Saturday, December 31, 2011

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 regular, $8 students/seniors/military, members and children under 5 free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America" provides a focused look at an extraordinary photographer whose compelling images of the American road and its unexpected turns form powerful narrative vignettes. The exhibition will be the artist's first major survey assembled in the United States, exploring over 15 years of his career, and including an extensive new body of work.

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, Soth's reputation as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography has continued to grow. Though he has followed the itinerant path laid forth by photographers such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Soth's is a distinct perspective, one in which the wandering, searching, and the process of telling is as resonant as the record of these remarkable encounters. When considered together, Soth's pictures probe the individualities of people, objects, and places he encounters; offer insight to broader sociologies, and in the process form a collective portrait of an unexpected America.

Featuring approximately 100 photographs made between 1994 and the present, "From Here to There" will include rarely-seen early black-and-white images as well as examples from Soth's best-known series "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Niagara." Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be a broad range of portraits made over the past 15 years. The exhibition will also include a new body of work the artist has been developing since 2006, exploring places of escape in America and individuals who seek to flee civilization for a life off the grid. To add insight into Soth's process, the exhibition additionally features a Library space, which includes a reading area for publications, a selection of maquettes for book and 'zine projects, short video works, and ephemera gathered on the road.

Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape
Everson Museum of Art

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

Internationally renowned ceramic artist Margie Hughto presents her first site-specific museum installation entitled A Fired Landscape, a "clay painting" spanning 50 feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist's spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment. Overall, Setting Sun is a ceramic abstraction, but Hughto establishes a connection to the landscape that inspired it by adding impressions of natural objects such as native ferns, marine life and fossils, into the wet clay and then coating the surfaces with brilliant color. The rich palette of burnt oranges and fiery reds evoke the sun’s glowing light and radiating warmth. Tiny pieces of glass embedded in the clay prior to firing add sparkle to the glossy green and blue glazes used to suggest the artist's lily pond.

Snow Days Eco-Igloo
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Step into the arctic! Warm up inside the Everson's life-sized igloo, made completely from recycled plastic milk cartons, collected by the Syracuse community and constructed by Everson staff. The igloo twinkles with lights, turning the Everson's Rosamond Gifford Sculpture Court into a snowy wonderland. Pose behind penguin cut-outs for a fun family photo. Take a moment to relax inside the igloo on comfy "icebergs" (bean bag chairs). The igloo materials will be recycled at the close of Everson Snow Days.

Everson Snow Days is a series of special programs to celebrate the arrival of winter.

Expressions of Joy: Annual Holiday Show
Gallery 54

Gallery 54
54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

Fine art and fine craft created by local artists.

Gifts for the Home
Imagine

Imagine
38 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles

Looking for that perfect, one-of-a-kind piece of home décor? Then check out this exhibition featuring original watercolors, wooden clocks and spoons, ceramic mugs, blown glass vases, and other handcrafted gifts at a variety of price points.

Artists represented include:
Lucie Wellner, of Pompey, watercolor paintings
Dennis MacDonald, of Fabius, brooms
Emily Reason, of Marshall, N.C., porcelain pottery
Rick Barrick, of Lancaster, Pa., candles
Jonathan Simons, of Kempton, Pa., wooden spoons
Schlabaugh & Sons, of Kalona, Iowa, clocks

Holiday Show 2011
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

The Holiday Show features jewelry, ceramics, photography, painting, and fiber art created by regionally and nationally recognized artists. Participating artists include Dana Stenson (Syracuse), Jen Gandee (Fabius), Jeanann Wieners (Syracuse), Elisabeth Groat (Syracuse), Sarah Saulson (Syracuse), Lucie Wellner (Pompey), and Errol Willett (Fabius).

The Holiday Group Show emphasizes the important role that handmade objects and fine art plays in domestic life, enriching living spaces and adorning the body.

Landmarks of New York
Onondaga Historical Association

Price: Free
Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Landmarks of New York is a traveling exhibit of 90 stunning black and white photographs of New York City buildings that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The exhibit is curated by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, New York City's first director of cultural affairs and acclaimed author of the book that serves as the basis for the exhibit, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Building. In conjunction with the show, Dennis Connors, OHA's Curator of History, selected over 20 contemporary and historic photographs to highlight Onondaga County's own architectural inheritance.

Always After (the Glass House)
Urban Video Project

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

Urban Video Project is pleased to present Always After (the Glass House), 2006, by internationally recognized multimedia artist, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.

Employing footage shot on a high-speed film camera, Always After focuses on the broken glass accumulated after the windows of the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology's Crown Hall were smashed by the architect's own grandson as part of a ceremony in advance of the building's renovation. Manglano-Ovalle scrupulously edits out all clear reference to this odd 'kill your fathers' ritual, leaving the viewer with a dream-like sequence in which well-shod anonymous masses eternally exit and equally anonymous custodians endlessly move in to sweep up the crystalline debris of modernism. The precise nature of the event--whether it is a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or just routine construction--never becomes clear. Instead, the narrative unfolds like a Jacob's ladder: never reaching the end, passing again and again through the point where modernist progress and crisis become indistinguishable--a point that is always already "after."

Little Red Riding Hood
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

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

In this interactive version, the children in the audience are invited to come dressed up as fairytale characters, and become the witnesses, jury, and judge at the wolf's trial (for trying to trick Little Red and her Grandmother).

For reservations, phone 315-449-3823.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Syracuse Stage
Syracuse University Drama Department
Linda Hartzell, director

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

Narnia comes to life in a mystical adventure, dramatized by Adrian Mitchell, with music composed by Shaun Davey.

London. The war is on and the bombs are falling. Four children -- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy -- flee the perils of the Blitz to the safety of the countryside. In an old wardrobe they discover a portal to the land of Narnia, where a fearsome White Witch holds the inhabitants spellbound in a winter lasting 100 years. There the children enter a deadly struggle, joining with the great lion, Aslan, to battle the White Witch and her army. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and rarely produced stateside, this thrilling musical adaptation of C.S. Lewis' inspiring tale delivers excitement for the whole family. Musical direction by Dianne Adams McDowell.

Read a Review!

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

John Knecht: Deluge and Anima
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Deluge (2010) hand-drawn looping animation
Anima (2011) hand-drawn looping animation

Artist Statement:
Things have been falling in my videos for decades. It was at first formal. Falling things filled the frame and made a complicated cinematic space. The things falling -- wishbones, test tubes, martini glasses, plastic strawberries that looked like a human heart, cement blocks and infected molars -- increasingly became an atmosphere, functioning both as a formal device and a metaphorical space.

There is a drawing in the collection of the Queen, hanging in Buckingham Palace, by Leonardo daVinci which depicts a deluge of raining everyday objects: rakes, funnels, lamps and general debris. The title of the drawing is "A Cloudburst of Material Things." It is graphite on paper and credited to daVinci. It is dated 1500. The drawing is torn in half so only a part of the drawing remains. I have struggled to find out more about the piece and there is virtually nothing written about it, but I am haunted by it. "Deluge" is directly informed by the overwhelmed totality of daVinci's image. What was he thinking?

Monday, January 2, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

Westcott Holiday Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Photos, paintings and prints by Steve Susman, Molly Susman, Jessica Breedlove and Kristina Starowitz.

