative collaboration among colleagues, while broadening their own definition of photography.

For more information, contact Michael Mancini, 315-460-3176, michael.mancini@esc.edu.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

Feats of Clay Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Feats of Clay spotlights the varied and creative ceramics art education programs in our high schools throughout Onondaga County and Central New York. The continued success of Feats of Clay rests with the talented and dedicated high school art teachers and art students.

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.

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."

Human Nature Series: Works of Maria Janina Rizzo
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Emerging artist Maria Rizzo exhibits 15 paintings that depict the human nature in an explosive combination of color and symbolism.

Maria Janina Rizzo was born and raised in Italy where she lived until 2007. She received a diploma from the High School for the Arts, and was mentored by the eclectic painter Roberto Giussani, an essential figure for the growth of her artistic development. She then continued on with her studies of painting at Syracuse University. In 2010 she opened "ART IT: Modern & Unique Art with a touch of Italian class" with the desire to offer original paintings and customized artwork. Her paintings were recently featured at the Emerging Women Artists of CNY show at the Red House Gallery, and at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society.

Annual High School Seniors Exhibit
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

High schools within a 30 mile radius of Syracuse are invited to display seniors’ artwork and have them juried by the CNY Art Guild.

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

Celebration of the Arts
41th Celebration of the Arts Art Exhibit

Price: Free
St. David's Episcopal Church
13 Jamar Dr., Dewitt

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!

East Meets West: Works by Nikolay Mikushkin and Robert Glisson
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Robert Glisson begins his oil paintings en plein air, and completes the work in his studio, utilizing the "push and pull" technique by incorporating color with distinct to dissolved forms. The artist also is known for turning a painting upside down to push further into abstracting the composition. The time Glisson spends working in the studio allows for a less literal and more emotive interpretation of the spirit of the Central New York landscape.

Nikolay Mikushkin, born in Kazakhstan, is a classically trained landscape painter in the style of Russian Realism that he learned while attending the St. Petersburg Academy of Painting in Russia. After moving to Syracuse from New York City following 9/11, Mikushkin found an abundance of inspiration throughout the Central New York landscape in which to continue his plein air painting style. The works in this exhibition were created from his time as artist-in-residence at Saltonstall in Ithaca, NY and at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.

Mikushkin also works as a scenic artist for the United Scenic Artists Union, working on movies and stage productions in New York City.

Women of CNY Student Art Show
Redhouse

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

Our year-long celebration of local women in art comes to a close as we offer this student show featuring the works of Henninger High School students.

Senior Interior Design Student Exhibition
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Senior interior design students in the Department of Design at Syracuse University will present an exhibition of thesis work, a culmination of year-long research and design projects by 29 graduating seniors. The show will include both two- and three-dimensional works. Faculty advisors for the show are interior design faculty members Zeke Leonard and Jen Hamilton.

For more information about the exhibition, contact at mleona02@syr.edu.

Faces & Figures
Szozda Gallery

Price: Free
Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A group show focusing solely on portraiture and figures. The six participating artists are Robert Glisson, Harry Freeman-Jones, Robert Niedzwiecki, Phil Parsons, Dona Flaherty, and Stephen Perrone.

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.

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."

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!

BFA Candidates' Exhibit
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

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

An exhibition of work by Syracuse University bachelor of fine arts degree candidates. For more information, contact XL Projects during gallery hours at 315-442-2542.

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!

The Braid of Night and Day: Works by Cayetano Valenzuela
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

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.

Read a review!

Spaceballs and Fanboys
EmpireCon

Price: $10
Palace Theater
2384 James St., Syracuse

EmpireCon will be hosting a "Star Wars Day Celebration". The 4th of May has come to be known as "Star Wars Day" among the fanbase from the phrase "May the Fourth be with you," word play on the well known line from the movies.

The night's activities will feature 35mm film screenings of Mel Brook's science fiction parody Spaceballs, and Fanboys, the 2009 comedy about a group of fans who decide to steal a copy of Star Wars Episode I from Skywalker Ranch. The event will also include trivia contests and other interactive activities. Guests are encouraged to dress in costume.

Additional information on the event can be found at www.empirecon.org.

Andrew Zaplatynsky, violin; Kevin Moore, piano
Civic Morning Musicals

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

Beethoven Sonatas in A minor, Op. 23, and F Major, Op. 24 for Violin and Piano.

Sam Adams, with Vonnegut, Jeremy Greene
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Beauty and the Beast
Broadway in Syracuse

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

The lush, romantic smash hit Broadway musical for all generations, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, is based on the Academy Award-winning animated feature film. This eye-popping spectacle has won the hearts of over 35 million people worldwide. The classic musical love story is filled with unforgettable characters, lavish sets and costumes, and dazzling production numbers including "Be Our Guest" and the beloved title song.

