ARTISTS
VITADUO
VitaDuo - VitaDuo appears as part of "Reverse Perspective," a joint project between Jonah Bokaer Choreography and Momentum Artists. Vitaly Vatulya (saxophone) and Maria Nemtsova (piano) - have been recognized as one of the most interesting ensembles performing in the chamber music world today. The rare combination saxophone – piano was formed in 2006, when the Duo won their first Prize at the prestigious festival in Moscow. Later they have founded the famous “Music - for Peace” Project, which is a charitable musical project, and it mission is to benefit young musicians who live in today’s conflict zones. The “Music for Peace” Project used the convening power of music as a vehicle to maximize the benefits of international and cross-cultural contacts between youth and young adult populations. Through music, MfP aimed to bring individuals from all backgrounds and social statuses together into a relaxed and natural environment. VitaDuo appears as part of "Reverse Perspective," a joint project between Jonah Bokaer Choreography and Momentum Artists.
WILLIAM Stone
William Stone traffics in word play to create provocative and humorous works utilizing woodworking, sculptural, and painting techniques. Stone plays with audience expectations and subverts the utilitarian purpose of functional objects, like desks and chairs, to imbue them with layered meaning beyond their formal ideal. William Stone splits his time between Germantown and New York City and has had solo exhibitions at James Fuentes Gallery (NYC), PS1 (NYC), John Davis Gallery (Hudson), and a 2020 exhibition at Hudson Hall (Hudson).
filiz soyak
Filiz Soyak is an interdisciplinary artist exploring themes of consciousness, memory, and time through intuitive mark-making in painting, fiber and installation. Motherhood transformed her to be present and simplify. Mindfulness practices including meditation and breathwork have become integral to her work, as has communing with nature. Her work is created in synchronicity with her breath.
Soyak was born in 1979 in Belgium to a Turkish father and Swedish mother. She spent most of her childhood in Japan, before moving to the United States in her teens. After living in the Middle East and Caribbean she landed in New York City for several years before moving up to Hudson with her family in search of a slower, more conscious and grounded life. Soyak’s work has been widely exhibited and collected internationally.
SHIKEITH
Shikeith is originally from Philadelphia, PA, and now lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. He received a BA from The Pennsylvania State University (2010) and an MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art (2018). Within overlapping practices of visual art and film making, he investigates the experiences of black men within and around concepts of psychic space. He has shared his work nationally and internationally through recent exhibitions and screenings that include The Language Must Not Sweat, Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Notes Towards Becoming A Spill, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; Shikeith: This was his body/His body finally his, MAK Gallery, London, UK; Go Tell It: Civil Rights Photography, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; A Drop of Sun Under The Earth, MOCA LA, Los Angeles, CA; Labor Relations, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Poland; and Black Intimacy: An Evening With Shikeith, MoMA, New York, NY. He is a 2019 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants.
Hala SHAH
Hala Shah is a performing artist, choreographer, and writer. She performs primarily with Jonah Bokaer Choreography and Ping Chong + Company (PCC). At the moment, her movement and writing are centered on the body as memorial, inherited gesture, and ritual revisited.
As a teaching artist for PCC’s Secret Histories: Arts in Education program, she has worked with students in New York City Public Schools to develop identity-driven narratives presented in theatrical performance. With PCC and director Jesca Prudencio, Hala collaborated in the creation of the docu-dance theater work “Calling: a dance with faith,” presented by La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, which unpacks her experiences as a Muslim dancer. Hala also co-choreographed “NOHING: a docu-dance on sexual assault” with Prudencio / People of Interest through Performance Project at University Settlement. She recently joined playwright Zizi Azah and director Nana Dakin for the production “I Know I Would,” featuring women of Muslim faith or familiy heritage, presented by Strong and Wrong Theater. She has also enjoyed performing in productions of “From The Horse’s Mouth,” honoring writer Deborah Jowitt and Egyptian ballet dancer Magda Saleh. Hala has choreographed works for the Voices Transposed: Refugee Crisis Benefit Concert and LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s Beyond Sacred program. She holds a BA in Journalism and Middle Eastern studies from NYU, and a MFA in Dance from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. Hala is a freelance writer for Dance Magazine and Dance Teacher magazine.
Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black female body. The artist constructs exaggerated depictions of female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The exaggerated biological characteristics of her figures reflect Self’s own experiences and cultural attitudes toward race and gender. “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise,” Self has said. “I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.”
