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For a long time, local artists have struggled to find a space within local museums, but the Everson is looking to change that with the CNY Artist Initiative.

“As an art museum, we have a national reputation, but it’s also very important to us to have a good relationship with the artists that live basically right next door to us,” Assistant Curator Steffi Chappell said.

Earlier this year, the Everson Museum of Art launched the CNY Artist Initiative, which highlights six artists to host an exhibition at different times throughout the year in a singular gallery. The selections are made from a pool of applicants that live in the region whose innovative work reflects the community. Each artist represents a different connection to the area of their art, which may be made from local materials or focused on creating a piece of narrative history.

The CNY Artist Initiative 2023 selections mark the second cohort of the program. The six artists, all of whom live within a 75-mile radius of the museum, will be Jamie Young, Alison Altafi, Ryan Krueger, Mara Baldwin, Marc-Anthony Polizzi and Christine Chin.

All the artists featured in the initiative work with distinct forms and themes, Chappell said. So, although each local artist will occupy the exhibition space at separate times of the year, each exhibit will offer something fresh and unique from the broad range of artists.

“We are really just trying to get a wide, diverse range of different mediums,” Chappell said. “So our repeat visitors, when they come back six times a year to see a different exhibition, (can see that) they’re all distinct, and they all have their own identity.”

Chin, for example, strives to portray the impacts of climate change on local communities through her artwork, using images of invasive species like giant hogweed and water lilies in the Finger Lakes area to serve as a larger metaphor for the climate crisis. When creating her pieces, she takes cyanotypes and puts the plants directly onto coding paper.

“By focusing on what is right in our backyards — in the lakes that we swim in, the waters we fish and boat in — I think it brings climate change home to people,” Chin said.

Courtesy of Christine Chin

Two of the other artists, Jamie Young and Ryan Krueger, are photographers. Young focuses on landscape photography, a medium that he said isn’t as popular anymore because it is more conventional and traditional.

Krueger, on the other hand, focuses on collecting and buying vintage photographs off of eBay and creating a piece of art putting them together, and he also does photography. Through these collections, Krueger said he wants to amplify lost voices from the gay community whose voices were silenced amid prejudice and stigma. He creates art that focuses on the lost history of the gay community, before they were given the freedom to express their experiences.

“I think what inspires my work is history, mostly (through) photography, and I feel like that will reflect back on this community and provide some visibility in a town where there’s not too much,” Krueger said.

Each artist finds a way to connect to the local region, whether that’s through the perspective of being a resident of the area or by using pieces from their hometown in their work. Marc-Anthony Polizzi, who creates installations, said he crafts his pieces with various objects he finds in the CNY area, creating a piece of art completely unique to the area he’s showing in.

“I collect items. I talk to people and gather trash,” Polizzi said. “The way my installations are put together are a direct reflection of the area within a little bit of a radius of the exhibition.”

Alison Altafi, owner of Loominarium, creates fiber art and directly sources her yarn from the Syracuse area, like a local spinner guild. The guild is made up of women primarily, and has helped her build connections with other artists around the Syracuse area.

“I’ve been working on a piece a lot bigger than I’ve ever done before, because now I have a venue who can host it,” Altafi said.

That venue, the Everson, is continuing to grow their program, Chappell said. This year, they are connecting with more artists than last year, after seeing visitors compelled and intrigued by the CNY Artist Initiative.

A major goal of the CNY Artist Initiative is to create visibility of local artists, who are relevant to the rich culture of the area, according to the museum’s instagram. The Everson wants to show that the artists are welcome, and they want to continue to support them, Chappell said.

“Especially museums in Central New York, a lot of them aren’t looking into their community or when they do. They’re kind of doing it in a haphazard way,” Pollizi said. “It’s really nice to look at Everson making well thought out decisions on how to engage artists in their surrounding area.”

Published on December 6, 2022 at 9:24 pm

Contact Rosina: rlboehm@syr.edu