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

"Everything is Illustrated III" and "Talking Wallpaper"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

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

Gallery A: Everything is Illustrated III, featuring work by Holly DePue, Beth Mand, and Kristen Tryon
Gallery B: Talking Wallpaper, featuring recent work by Miles George and Aaron Lee

Open Apple Steve. Memoriam: an aesthetic homage to Steve Jobs
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

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

Exhibit features works by local artists Vicki Harris, Matthew Keeney, Ellen Leahy, Paul Melnikow, and Kathryn Petrillo, plus works from artists in California, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Utah, Washington DC, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Philippines, and Portugal

Read a review!

Just One Word: Plastics
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

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

For more than a century, plastics have transformed our lives -- from bathroom to battlefield; from supermarket to spacecraft. Begun as a 19th-century replacement material for billiard balls and piano keys, plastics spurred 20th century developments in industry, transportation, medicine, entertainment, and other aspects of contemporary life. The original objects of "Just One Word: Plastics" represent a material history of the modern world.

This exhibition features a representative sample of the Plastics Collection at the Syracuse University Library and presents an overview of major trends in the development of plastics in everyday life. The exhibit focuses on personal and household objects rather than the use of plastics in industry where they are also widely used. Approximately 250 objects divided into 12 categories will be on view. In addition, a small selection of manuscripts and printed materials will be included.

Specific objects to be featured in the exhibition are:
* ornate celluloid combs and a wide variety of plastic toiletries
* phenolic (Bakelite) objects from the 1920s and 30s including jewelry, radios, and other appliances and games
* musical instruments
* post-war toys, dishes, and household items
* original patent books of John Wesley Hyatt, inventor of Celluloid
* product catalogues from the 1930s and 1950s for popular items such as DuPont French Ivory dresser sets, Boltaware molded "stoneware" dishes, and Tupperware, and
* the Pleur-evac, a revolutionary plastic medical device for draining fluid and maintaining pressure in the lungs that helped save the life of President Ronald Reagan.

The Plastics Collection was begun in 2007 as a joint project of the Syracuse University Library and the Plastics History & Artifacts Committee of the Plastics Pioneers Association. The Collection expanded dramatically when the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, MA, closed and transferred its artifacts, books, and manuscripts to Syracuse University's care in 2008.

Westcott Holiday Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Photos, paintings and prints by Steve Susman, Molly Susman, Jessica Breedlove and Kristina Starowitz.

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

Six Sides of Japanese Package Design
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

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

The exhibition focuses on the way the design of the package relates to Japanese culture and consumerism.

Based on a collection of different Japanese products, "Six Sides of Japanese Package Design" is the result of a collaboration between undergraduate communications design students in the class Problem-Solving Strategies, taught by Roderick Martinez, and graduate museum studies students in the class Museum Studies Practicum, taught by Bradley Hudson. Divided into six groups, the students selected themes that each highlight a different dimension of package design in Japan. Each section of the gallery is a realization of the groups' respective themes in the form of a museum exhibition.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter The Warehouse via the ground-floor door, adjacent to the café on West Fayette Street or the first-floor door on West Washington Street.

Sources & Structures: The Art of Robert Stackhouse
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

This 25-year retrospective, organized by the SUArt Galleries, surveys the development of Robert Stackhouse as an artist. In addition to investigating the roots of his best-known imagery -- Viking ships, whales, snakes, and wood A-frame constructs -- this exhibition examines how he conceives of these designs through his drawings, watercolors, and prints. "Sources and Structures" considers how Stackhouse has made a personal examination of these natural and man-made forms and developed a body of work that explores affinities between architecture and biological anatomy.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World" examines how depictions of the railroad transformed our perception of the railroad industry. Whether the purpose of an artistic work was to entertain the viewer, to provide cultural commentary, or to call attention to the railroad's impact on the economic climate, each one inevitably had an effect on the way the audience viewed and understood the railroad in modern society.

In partnership with the Syracuse University Art Galleries and the Special Collections Research Center, the students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorship course in the Graduate Program in Museum Studies have worked together to thematically demonstrate visual testimonies to the railroad's reign over the industrialized world.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 regular, $8 students/seniors/military, members and children under 5 free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America" provides a focused look at an extraordinary photographer whose compelling images of the American road and its unexpected turns form powerful narrative vignettes. The exhibition will be the artist's first major survey assembled in the United States, exploring over 15 years of his career, and including an extensive new body of work.

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, Soth's reputation as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography has continued to grow. Though he has followed the itinerant path laid forth by photographers such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Soth's is a distinct perspective, one in which the wandering, searching, and the process of telling is as resonant as the record of these remarkable encounters. When considered together, Soth's pictures probe the individualities of people, objects, and places he encounters; offer insight to broader sociologies, and in the process form a collective portrait of an unexpected America.

Featuring approximately 100 photographs made between 1994 and the present, "From Here to There" will include rarely-seen early black-and-white images as well as examples from Soth's best-known series "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Niagara." Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be a broad range of portraits made over the past 15 years. The exhibition will also include a new body of work the artist has been developing since 2006, exploring places of escape in America and individuals who seek to flee civilization for a life off the grid. To add insight into Soth's process, the exhibition additionally features a Library space, which includes a reading area for publications, a selection of maquettes for book and 'zine projects, short video works, and ephemera gathered on the road.

Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape
Everson Museum of Art

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

Internationally renowned ceramic artist Margie Hughto presents her first site-specific museum installation entitled A Fired Landscape, a "clay painting" spanning 50 feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist's spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment. Overall, Setting Sun is a ceramic abstraction, but Hughto establishes a connection to the landscape that inspired it by adding impressions of natural objects such as native ferns, marine life and fossils, into the wet clay and then coating the surfaces with brilliant color. The rich palette of burnt oranges and fiery reds evoke the sun’s glowing light and radiating warmth. Tiny pieces of glass embedded in the clay prior to firing add sparkle to the glossy green and blue glazes used to suggest the artist's lily pond.

Deng Guo Yuan
The Warehouse Gallery

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

This exhibit will highlight ink brush paintings by Tianjin-based Chinese artist Deng Guo Yuan. His work reveals the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and a profound knowledge of modern and international contemporary aesthetics. The film "Deng Guo Yuan" (2010) by French filmmaker Pierre Creton, presented in the Gallery's vault, meticulously documents the creation of one of Deng Guo Yuan's ink paintings in his Tianjin studio. Widely exhibited in China and Europe, this will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The show originated at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Tianjin, China), and then traveled in modified form to the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), to the Provenance Center (New London, CT), and to its last venue, the Warehouse Gallery, for which Deng Guo Yuan will create additional site-specific works.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

Spanglish: Drawing, Collage, Photography and Video
Point of Contact Gallery

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

Spanglish is a project made specifically for the Point of Contact Gallery by New York City artist Celeste Fichter, based on Point of Contact's work in the verbal and the visual arts, and its ties to the Latin American literary and visual arts. Comprised of drawing, collage, photography and video, Spanglish is based solely on the artist's understanding and misunderstanding of the Spanish language.