Read a review!

Preview: The Clean House
Syracuse Stage
Michael Barakiva, director

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

Matilde (pronounced Ma-chil-gee) has a problem: she's a cleaning lady who doesn’t like to clean. She'd rather think up the perfect joke. Now that her parents (once the funniest people in Brazil) are dead—her mother died laughing—she is the funniest person in her family. Mathilde works for a doctor named Lane, who has a problem: Lane's husband Charles, a surgeon, has found his soul mate, and it's not Lane. It's Ana, a vibrant Argentinean woman, who is dying, and that is Charles's problem. Sarah Ruhl is an exceptional playwright and MacArthur Foundation Fellow whose work has garnered Pulitzer nominations and justified recognition from Broadway to theatres across the country. The Clean House is one of her best, a compassionate, theatrically bold, and emotionally rich comedy. The perfect joke is worth the wait.

The Clean House won the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to the best English-language play written by a woman, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. At the end of 2006, Entertainment Weekly magazine named the New York production one of the top ten theatrical attractions of the year.

Read a Review!

Thursday, May 5, 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.

Approaches & Disclosures: Three Photographers

Price: Free
Empire State College CNY Center
6333 Route 298, East Syracuse

Approaches & Disclosures is a collection of work from three SUNY Empire State College faculty and staff members: Lee Herman, mentor at the Auburn Unit; Sue Orrell, director of academic support at the CNY Center; and Alan Stankiewicz, mentor at the CNY Center.

All three photographers approach photography from a different perspective, prompting the exhibition. The work ranges in content from urban street life, to local landscapes and constructed images of skies. As a single image or a studied series, each photograph reflects a deep rooted approach to photography based on personal experience and external influences.

The exhibition affords the Empire State College community the opportunity to view and celebrate a creative collaboration among colleagues, while broadening their own definition of photography.

For more information, contact Michael Mancini, 315-460-3176, michael.mancini@esc.edu.

Architecture & Interior Design Student Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

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

Exhibition of student work from the Architecture & Interior Design Department. It is an annual exhibit that showcases some of the best work produced by our students in the preceding academic year.

Feats of Clay Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Feats of Clay spotlights the varied and creative ceramics art education programs in our high schools throughout Onondaga County and Central New York. The continued success of Feats of Clay rests with the talented and dedicated high school art teachers and art students.

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.

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."

Human Nature Series: Works of Maria Janina Rizzo
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Emerging artist Maria Rizzo exhibits 15 paintings that depict the human nature in an explosive combination of color and symbolism.

Maria Janina Rizzo was born and raised in Italy where she lived until 2007. She received a diploma from the High School for the Arts, and was mentored by the eclectic painter Roberto Giussani, an essential figure for the growth of her artistic development. She then continued on with her studies of painting at Syracuse University. In 2010 she opened "ART IT: Modern & Unique Art with a touch of Italian class" with the desire to offer original paintings and customized artwork. Her paintings were recently featured at the Emerging Women Artists of CNY show at the Red House Gallery, and at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society.

Annual High School Seniors Exhibit
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

High schools within a 30 mile radius of Syracuse are invited to display seniors’ artwork and have them juried by the CNY Art Guild.

Members' Theme Show
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

Celebration of the Arts
41th Celebration of the Arts Art Exhibit

Price: Free
St. David's Episcopal Church
13 Jamar Dr., Dewitt

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!

East Meets West: Works by Nikolay Mikushkin and Robert Glisson
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Robert Glisson begins his oil paintings en plein air, and completes the work in his studio, utilizing the "push and pull" technique by incorporating color with distinct to dissolved forms. The artist also is known for turning a painting upside down to push further into abstracting the composition. The time Glisson spends working in the studio allows for a less literal and more emotive interpretation of the spirit of the Central New York landscape.

Nikolay Mikushkin, born in Kazakhstan, is a classically trained landscape painter in the style of Russian Realism that he learned while attending the St. Petersburg Academy of Painting in Russia. After moving to Syracuse from New York City following 9/11, Mikushkin found an abundance of inspiration throughout the Central New York landscape in which to continue his plein air painting style. The works in this exhibition were created from his time as artist-in-residence at Saltonstall in Ithaca, NY and at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.

Mikushkin also works as a scenic artist for the United Scenic Artists Union, working on movies and stage productions in New York City.

Women of CNY Student Art Show
Redhouse

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

Our year-long celebration of local women in art comes to a close as we offer this student show featuring the works of Henninger High School students.