Tschabalala Self (B.1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in New York and New Haven. Future exhibitions include: Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2020). Current and recent exhibitions include: The Black Atlantic, Kunstverein Hannover, Hanover; Radical Figures, Whitechapel, London (2020); Out of Body, ICA, Boston (2020); Tschabalala Self, Art Omi, Ghent (2019); MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence, MoMA PS1 (2019); Bodega Run, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Tschabalala Self, Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019); Bodega Run, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2018); Bodega Run, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2017); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017); Tschabalala Self, Tramway, Glasgow (2017); Tschabalala Self, Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London (2017); Desire, Moore Building, Miami (2016); A Constellation, Studio Museum Harlem, Harlem (2015).
Mckenzie raley
Mckenzie Raley is a sculptor and painter based in NYC and the Hudson Valley. After studying painting at Columbia College in Chicago, Raley moved to NYC shifting her work to a sculpture and textile-based practice. After nearly 8 years in the city, she relocated to upstate New York. Her work has been shown throughout NYC, Brooklyn, the Hudson Valley and LA. Raley currently lives in Hudson, NY with her wife and son.
Myron Polenberg
Over the course of a 50+ year career as a Fine Artist and Designer, Myron Polenberg has created a significant body of work that addresses important issues of our time and uses a variety of mediums including paint, sculpture, assemblage, mixed media, installation and film, among others. Regardless of the medium, Polenberg’s work retains as its core a concern with information; in particular, the gap between the remains of information and the information that remains; information as artifact; questions about impermanence and the manner in which information is processed, obscured, revealed and destroyed. All of this is done in the context of a historical continuum that coincides with the events, histories and social narratives that Polenberg has been witness to in his lifetime. Themes that emerge time and again in Polenberg’s work include justice, inequality, power, war, gender and sexuality. Such are the concepts that continue to remind us of our own humanity, and historically, the incidences that cause us to question it altogether.
Polenberg’s lengthy career in advertising Design was also consumed by the conveyance of information, including designing the first line of Swiss Army watches by the brand. Where Polenberg’s Design career was preoccupied with a very direct manner of information transmission for the consumer market, his Fine Art often ruminates, sometimes remaining intentionally elusive, preferring suggestion to statement; other times relying on provocation to compel a response. In every case, Polenberg is reacting to or against personal experiences from a lifetime lived in the midst of historic cultural shifts and dramatic social change.
*Photo credit: David McIntyre ©
ryan ostrowski
Ryan Ostrowski was born in 1986 in Vermont and works in painting, drawing, filmmaking and poetry; trending toward an interdisciplinary working practice. His most recent one-man show of paintings, Happiness was held in Hudson, New York in October 2019. The artist’s previous exhibitions in New York City and Mexico explored the anatomy of the face and the mystery of the mask. Ostrowski’s work is in a number of private collections in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and London. The artist currently lives and maintains his studio in Hudson, NY.
Dan Taulapapa McMullin
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Eastern Samoa, whose book of poems Coconut Milk (2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. His most recent book Samoan Queer Lives (2018), was co-edited with Yuki Kihara. Taulapapa’s performance poem The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. His artwork was in exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Oakland Museum, Bishop Museum, the United Nations, Auckland Art Gallery, and Musée du quai Branly. His film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award.
Taulapapa’s film 100 Tikis is an appropriation work about tiki kitsch and indigenous sovereignty, it was the opening night film of the 2016 Présence Autochtone First Peoples Festival in Montréal; and was an official selection in the Fifo International Film Festival in Tahiti; and Pacifique Festival Rochefort in France. He is currently working on a novel and a suite of collages reflecting on the queer history of Polynesia, and co-editing a a queer Pacific Islander anthology entitled Queernesia. Taulapapa’s art studio and writing practice is based in Hudson, New York, where he lives with his partner. More on his work can be found at taulapapa.com.
Shanekia mcintosh
Shanekia McIntosh is a writer, poet and performer born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Raised as a first-generation American, in a predominately Caribbean neighborhood, by Jamaican- immigrants. Her work is inspired by the double consciousness of her cultural heritage and the black diaspora; it aims to disrupt and confront the historical colonial erasure of black/poc narratives, the contemporary byproducts of that erasure and it's continued practice today. Using the thematic palette of generational trauma, dislocation and migration, climate change, afro-futurism, empathetic political actions and accessibility the work aims to cultivate a community space to engage contemporary narratives and perspectives to upend the learned complacency of these practices.
McIntosh has read and shown her work at The New Museum, Second Ward Foundation, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, NY Live Arts, September Gallery and more, with recent work being published in Chronogram, Apogee Journal and The TENTH Magazine. She is the co-founder of Free Range, a black performance series with artist Tschabalala Self and DJ Michael Mosby. Previously, McIntosh co-curated TRIPTYCH, the Sunday daytime programming for Basilica Soundscape Music and Arts Festival in Hudson,NY with poet Joey de Jesus. McIntosh is the Youth Service & Programs Assistant for the Hudson Area Library in Hudson, NY.