For several months Fichter studied the Spanish/English dictionary page by page, definition by definition in alphabetical order, pronouncing each word aloud in search of words that sound like other words (in either English or Spanish), and looking for definitions that have intriguing double meanings or spellings that can be manipulated. As a non-Spanish speaker, the attempt to learn a new language through a list of definitions presented many limitations; however it is within the narrow confines of these limitations, and maybe because of them, that new understanding is created.

Fichter is interested in the fluidity of language in general as a tool of expression and visual language specifically. Spanglish is beyond a spoken language, beyond a hybrid of the English and Spanish languages — a visual language made up of words, images, signs and symbols.

"Everything is Illustrated III" and "Talking Wallpaper"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

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

Gallery A: Everything is Illustrated III, featuring work by Holly DePue, Beth Mand, and Kristen Tryon
Gallery B: Talking Wallpaper, featuring recent work by Miles George and Aaron Lee

Open Apple Steve. Memoriam: an aesthetic homage to Steve Jobs
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

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

Exhibit features works by local artists Vicki Harris, Matthew Keeney, Ellen Leahy, Paul Melnikow, and Kathryn Petrillo, plus works from artists in California, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Utah, Washington DC, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Philippines, and Portugal

Read a review!

Just One Word: Plastics
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

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

For more than a century, plastics have transformed our lives -- from bathroom to battlefield; from supermarket to spacecraft. Begun as a 19th-century replacement material for billiard balls and piano keys, plastics spurred 20th century developments in industry, transportation, medicine, entertainment, and other aspects of contemporary life. The original objects of "Just One Word: Plastics" represent a material history of the modern world.

This exhibition features a representative sample of the Plastics Collection at the Syracuse University Library and presents an overview of major trends in the development of plastics in everyday life. The exhibit focuses on personal and household objects rather than the use of plastics in industry where they are also widely used. Approximately 250 objects divided into 12 categories will be on view. In addition, a small selection of manuscripts and printed materials will be included.

Specific objects to be featured in the exhibition are:
* ornate celluloid combs and a wide variety of plastic toiletries
* phenolic (Bakelite) objects from the 1920s and 30s including jewelry, radios, and other appliances and games
* musical instruments
* post-war toys, dishes, and household items
* original patent books of John Wesley Hyatt, inventor of Celluloid
* product catalogues from the 1930s and 1950s for popular items such as DuPont French Ivory dresser sets, Boltaware molded "stoneware" dishes, and Tupperware, and
* the Pleur-evac, a revolutionary plastic medical device for draining fluid and maintaining pressure in the lungs that helped save the life of President Ronald Reagan.

The Plastics Collection was begun in 2007 as a joint project of the Syracuse University Library and the Plastics History & Artifacts Committee of the Plastics Pioneers Association. The Collection expanded dramatically when the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, MA, closed and transferred its artifacts, books, and manuscripts to Syracuse University's care in 2008.

Westcott Holiday Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Photos, paintings and prints by Steve Susman, Molly Susman, Jessica Breedlove and Kristina Starowitz.

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

Landmarks of New York
Onondaga Historical Association

Price: Free
Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Landmarks of New York is a traveling exhibit of 90 stunning black and white photographs of New York City buildings that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The exhibit is curated by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, New York City's first director of cultural affairs and acclaimed author of the book that serves as the basis for the exhibit, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Building. In conjunction with the show, Dennis Connors, OHA's Curator of History, selected over 20 contemporary and historic photographs to highlight Onondaga County's own architectural inheritance.

Six Sides of Japanese Package Design
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

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

The exhibition focuses on the way the design of the package relates to Japanese culture and consumerism.

Based on a collection of different Japanese products, "Six Sides of Japanese Package Design" is the result of a collaboration between undergraduate communications design students in the class Problem-Solving Strategies, taught by Roderick Martinez, and graduate museum studies students in the class Museum Studies Practicum, taught by Bradley Hudson. Divided into six groups, the students selected themes that each highlight a different dimension of package design in Japan. Each section of the gallery is a realization of the groups' respective themes in the form of a museum exhibition.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter The Warehouse via the ground-floor door, adjacent to the café on West Fayette Street or the first-floor door on West Washington Street.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Sources & Structures: The Art of Robert Stackhouse
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

This 25-year retrospective, organized by the SUArt Galleries, surveys the development of Robert Stackhouse as an artist. In addition to investigating the roots of his best-known imagery -- Viking ships, whales, snakes, and wood A-frame constructs -- this exhibition examines how he conceives of these designs through his drawings, watercolors, and prints. "Sources and Structures" considers how Stackhouse has made a personal examination of these natural and man-made forms and developed a body of work that explores affinities between architecture and biological anatomy.

Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World" examines how depictions of the railroad transformed our perception of the railroad industry. Whether the purpose of an artistic work was to entertain the viewer, to provide cultural commentary, or to call attention to the railroad's impact on the economic climate, each one inevitably had an effect on the way the audience viewed and understood the railroad in modern society.

In partnership with the Syracuse University Art Galleries and the Special Collections Research Center, the students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorship course in the Graduate Program in Museum Studies have worked together to thematically demonstrate visual testimonies to the railroad's reign over the industrialized world.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 regular, $8 students/seniors/military, members and children under 5 free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America" provides a focused look at an extraordinary photographer whose compelling images of the American road and its unexpected turns form powerful narrative vignettes. The exhibition will be the artist's first major survey assembled in the United States, exploring over 15 years of his career, and including an extensive new body of work.

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, Soth's reputation as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography has continued to grow. Though he has followed the itinerant path laid forth by photographers such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Soth's is a distinct perspective, one in which the wandering, searching, and the process of telling is as resonant as the record of these remarkable encounters. When considered together, Soth's pictures probe the individualities of people, objects, and places he encounters; offer insight to broader sociologies, and in the process form a collective portrait of an unexpected America.

Featuring approximately 100 photographs made between 1994 and the present, "From Here to There" will include rarely-seen early black-and-white images as well as examples from Soth's best-known series "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Niagara." Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be a broad range of portraits made over the past 15 years. The exhibition will also include a new body of work the artist has been developing since 2006, exploring places of escape in America and individuals who seek to flee civilization for a life off the grid. To add insight into Soth's process, the exhibition additionally features a Library space, which includes a reading area for publications, a selection of maquettes for book and 'zine projects, short video works, and ephemera gathered on the road.

Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape
Everson Museum of Art

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

Internationally renowned ceramic artist Margie Hughto presents her first site-specific museum installation entitled A Fired Landscape, a "clay painting" spanning 50 feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist's spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment. Overall, Setting Sun is a ceramic abstraction, but Hughto establishes a connection to the landscape that inspired it by adding impressions of natural objects such as native ferns, marine life and fossils, into the wet clay and then coating the surfaces with brilliant color. The rich palette of burnt oranges and fiery reds evoke the sun’s glowing light and radiating warmth. Tiny pieces of glass embedded in the clay prior to firing add sparkle to the glossy green and blue glazes used to suggest the artist's lily pond.

Deng Guo Yuan
The Warehouse Gallery

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

This exhibit will highlight ink brush paintings by Tianjin-based Chinese artist Deng Guo Yuan. His work reveals the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and a profound knowledge of modern and international contemporary aesthetics. The film "Deng Guo Yuan" (2010) by French filmmaker Pierre Creton, presented in the Gallery's vault, meticulously documents the creation of one of Deng Guo Yuan's ink paintings in his Tianjin studio. Widely exhibited in China and Europe, this will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The show originated at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Tianjin, China), and then traveled in modified form to the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), to the Provenance Center (New London, CT), and to its last venue, the Warehouse Gallery, for which Deng Guo Yuan will create additional site-specific works.

