Featured Artists
GEMMA KAHNG
Gemma Kahng is the Founder of the Beekman Arts Club and a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. Best known for her work as a fashion designer, Gemma has dressed numerous celebrities including Madonna, Pink, Julia Roberts, and Sharon Stone. Today, Gemma brings her unique talent to the canvas where her most recent work centers around paintings of bold and bright birds and the astonishing beauty found in different species. Gemma's paintings are reminiscent of her glamourous clothing with mysticism, dynamism, and a natural progression towards nature.
REBECCA AMBROSINI
Rebecca Ambrosini lives and works in Beacon, NY. She attended the School of Visual Arts and Dutchess Community College where she received her associates in Fine Arts. Ambrosini works primarily with acrylic at a large scale, blending realism and abstraction in landscapes inspired by her cross-country travels.
NADÉNE GREY
Nadéne Grey is an artist based in Newburgh, NY. She received her BFA from the California College of Arts and her MFA from the New York Academy of Arts. She has shown her work in several group and solo exhibitions, including at the Holden Arts Center, the Holland Tunnel Newburgh Gallery, and the TNC Gallery NYC. Nadéne's paintings envision a world where the human inner landscape and the beauty of the observed world intertwine. Her art-making process has been a foundational tool for mental health, allowing her to explore her mind and find beauty, spontaneity, and awe, as well as to transverse between the light and dark of our emotional landscapes, exploring trauma and pivotal personal experiences.
ERIC HADO
Eric Hado is an artist and technician in New York’s Hudson Valley. Inspired by nature and the world around him, much of his work includes found driftwood from the Hudson River. He incorporates repurposed metals using blacksmith and metal working techniques. Viewers will notice repurposed welding rods converted to flowing curves, pulsing moiré circles, the occasional bird feather, and 150-year-old landscaping iron throughout his work. Eric’s practice is ever evolving as he seeks new techniques and materials inspired by nature and the world around him.
CYNTHIA KARALLA
Cynthia Karalla works with the camera and also mixed media. She returned to the camera while working with Andres Serrano. The project she is presenting is her Morning series. Photographed in the graven of the Sassi di Matera, Italy, are her Poppies. She would wake at 3am to catch the light falling over the mountain, a light that is rarely seen, because the world is still sleeping. Karalla's work is in MOMA, NYC, / Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC / Yokohama Museum, Tokyo, Japan / New York Public Library, NYC / Daniel Katz, London, U.K. / Omer Koc Holding, Istanbul, Turkey / Jasmine Kassulke, Australia / Edward R. Downe Jr, NYC / Esra Ekmekci, Istanbul, Turkey / Kenji Suzuki, Japan / Verena Johann-vor-der-Brüggen, Germany / Marcus Kiefer, Germany / Nils Halberg, Norway / Ronnette Riley, NYC / Jeff Carey, NYC. to name a few.
PAULIEN LETHEN
Paulien Lethen is a Hudson Valley based artist originally from the Netherlands. She studied monumental art at the Arnhem Academy of Arts and worked as an art teacher in Holland. After graduating, Paulien lived on both the Greek island of Paros for over a decade and also spent long stretches of time in Kyoto, Japan. Each location inspired a new iteration of her work.
She moved to New York City in 1982 , where she made her way in the burgeoning Brooklyn art scene. In 1997, Paulien started her own arts space, the Holland Tunnel Gallery, in the garden shed of her Williamsburg apartment. The gallery has since moved to an 1890 industrial building located in Newburgh, NY.
Paulien works in a variety of mediums, including assemblages of found objects and paintings.
ERIKA MAHR
Erika Mahr’s studio practice explores drawing with an expanded sensibility, incorporating traditional notions of drawing, sculpture, painting, and sound. The act of mediation, reducing, and repeating are used to locate where the ephemeral and concrete intersect, become blurred, and create tension. She’s had solo exhibitions at Launch F18 Gallery, Hap Gallery, and The Susan B. Hilles Gallery and her work has been included in several group exhibitions and fairs including at K. Imperial Gallery, New Hampshire Institute, Theirry Goldberg Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, among others. She earned a BFA from the University of Florida and MFA from Hunter College. She received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2009 and was a recipient of the Joshua Tree Highlands Residency in 2016. She is currently an Assistant Professor and serving as Department Chair of the Art and Design Department at SUNY WCC.
JASON MITCHAM
Jason Mitcham is a visual artist whose work spans painting, drawing and stop motion animation. With a background in land surveying, central themes within his work include mapping, land use and planning; cycles of growth and decay; layering of history; and the complex web of social, political and environmental forces embedded in the landscape. He has held solo museum exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Flint Institute of Arts, and has created animations for musicians and filmmakers, such as the Avett Brothers. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and was a finalist for the 1858 Prize at the Gibbs Museum. He received a BFA from East Carolina University and an MFA from the University of Florida.
SARA NESBITT
Using pen and ink, and mixed media, Sara Nesbitt's work creates scenes of unsettled idylls. She uses ambiguous space as well as figures and animals running, dancing, and chasing each other through the present day architecture of our world to represent the urban heartbeat. Her work tells a story, half imagined, half experienced, always influenced by the cities she's lived in; New York, London and Rome.
ASTON PHILIP
Aston is a painter, however he also continues to manipulate paint once it has dried by collaging, weaving and sculpting cured paint-skins and chips. He also incorporates the tools and processes of painting practice back into his works building colorful installations of paintbrushes or recycled studio apparatuses. Aston has exhibited widely at galleries and public institutions in his home country of Australia including The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Galerie Pompom, Artspace, Goulburn Regional Gallery and Campbelltown Art Centre. He has been artist in residence at Bundanon in New South Wales, Fraser’s Queen Street in Sydney, Hafnarborg Centre of Culture and Fine Art in Iceland, Trestle Artspace in Brooklyn, and now at Chashama in New York.
MICHAEL PIERCE
Michael Pierce is a Hudson Valley resident whose love for design has led him to have a successful architecture design firm. A graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design he enjoyed painting and had a show before focusing solely on architecture. Now reemerging as a multi-disciplinary artist, Michael uses a type of process he describes as "draw-paint" using a mixture of acrylics, oil sticks, and ink.
HARVEY WEISS
If there is a conceptual thread that links Harvey Weiss's works together it's his impulse to blur boundaries in order to connect disparate realms. His current practice involves photo based work he either collects or shoots digitally, which he marries to other mediums. Improvised methods of painting, drawing, and collage are added in ways to amend images which engage him. Figurative and abstract elements often overlap or merge while conveying themes that have included memory, transcendence, loss, and connection. At the core of his practice he yields to a vague sense of informing how and where to direct the work. This process often leads him to challenge an image's status quo. Weiss' works have been exhibited in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His publications include "head trip," and "This is Where We are Spending the Afternoon," (available at Blurb.com.) He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in New York City, he grew up in Miami, Florida, and currently lives in the Hudson Valley.