*Photo credit: Clément Pascal.
sondra loring
Sondra Loring fell in love with yoga while dancing professionally in New York City. She received a 1996 Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) as an improviser, writer, teacher and performer. Loring co-founded the annual Improvisation Festival/NY, a two-week program of workshops, classes, ‘jams’ and performances by both national and international improvisers. She also co-founded and edited JUICE, an underground dance journal in NYC.
After moving to the Hudson Valley, Loring rocked the dance scene, organizing performance and educational experiences for the local community, with infusions from the NYC dance world, with support by the NYDanceForce. She was the co-director of UpRiver/Downtown Dance Company for seven years, a collective of women dancers and choreographers that worked together to create classes, workshops and performances in Columbia County. She traveled to India several times to study yoga, and has studied with many that have since fallen from grace. After moving to the Hudson Valley, Sondra opened Sadhana Center for Yoga and Meditation in Hudson in 2003, and Satya Yoga Center in Rhinebeck in 2005.
Sondra is an interdisciplinary queer witch, bringing somatic practices, yoga, meditation, science, poetry and mantra into her teaching. Her classes are loved for their graceful flow of movement, the beautiful quality of devotion, and a strong sense of community. She lives on Feathertail Farm, now a small community garden, with her son, Mateo and their rascally elderly dog, Pequena.
Thea Little
Thea Little is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work draws upon performance art, dance, and experimental opera. She has composed more than 50 scores presented in the U.S. and abroad. Little attended the School of American Ballet and holds MFA and BA degrees in Dance respectively from Hollins University/ADF and Columbia University. Thea has performed in the U.S. and Europe with New York City Ballet, The Whitney Museum, The Traveling Trolley in Kingston, NY and WUK in Vienna. She has worked with Neta Pulvermacher, Todd Williams, Moving Theater, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Anaïs Maviel, Feminist Art Group (FAG), and Shen Wei Dance Arts. Thea’s work has been presented at National Sawdust, Earthdance, Dåncēhølø, RECESS by the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Asia Society, Women Between Arts at The New School, Center for Performance Research, the NYU Music Department, The Exponential Festival, The Beaux Arts Court in The Brooklyn Museum, and The Performance Mix31 Festival. She is currently a returning LEIMAY Fellow and is excited to be presented at The Hudson Eye 2020. Thea is proud to be on the Advisory Board of New Dance Alliance.
*Photo Credit: Anna Maynard
terence koh
Terence Koh was born in 1977 in Beijing, China and grew up in Mississauga, Canada. He received his Bachelor degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. He is currently living in New York City. In 2008, he was listed in Out magazine’s “100 People of the Year”, and was short listed for the SOBEY awards. He has exhibited widely around the United States and extensively abroad. In his installations, objects, wall pieces, and performances, Terence Koh creates a space in which memory and imagination mix with art history and subculture. He explores such diverse subjects as mythology, religion, identity, power, fashion and sexuality, in an often provocative manner, charged with possible symbolic readings. He is most well-known for his monochromatic installations, and ritualistic performances.
Nadia Khayrallah
Nadia Khayrallah is a performer, choreographer, writer, occasional drag artist, and general menace. Her work highlights the body as a place of intersection between intimacy and power; pleasure and resistance; personal and political--often with a dose of humor. A graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. in Dance and Psychology, she currently performs with Jonah Bokaer Choreography, Gotham Dance Theater, eSKay Arts Collective, and Artists by Any Other Name. Nadia has presented work through Dixon Place’s Crossing Boundaries and HOT! Festival, Dancers Unlimited, Queens College Arts Festival, Chez Bushwick RECESS, YallaPunk, and ModArts Move to Change Festival, and has worked with musical artists Roxiny and Alethea and visual artists Qinza Najm and Reza Farkondeh. She has written for The Dance Enthusiast, The Huffington Post, Sukoon Magazine, and Reductress. As a member of the Dance/NYC Junior Committee, she has co-hosted discussions on racial and economic justice in the dance field at the Dance/NYC Symposium and the Arts Administrators of Color Network Convening. Nadia served as cultural consultant for National Queer Theater’s 2020 Criminal Queerness Festival, connecting programming to international communities.
Nathalie JonAS
Nathalie Jonas is a teacher, choreographer, and performer with over twenty years of experience in the field. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, completing thesis research there focused on the intersections of anarchism and dance. Her recent choreography explores a related theme: the place and purpose of performance outside of traditional venues, activated through an investigation of methods that increase our awareness of the spatio-political contexts in which dance occurs. Nathalie is currently on faculty at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where she teaches theory, technique, choreography, improvisation, and pedagogy. Previously, she served for eleven years on the dance faculty at Barnard College. Nathalie is also a Feldenkrais teacher with certification from the Feldenkrais Institute of New York, a training that strongly grounds her specific approach to movement and the body. Nathalie is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Dance at Texas Woman's University.