Sculpture Club Exhibition
XL Projects

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

A collaborative group show displaying a wide variety of work done by the undergraduate members of SU's Sculpture Club. With more than 20 artists being shown, the exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to see the vast array of artwork students have been creating in the sculptural field. The show is curated by Alex Svoboda and Sarah Whitehouse.

Daughters of Ixchel: The Photography of Mary Lawyer O'Connor
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

"Daughters of Ixchel" is a collection of images of Maya women and their hand-woven textiles that brings awareness and understanding of vibrant Maya cultures and the challenges they face. The exhibit will be a look into the lives of women weavers from Guatemala and Southern Mexico. Portrait and documentary photography along with text will tell their stories and will include original textiles. We will highlight fair-trade, worker-owned cooperatives and the political history of Guatemala where, despite persecution and genocide, Maya weavers maintain traditional methods, patterns, colors and styles that flourish and evolve.

Mary Lawyer O'Connor lives in Pompey and is a founder and current head of the Montessori School of Syracuse.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

Spanglish: Drawing, Collage, Photography and Video
Point of Contact Gallery

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

Spanglish is a project made specifically for the Point of Contact Gallery by New York City artist Celeste Fichter, based on Point of Contact's work in the verbal and the visual arts, and its ties to the Latin American literary and visual arts. Comprised of drawing, collage, photography and video, Spanglish is based solely on the artist's understanding and misunderstanding of the Spanish language.

For several months Fichter studied the Spanish/English dictionary page by page, definition by definition in alphabetical order, pronouncing each word aloud in search of words that sound like other words (in either English or Spanish), and looking for definitions that have intriguing double meanings or spellings that can be manipulated. As a non-Spanish speaker, the attempt to learn a new language through a list of definitions presented many limitations; however it is within the narrow confines of these limitations, and maybe because of them, that new understanding is created.

Fichter is interested in the fluidity of language in general as a tool of expression and visual language specifically. Spanglish is beyond a spoken language, beyond a hybrid of the English and Spanish languages — a visual language made up of words, images, signs and symbols.

"Everything is Illustrated III" and "Talking Wallpaper"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

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

Gallery A: Everything is Illustrated III, featuring work by Holly DePue, Beth Mand, and Kristen Tryon
Gallery B: Talking Wallpaper, featuring recent work by Miles George and Aaron Lee

Open Apple Steve. Memoriam: an aesthetic homage to Steve Jobs
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

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

Exhibit features works by local artists Vicki Harris, Matthew Keeney, Ellen Leahy, Paul Melnikow, and Kathryn Petrillo, plus works from artists in California, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Utah, Washington DC, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Philippines, and Portugal

Read a review!

Just One Word: Plastics
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

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

For more than a century, plastics have transformed our lives -- from bathroom to battlefield; from supermarket to spacecraft. Begun as a 19th-century replacement material for billiard balls and piano keys, plastics spurred 20th century developments in industry, transportation, medicine, entertainment, and other aspects of contemporary life. The original objects of "Just One Word: Plastics" represent a material history of the modern world.

This exhibition features a representative sample of the Plastics Collection at the Syracuse University Library and presents an overview of major trends in the development of plastics in everyday life. The exhibit focuses on personal and household objects rather than the use of plastics in industry where they are also widely used. Approximately 250 objects divided into 12 categories will be on view. In addition, a small selection of manuscripts and printed materials will be included.

Specific objects to be featured in the exhibition are:
* ornate celluloid combs and a wide variety of plastic toiletries
* phenolic (Bakelite) objects from the 1920s and 30s including jewelry, radios, and other appliances and games
* musical instruments
* post-war toys, dishes, and household items
* original patent books of John Wesley Hyatt, inventor of Celluloid
* product catalogues from the 1930s and 1950s for popular items such as DuPont French Ivory dresser sets, Boltaware molded "stoneware" dishes, and Tupperware, and
* the Pleur-evac, a revolutionary plastic medical device for draining fluid and maintaining pressure in the lungs that helped save the life of President Ronald Reagan.

The Plastics Collection was begun in 2007 as a joint project of the Syracuse University Library and the Plastics History & Artifacts Committee of the Plastics Pioneers Association. The Collection expanded dramatically when the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, MA, closed and transferred its artifacts, books, and manuscripts to Syracuse University's care in 2008.

Westcott Holiday Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Photos, paintings and prints by Steve Susman, Molly Susman, Jessica Breedlove and Kristina Starowitz.

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

Landmarks of New York
Onondaga Historical Association

Price: Free
Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Landmarks of New York is a traveling exhibit of 90 stunning black and white photographs of New York City buildings that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The exhibit is curated by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, New York City's first director of cultural affairs and acclaimed author of the book that serves as the basis for the exhibit, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Building. In conjunction with the show, Dennis Connors, OHA's Curator of History, selected over 20 contemporary and historic photographs to highlight Onondaga County's own architectural inheritance.

Six Sides of Japanese Package Design
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

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

The exhibition focuses on the way the design of the package relates to Japanese culture and consumerism.

Based on a collection of different Japanese products, "Six Sides of Japanese Package Design" is the result of a collaboration between undergraduate communications design students in the class Problem-Solving Strategies, taught by Roderick Martinez, and graduate museum studies students in the class Museum Studies Practicum, taught by Bradley Hudson. Divided into six groups, the students selected themes that each highlight a different dimension of package design in Japan. Each section of the gallery is a realization of the groups' respective themes in the form of a museum exhibition.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter The Warehouse via the ground-floor door, adjacent to the café on West Fayette Street or the first-floor door on West Washington Street.

Holiday Show 2011
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

The Holiday Show features jewelry, ceramics, photography, painting, and fiber art created by regionally and nationally recognized artists. Participating artists include Dana Stenson (Syracuse), Jen Gandee (Fabius), Jeanann Wieners (Syracuse), Elisabeth Groat (Syracuse), Sarah Saulson (Syracuse), Lucie Wellner (Pompey), and Errol Willett (Fabius).

The Holiday Group Show emphasizes the important role that handmade objects and fine art plays in domestic life, enriching living spaces and adorning the body.

Sources & Structures: The Art of Robert Stackhouse
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

This 25-year retrospective, organized by the SUArt Galleries, surveys the development of Robert Stackhouse as an artist. In addition to investigating the roots of his best-known imagery -- Viking ships, whales, snakes, and wood A-frame constructs -- this exhibition examines how he conceives of these designs through his drawings, watercolors, and prints. "Sources and Structures" considers how Stackhouse has made a personal examination of these natural and man-made forms and developed a body of work that explores affinities between architecture and biological anatomy.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World" examines how depictions of the railroad transformed our perception of the railroad industry. Whether the purpose of an artistic work was to entertain the viewer, to provide cultural commentary, or to call attention to the railroad's impact on the economic climate, each one inevitably had an effect on the way the audience viewed and understood the railroad in modern society.

In partnership with the Syracuse University Art Galleries and the Special Collections Research Center, the students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorship course in the Graduate Program in Museum Studies have worked together to thematically demonstrate visual testimonies to the railroad's reign over the industrialized world.

Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape
Everson Museum of Art

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

Internationally renowned ceramic artist Margie Hughto presents her first site-specific museum installation entitled A Fired Landscape, a "clay painting" spanning 50 feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist's spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment. Overall, Setting Sun is a ceramic abstraction, but Hughto establishes a connection to the landscape that inspired it by adding impressions of natural objects such as native ferns, marine life and fossils, into the wet clay and then coating the surfaces with brilliant color. The rich palette of burnt oranges and fiery reds evoke the sun’s glowing light and radiating warmth. Tiny pieces of glass embedded in the clay prior to firing add sparkle to the glossy green and blue glazes used to suggest the artist's lily pond.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 regular, $8 students/seniors/military, members and children under 5 free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America" provides a focused look at an extraordinary photographer whose compelling images of the American road and its unexpected turns form powerful narrative vignettes. The exhibition will be the artist's first major survey assembled in the United States, exploring over 15 years of his career, and including an extensive new body of work.

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, Soth's reputation as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography has continued to grow. Though he has followed the itinerant path laid forth by photographers such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Soth's is a distinct perspective, one in which the wandering, searching, and the process of telling is as resonant as the record of these remarkable encounters. When considered together, Soth's pictures probe the individualities of people, objects, and places he encounters; offer insight to broader sociologies, and in the process form a collective portrait of an unexpected America.

Featuring approximately 100 photographs made between 1994 and the present, "From Here to There" will include rarely-seen early black-and-white images as well as examples from Soth's best-known series "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Niagara." Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be a broad range of portraits made over the past 15 years. The exhibition will also include a new body of work the artist has been developing since 2006, exploring places of escape in America and individuals who seek to flee civilization for a life off the grid. To add insight into Soth's process, the exhibition additionally features a Library space, which includes a reading area for publications, a selection of maquettes for book and 'zine projects, short video works, and ephemera gathered on the road.

Deng Guo Yuan
The Warehouse Gallery

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

This exhibit will highlight ink brush paintings by Tianjin-based Chinese artist Deng Guo Yuan. His work reveals the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and a profound knowledge of modern and international contemporary aesthetics. The film "Deng Guo Yuan" (2010) by French filmmaker Pierre Creton, presented in the Gallery's vault, meticulously documents the creation of one of Deng Guo Yuan's ink paintings in his Tianjin studio. Widely exhibited in China and Europe, this will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The show originated at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Tianjin, China), and then traveled in modified form to the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), to the Provenance Center (New London, CT), and to its last venue, the Warehouse Gallery, for which Deng Guo Yuan will create additional site-specific works.

Sculpture Club Exhibition
XL Projects

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

A collaborative group show displaying a wide variety of work done by the undergraduate members of SU's Sculpture Club. With more than 20 artists being shown, the exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to see the vast array of artwork students have been creating in the sculptural field. The show is curated by Alex Svoboda and Sarah Whitehouse.

Daughters of Ixchel: The Photography of Mary Lawyer O'Connor
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

"Daughters of Ixchel" is a collection of images of Maya women and their hand-woven textiles that brings awareness and understanding of vibrant Maya cultures and the challenges they face. The exhibit will be a look into the lives of women weavers from Guatemala and Southern Mexico. Portrait and documentary photography along with text will tell their stories and will include original textiles. We will highlight fair-trade, worker-owned cooperatives and the political history of Guatemala where, despite persecution and genocide, Maya weavers maintain traditional methods, patterns, colors and styles that flourish and evolve.

Mary Lawyer O'Connor lives in Pompey and is a founder and current head of the Montessori School of Syracuse.

John Knecht: Deluge and Anima
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Deluge (2010) hand-drawn looping animation
Anima (2011) hand-drawn looping animation

Artist Statement:
Things have been falling in my videos for decades. It was at first formal. Falling things filled the frame and made a complicated cinematic space. The things falling -- wishbones, test tubes, martini glasses, plastic strawberries that looked like a human heart, cement blocks and infected molars -- increasingly became an atmosphere, functioning both as a formal device and a metaphorical space.

There is a drawing in the collection of the Queen, hanging in Buckingham Palace, by Leonardo daVinci which depicts a deluge of raining everyday objects: rakes, funnels, lamps and general debris. The title of the drawing is "A Cloudburst of Material Things." It is graphite on paper and credited to daVinci. It is dated 1500. The drawing is torn in half so only a part of the drawing remains. I have struggled to find out more about the piece and there is virtually nothing written about it, but I am haunted by it. "Deluge" is directly informed by the overwhelmed totality of daVinci's image. What was he thinking?

Pirates of the Yuletide
Acme Mystery Company

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

Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum! Avast ye, maties! It be Christmas time in the year 1757 in Merry Olde England. The scuttlebutt is that all the famous pirates of the day be gathering down by the docks at London's infamous Finch and Pickle Tavern. 'Tis true, me hardies, and they be cooking up the most dastardly deed of all time. Come the tide, they be sailing to the North Pole to kidnap old Saint Nick himself! Hold on to your parrot, bucco. This meeting could get rowdy!

Friday, January 6, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

Spanglish: Drawing, Collage, Photography and Video
Point of Contact Gallery

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

Spanglish is a project made specifically for the Point of Contact Gallery by New York City artist Celeste Fichter, based on Point of Contact's work in the verbal and the visual arts, and its ties to the Latin American literary and visual arts. Comprised of drawing, collage, photography and video, Spanglish is based solely on the artist's understanding and misunderstanding of the Spanish language.

For several months Fichter studied the Spanish/English dictionary page by page, definition by definition in alphabetical order, pronouncing each word aloud in search of words that sound like other words (in either English or Spanish), and looking for definitions that have intriguing double meanings or spellings that can be manipulated. As a non-Spanish speaker, the attempt to learn a new language through a list of definitions presented many limitations; however it is within the narrow confines of these limitations, and maybe because of them, that new understanding is created.

Fichter is interested in the fluidity of language in general as a tool of expression and visual language specifically. Spanglish is beyond a spoken language, beyond a hybrid of the English and Spanish languages — a visual language made up of words, images, signs and symbols.

"Everything is Illustrated III" and "Talking Wallpaper"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

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

Gallery A: Everything is Illustrated III, featuring work by Holly DePue, Beth Mand, and Kristen Tryon
Gallery B: Talking Wallpaper, featuring recent work by Miles George and Aaron Lee

Open Apple Steve. Memoriam: an aesthetic homage to Steve Jobs
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

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

Exhibit features works by local artists Vicki Harris, Matthew Keeney, Ellen Leahy, Paul Melnikow, and Kathryn Petrillo, plus works from artists in California, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Utah, Washington DC, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Philippines, and Portugal

Read a review!

Just One Word: Plastics
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

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

For more than a century, plastics have transformed our lives -- from bathroom to battlefield; from supermarket to spacecraft. Begun as a 19th-century replacement material for billiard balls and piano keys, plastics spurred 20th century developments in industry, transportation, medicine, entertainment, and other aspects of contemporary life. The original objects of "Just One Word: Plastics" represent a material history of the modern world.