*Photo Credit: Ian Douglas
Laetitia Hussain
Born in Marseille in 1976, Laetitia Hussain has lived in France, Syria, New York City and the Hudson Valley. Laetitia Hussain's work and installations are elaborations of emotional reactions to social and environmental issues. A graduate of SUNY Purchase (BFA), she works in many media including drawing, installation, sculpture, painting, printmaking, video, sound and photography. She currently lives and maintains her studio in Hudson NY.
*Photo Credit: Elena Kamenskaya
Bibbe Hansen
Bibbe Hansen is a veteran of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory and the 1960’s NY experimental theater and film underground. She is the daughter of Fluxus and Happenings artist Al Hansen, and the mother of visual artist Channing Hansen and pop musician, Beck. A multiverse performer, musician and visual artist, Bibbe is a member of the online performance group Second Front. She lives in Hudson, New York and continues to lecture, perform and exhibit internationally.
david hammons
David Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1943. He moved to Los Angeles in 1963 attending Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) from 1966 – 1968 and the Otis Art Institute from 1968 – 1972. In 1974 Hammons settled in New York City. Influenced by Arte Povera, Hammons's work speaks of cultural overtones; employing provocative materials such as elephant dung, chicken parts, strands of hair, and bottles of cheap wine. Centered in the black urban experience, Hammons often uses sarcasm as a means of confronting cultural stereotypes and racial issues. Hammons was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in July 1991. Hammons's work is collected by major public and private institutions internationally, among them: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; Glenstone, Potomac; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice; and Tate Britain, London.
Tommy Coleman
Tommy Coleman is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary Artist and Educator who produces masterfully crafted objects, and staunchly sincere albeit witty images. Coleman’s practice implores investigations of honesty, intimacy, and perceptional break downs which accompany anxiety and identity in the contemporary climate- all done by way of navigating nuances of control and what is considered permissible within the boundaries of public and private space.
Allora and Calzadilla
Through a complex research-oriented practice, Allora & Calzadilla critically address the intersections and complicities between the cultural, the historical and the geopolitical. The interdisciplinary nature of their interventions is echoed by an expanded use of the artistic medium that includes performance, sculpture, sound, video and photography. Their dynamic engagement with the art historical results in an acute attention to both the conceptual and the material, the metaphoric as well as the literal.
The Puerto Rico-based artists have studied the ephemeral nature of collective drawing with monumental sticks of chalk at the Biennial de Lima, Peru (Chalk [Lima], 1998–2002); the imprints of colonial, nationalist, and military violence on the diverse populations and landscapes of Vieques, Puerto Rico (Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2001–2002; Land Mark, 2003; Returning a Sound, 2004; Under Discussion, 2006 and Half Mast/Full Mast, 2011); and the resonance of playing, warping and combining music from various moments in history (Clamor, 2006; Wake Up, 2007; Sediments Sentiments- Figures of Speech, 2008; Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, 2008; Raptor’s Rapture, 2012; Apotomē, 2013; 3, 2013); as well as the entanglement between biophysics, semiotics and actuality (Growth, 2004; Puerto Rican Light: Cueva Vientos, 2015).
*Photo Credit: Marion Vogel
james autery
James Autery began photographing and printing in the darkroom in high school. He attended the University of Missouri-Columbia to study photojournalism, becoming a finalist in the Gorden Parks International Photo Competition in 2006, later to drop out to document train- hoppers. In 2014 he went full time freelance and started photographing for TIME in 2017. He has had exhibitions with Second Ward Foundation, Film Makers Cooperative, Areté Venue and Gallery, Next to Nothing, Hudson Hall, Minneapolis Photo Center, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, and has had work listed on Paddle8. He has been an artist in residence with Second Ward Foundation for 2 years, working on his first film, Mantra, an experimental documentary about the meditation of making art.
john ashbery +
The FLOW CHART FOUNDATION
*LITANY performed by Anselm Berrigan and Kyle Dacuyan
*With Jeffrey Lependorf and Mark Allen of The Flow Chart Foundation
Longtime Hudson resident, and widely recognized as one of the most influential American poets of our time, John Ashbery (1927 - 2017) received numerous awards for poetry, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry, Légion d'Honneur of the Republic of France, Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie, International Griffin Poetry Prize, National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and many others. Ashbery received a number of honorary degrees, including, from among others, Harvard and Yale, and was also the first living poet to have his collected poems included in the prestigious Library of America series. His work intersects with the visual arts, theatre, film and other art forms, and continues to inspire countless readers and artists in many different fields.
*Image © Lynn Davis