This exhibition features a representative sample of the Plastics Collection at the Syracuse University Library and presents an overview of major trends in the development of plastics in everyday life. The exhibit focuses on personal and household objects rather than the use of plastics in industry where they are also widely used. Approximately 250 objects divided into 12 categories will be on view. In addition, a small selection of manuscripts and printed materials will be included.

Specific objects to be featured in the exhibition are:
* ornate celluloid combs and a wide variety of plastic toiletries
* phenolic (Bakelite) objects from the 1920s and 30s including jewelry, radios, and other appliances and games
* musical instruments
* post-war toys, dishes, and household items
* original patent books of John Wesley Hyatt, inventor of Celluloid
* product catalogues from the 1930s and 1950s for popular items such as DuPont French Ivory dresser sets, Boltaware molded "stoneware" dishes, and Tupperware, and
* the Pleur-evac, a revolutionary plastic medical device for draining fluid and maintaining pressure in the lungs that helped save the life of President Ronald Reagan.

The Plastics Collection was begun in 2007 as a joint project of the Syracuse University Library and the Plastics History & Artifacts Committee of the Plastics Pioneers Association. The Collection expanded dramatically when the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, MA, closed and transferred its artifacts, books, and manuscripts to Syracuse University's care in 2008.

Westcott Holiday Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

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

Photos, paintings and prints by Steve Susman, Molly Susman, Jessica Breedlove and Kristina Starowitz.

Opening: CNY Visions
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

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

Unique views of the Central New York area through the lenses of Herm Card, Richard Emory, Larry Hoyt, and Bill Sullivan. Also showcasing the artglass of Phil Austin and jewelry of Esperanza Tielbaard.

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

Landmarks of New York
Onondaga Historical Association

Price: Free
Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Landmarks of New York is a traveling exhibit of 90 stunning black and white photographs of New York City buildings that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The exhibit is curated by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, New York City's first director of cultural affairs and acclaimed author of the book that serves as the basis for the exhibit, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Building. In conjunction with the show, Dennis Connors, OHA's Curator of History, selected over 20 contemporary and historic photographs to highlight Onondaga County's own architectural inheritance.

Six Sides of Japanese Package Design
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

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

The exhibition focuses on the way the design of the package relates to Japanese culture and consumerism.

Based on a collection of different Japanese products, "Six Sides of Japanese Package Design" is the result of a collaboration between undergraduate communications design students in the class Problem-Solving Strategies, taught by Roderick Martinez, and graduate museum studies students in the class Museum Studies Practicum, taught by Bradley Hudson. Divided into six groups, the students selected themes that each highlight a different dimension of package design in Japan. Each section of the gallery is a realization of the groups' respective themes in the form of a museum exhibition.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter The Warehouse via the ground-floor door, adjacent to the café on West Fayette Street or the first-floor door on West Washington Street.

Holiday Show 2011
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

The Holiday Show features jewelry, ceramics, photography, painting, and fiber art created by regionally and nationally recognized artists. Participating artists include Dana Stenson (Syracuse), Jen Gandee (Fabius), Jeanann Wieners (Syracuse), Elisabeth Groat (Syracuse), Sarah Saulson (Syracuse), Lucie Wellner (Pompey), and Errol Willett (Fabius).

The Holiday Group Show emphasizes the important role that handmade objects and fine art plays in domestic life, enriching living spaces and adorning the body.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Sources & Structures: The Art of Robert Stackhouse
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

This 25-year retrospective, organized by the SUArt Galleries, surveys the development of Robert Stackhouse as an artist. In addition to investigating the roots of his best-known imagery -- Viking ships, whales, snakes, and wood A-frame constructs -- this exhibition examines how he conceives of these designs through his drawings, watercolors, and prints. "Sources and Structures" considers how Stackhouse has made a personal examination of these natural and man-made forms and developed a body of work that explores affinities between architecture and biological anatomy.

Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World" examines how depictions of the railroad transformed our perception of the railroad industry. Whether the purpose of an artistic work was to entertain the viewer, to provide cultural commentary, or to call attention to the railroad's impact on the economic climate, each one inevitably had an effect on the way the audience viewed and understood the railroad in modern society.

In partnership with the Syracuse University Art Galleries and the Special Collections Research Center, the students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorship course in the Graduate Program in Museum Studies have worked together to thematically demonstrate visual testimonies to the railroad's reign over the industrialized world.

Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape
Everson Museum of Art

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

Internationally renowned ceramic artist Margie Hughto presents her first site-specific museum installation entitled A Fired Landscape, a "clay painting" spanning 50 feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist's spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment. Overall, Setting Sun is a ceramic abstraction, but Hughto establishes a connection to the landscape that inspired it by adding impressions of natural objects such as native ferns, marine life and fossils, into the wet clay and then coating the surfaces with brilliant color. The rich palette of burnt oranges and fiery reds evoke the sun’s glowing light and radiating warmth. Tiny pieces of glass embedded in the clay prior to firing add sparkle to the glossy green and blue glazes used to suggest the artist's lily pond.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 regular, $8 students/seniors/military, members and children under 5 free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America" provides a focused look at an extraordinary photographer whose compelling images of the American road and its unexpected turns form powerful narrative vignettes. The exhibition will be the artist's first major survey assembled in the United States, exploring over 15 years of his career, and including an extensive new body of work.

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, Soth's reputation as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography has continued to grow. Though he has followed the itinerant path laid forth by photographers such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Soth's is a distinct perspective, one in which the wandering, searching, and the process of telling is as resonant as the record of these remarkable encounters. When considered together, Soth's pictures probe the individualities of people, objects, and places he encounters; offer insight to broader sociologies, and in the process form a collective portrait of an unexpected America.

Featuring approximately 100 photographs made between 1994 and the present, "From Here to There" will include rarely-seen early black-and-white images as well as examples from Soth's best-known series "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Niagara." Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be a broad range of portraits made over the past 15 years. The exhibition will also include a new body of work the artist has been developing since 2006, exploring places of escape in America and individuals who seek to flee civilization for a life off the grid. To add insight into Soth's process, the exhibition additionally features a Library space, which includes a reading area for publications, a selection of maquettes for book and 'zine projects, short video works, and ephemera gathered on the road.

Deng Guo Yuan
The Warehouse Gallery

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

This exhibit will highlight ink brush paintings by Tianjin-based Chinese artist Deng Guo Yuan. His work reveals the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and a profound knowledge of modern and international contemporary aesthetics. The film "Deng Guo Yuan" (2010) by French filmmaker Pierre Creton, presented in the Gallery's vault, meticulously documents the creation of one of Deng Guo Yuan's ink paintings in his Tianjin studio. Widely exhibited in China and Europe, this will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The show originated at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Tianjin, China), and then traveled in modified form to the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), to the Provenance Center (New London, CT), and to its last venue, the Warehouse Gallery, for which Deng Guo Yuan will create additional site-specific works.

Sculpture Club Exhibition
XL Projects

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

A collaborative group show displaying a wide variety of work done by the undergraduate members of SU's Sculpture Club. With more than 20 artists being shown, the exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to see the vast array of artwork students have been creating in the sculptural field. The show is curated by Alex Svoboda and Sarah Whitehouse.

Daughters of Ixchel: The Photography of Mary Lawyer O'Connor
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

"Daughters of Ixchel" is a collection of images of Maya women and their hand-woven textiles that brings awareness and understanding of vibrant Maya cultures and the challenges they face. The exhibit will be a look into the lives of women weavers from Guatemala and Southern Mexico. Portrait and documentary photography along with text will tell their stories and will include original textiles. We will highlight fair-trade, worker-owned cooperatives and the political history of Guatemala where, despite persecution and genocide, Maya weavers maintain traditional methods, patterns, colors and styles that flourish and evolve.

Mary Lawyer O'Connor lives in Pompey and is a founder and current head of the Montessori School of Syracuse.

John Knecht: Deluge and Anima
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Deluge (2010) hand-drawn looping animation
Anima (2011) hand-drawn looping animation

Artist Statement:
Things have been falling in my videos for decades. It was at first formal. Falling things filled the frame and made a complicated cinematic space. The things falling -- wishbones, test tubes, martini glasses, plastic strawberries that looked like a human heart, cement blocks and infected molars -- increasingly became an atmosphere, functioning both as a formal device and a metaphorical space.

There is a drawing in the collection of the Queen, hanging in Buckingham Palace, by Leonardo daVinci which depicts a deluge of raining everyday objects: rakes, funnels, lamps and general debris. The title of the drawing is "A Cloudburst of Material Things." It is graphite on paper and credited to daVinci. It is dated 1500. The drawing is torn in half so only a part of the drawing remains. I have struggled to find out more about the piece and there is virtually nothing written about it, but I am haunted by it. "Deluge" is directly informed by the overwhelmed totality of daVinci's image. What was he thinking?

Red House Live Comedy Improv
Redhouse

Price: $10 regular, $5 members
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

This high-energy comedy show features actors performing scenes and games based on audience suggestion and participation. Second City veterans Tim Mahar and Laura Austin have headed the troupe since its inception in 2007. Red House is proud to welcome two new permanent troupe members, Marguerite Mitchell-Sundberg and Stephfond Brunson. In addition to these seasoned professionals, Red House Live will continue to host guest performers.

Jazz@Sitrus
CNY Jazz Arts Foundation
Featuring Michael Houston & Anjela Lynn

Sitrus on the Hill
Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel, Syracuse

Atwater and Donnelly
Folkus Project

Price: $15
May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

The highly praised husband-wife duo, Atwater-Donnelly, blends gorgeous vocals with an astonishing array of instruments including the mountain dulcimer, old-time banjo, tin whistle, guitar, limberjack, mandolin, harmonica, and feet. For more than 25 years, Aubrey Atwater and Elwood Donnelly have been performing their unique blend of traditional American and Celtic folk music and dance, along with their original songs and poetry. Their delightful concerts include old-time gospel songs, a capella pieces, and dance tunes featuring Appalachian clog dancing, French Canadian footwork, and tap dancing. The cultural history of the songs is interwoven into their performances, helping to create a deeper understanding of the music. With a relaxed stage presence and a lively sense of humor, they easily connect with their audiences.

Mickey Hart Band
Westcott Theater

Price: $35
Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

An evening with the Grateful Dead drummer.

Bedroom Farce
CNY Playhouse
Pat Catchouny, director

Price: Dinner theater: $29 single; $55 couple. Show only: $20 (limited availability)
Fire and Ice Banquet Hall, The Locker Room
528 Hiawatha Blvd., Syracuse

Dinner at 6:45 pm, followed by show at 8:00 pm.

Three bedrooms, four couples, and a bunch of problems!

Our tradition of laughter in the winter continues. This farce by Alyn Ayckbourn will warm your hearts and chase away the Syracuse winter. Trevor and Susannah, whose marriage is on the rocks, inflict their miseries on their nearest and dearest -- three couples whose own relationships are tenuous at best. Taking place sequentially in the three beleaguered couples' bedrooms during one endless Saturday night of co-dependence and dysfunction, beds, tempers and domestic order are ruffled, leading all the players to a hilariously touching epiphany.

Read a Review!

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Windows Project: Elisabeth Meyer: Black Night/White Night
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The Window Project features an installation by Elisabeth Meyer consisting of organic forms embroidered onto an organza fabric. The overall patterning evokes an association with ocean waves and a net. The transparent quality of the organza background allows the viewer to see through the piece that is hanging from the ceiling covering the entire window front. The work addresses the issue of displacement through traveling. Meyer, who is based in Ithaca, developed the concept for this exhibition while at a residency in Iceland, traveled to India to oversee the production of the embroidery, and created the work on site in Syracuse.

"Everything is Illustrated III" and "Talking Wallpaper"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

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

Gallery A: Everything is Illustrated III, featuring work by Holly DePue, Beth Mand, and Kristen Tryon
Gallery B: Talking Wallpaper, featuring recent work by Miles George and Aaron Lee

"Off the Wall" Holiday Art Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

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

CNY Visions
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Unique views of the Central New York area through the lenses of Herm Card, Richard Emory, Larry Hoyt, and Bill Sullivan. Also showcasing the artglass of Phil Austin and jewelry of Esperanza Tielbaard.

26th Annual Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular, $4 seniors, $2 children, members free
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

The museums transforms into a festive 1800s street scene with more than 40 gingerbread creations in storefront windows.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 regular, $8 students/seniors/military, members and children under 5 free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From Here to There: Alec Soth's America" provides a focused look at an extraordinary photographer whose compelling images of the American road and its unexpected turns form powerful narrative vignettes. The exhibition will be the artist's first major survey assembled in the United States, exploring over 15 years of his career, and including an extensive new body of work.

Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo biennials, Soth's reputation as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography has continued to grow. Though he has followed the itinerant path laid forth by photographers such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Soth's is a distinct perspective, one in which the wandering, searching, and the process of telling is as resonant as the record of these remarkable encounters. When considered together, Soth's pictures probe the individualities of people, objects, and places he encounters; offer insight to broader sociologies, and in the process form a collective portrait of an unexpected America.

Featuring approximately 100 photographs made between 1994 and the present, "From Here to There" will include rarely-seen early black-and-white images as well as examples from Soth's best-known series "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and "Niagara." Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be a broad range of portraits made over the past 15 years. The exhibition will also include a new body of work the artist has been developing since 2006, exploring places of escape in America and individuals who seek to flee civilization for a life off the grid. To add insight into Soth's process, the exhibition additionally features a Library space, which includes a reading area for publications, a selection of maquettes for book and 'zine projects, short video works, and ephemera gathered on the road.

Margie Hughto: A Fired Landscape
Everson Museum of Art

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

Internationally renowned ceramic artist Margie Hughto presents her first site-specific museum installation entitled A Fired Landscape, a "clay painting" spanning 50 feet of gallery wall space. Inspired by the artist's spectacular backyard gardens and natural landscape just steps from her studio, The Fired Landscape installation consists of Setting Sun, a brilliantly colored ceramic wall relief displayed continuously on five angled walls. The visitor encounter is reminiscent of what one experiences when surrounded by the natural environment. Overall, Setting Sun is a ceramic abstraction, but Hughto establishes a connection to the landscape that inspired it by adding impressions of natural objects such as native ferns, marine life and fossils, into the wet clay and then coating the surfaces with brilliant color. The rich palette of burnt oranges and fiery reds evoke the sun’s glowing light and radiating warmth. Tiny pieces of glass embedded in the clay prior to firing add sparkle to the glossy green and blue glazes used to suggest the artist's lily pond.

Holiday Show 2011
Gandee Gallery

Gandee Gallery
7846 Main St., Fabius

The Holiday Show features jewelry, ceramics, photography, painting, and fiber art created by regionally and nationally recognized artists. Participating artists include Dana Stenson (Syracuse), Jen Gandee (Fabius), Jeanann Wieners (Syracuse), Elisabeth Groat (Syracuse), Sarah Saulson (Syracuse), Lucie Wellner (Pompey), and Errol Willett (Fabius).

The Holiday Group Show emphasizes the important role that handmade objects and fine art plays in domestic life, enriching living spaces and adorning the body.

Landmarks of New York
Onondaga Historical Association

Price: Free
Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Landmarks of New York is a traveling exhibit of 90 stunning black and white photographs of New York City buildings that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The exhibit is curated by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, New York City's first director of cultural affairs and acclaimed author of the book that serves as the basis for the exhibit, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Building. In conjunction with the show, Dennis Connors, OHA's Curator of History, selected over 20 contemporary and historic photographs to highlight Onondaga County's own architectural inheritance.

Sources & Structures: The Art of Robert Stackhouse
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

This 25-year retrospective, organized by the SUArt Galleries, surveys the development of Robert Stackhouse as an artist. In addition to investigating the roots of his best-known imagery -- Viking ships, whales, snakes, and wood A-frame constructs -- this exhibition examines how he conceives of these designs through his drawings, watercolors, and prints. "Sources and Structures" considers how Stackhouse has made a personal examination of these natural and man-made forms and developed a body of work that explores affinities between architecture and biological anatomy.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Engineered Perspectives: Railroad Culture in the Modern World" examines how depictions of the railroad transformed our perception of the railroad industry. Whether the purpose of an artistic work was to entertain the viewer, to provide cultural commentary, or to call attention to the railroad's impact on the economic climate, each one inevitably had an effect on the way the audience viewed and understood the railroad in modern society.

In partnership with the Syracuse University Art Galleries and the Special Collections Research Center, the students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorship course in the Graduate Program in Museum Studies have worked together to thematically demonstrate visual testimonies to the railroad's reign over the industrialized world.

Daughters of Ixchel: The Photography of Mary Lawyer O'Connor
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

"Daughters of Ixchel" is a collection of images of Maya women and their hand-woven textiles that brings awareness and understanding of vibrant Maya cultures and the challenges they face. The exhibit will be a look into the lives of women weavers from Guatemala and Southern Mexico. Portrait and documentary photography along with text will tell their stories and will include original textiles. We will highlight fair-trade, worker-owned cooperatives and the political history of Guatemala where, despite persecution and genocide, Maya weavers maintain traditional methods, patterns, colors and styles that flourish and evolve.

Mary Lawyer O'Connor lives in Pompey and is a founder and current head of the Montessori School of Syracuse.

Deng Guo Yuan
The Warehouse Gallery

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

This exhibit will highlight ink brush paintings by Tianjin-based Chinese artist Deng Guo Yuan. His work reveals the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and a profound knowledge of modern and international contemporary aesthetics. The film "Deng Guo Yuan" (2010) by French filmmaker Pierre Creton, presented in the Gallery's vault, meticulously documents the creation of one of Deng Guo Yuan's ink paintings in his Tianjin studio. Widely exhibited in China and Europe, this will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The show originated at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Tianjin, China), and then traveled in modified form to the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), to the Provenance Center (New London, CT), and to its last venue, the Warehouse Gallery, for which Deng Guo Yuan will create additional site-specific works.

Sculpture Club Exhibition
XL Projects

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

A collaborative group show displaying a wide variety of work done by the undergraduate members of SU's Sculpture Club. With more than 20 artists being shown, the exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to see the vast array of artwork students have been creating in the sculptural field. The show is curated by Alex Svoboda and Sarah Whitehouse.

John Knecht: Deluge and Anima
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Deluge (2010) hand-drawn looping animation
Anima (2011) hand-drawn looping animation

Artist Statement:
Things have been falling in my videos for decades. It was at first formal. Falling things filled the frame and made a complicated cinematic space. The things falling -- wishbones, test tubes, martini glasses, plastic strawberries that looked like a human heart, cement blocks and infected molars -- increasingly became an atmosphere, functioning both as a formal device and a metaphorical space.

There is a drawing in the collection of the Queen, hanging in Buckingham Palace, by Leonardo daVinci which depicts a deluge of raining everyday objects: rakes, funnels, lamps and general debris. The title of the drawing is "A Cloudburst of Material Things." It is graphite on paper and credited to daVinci. It is dated 1500. The drawing is torn in half so only a part of the drawing remains. I have struggled to find out more about the piece and there is virtually nothing written about it, but I am haunted by it. "Deluge" is directly informed by the overwhelmed totality of daVinci's image. What was he thinking?

Bluegrass Ramble 39th Anniversary Radio Barndance
Featuring John Cadley, Tired Hands String Band, Diamond Someday

Price: Free
WCNY
415 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

John Cadley is a SAMMY winner; Diamond Someday does a monthly quarter-hour radio show for the Ramble; Tired Hands plays the old-time pre-bluegrass acoustic country music of the '20s and '30s. Bring the whole family.

For more information, email Bill Knowlton at udmacon1@hotmail.com.

The Big Break! Finale
Westcott Theater

Price: $10
Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Featuring finalists Steep, Amerikan Primitive, Pregnant Babys, All The Kings Horses, Redfield

The Secret of the Puppet's Book
Open Hand Theater

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

Lewis, a most amazing puppet, finds some wonderful surprises in the books he is learning to read: a magical wizard, a rhinoceros and a giraffe, a break-dancing puppet who becomes his friend. Open Hand Theater's fanciful puppets pair with the music of Bill Harley in a magical journey through books for young audiences who are learning to read.

Little Red Riding Hood
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

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

In this interactive version, the children in the audience are invited to come dressed up as fairytale characters, and become the witnesses, jury, and judge at the wolf's trial (for trying to trick Little Red and her Grandmother).

For reservations, phone 315-449-3823.

Bedroom Farce
CNY Playhouse
Pat Catchouny, director

Price: Dinner theater: $29 single; $55 couple. Show only: $20 (limited availability)
Fire and Ice Banquet Hall, The Locker Room
528 Hiawatha Blvd., Syracuse

Dinner at 6:45 pm, followed by show at 8:00 pm.

Three bedrooms, four couples, and a bunch of problems!

Our tradition of laughter in the winter continues. This farce by Alyn Ayckbourn will warm your hearts and chase away the Syracuse winter. Trevor and Susannah, whose marriage is on the rocks, inflict their miseries on their nearest and dearest -- three couples whose own relationships are tenuous at best. Taking place sequentially in the three beleaguered couples' bedrooms during one endless Saturday night of co-dependence and dysfunction, beds, tempers and domestic order are ruffled, leading all the players to a hilariously touching epiphany.

Read a Review!