CAP ArtSpace
2020 is Virtual
The CAP Artspace is located within the "Ithaca College Gallery" in the downtown (on the Commons) Tompkins Center for History and Culture. In 2020, all of our Artspace exhbits will be virtual!
September Exhibit:
Ithaca College in the Downtown Era
Virtual Exhibit - Click here. It's really cool!
Read all about the exhibit below.
Live Event: September 4th, 6pm.
At 6pm on Friday, the Downtown Ithaca Alliance will host a live Facebook event. Check out www.GalleryNightIthaca.com on September 3rd for info about live and virtual exhibits, and the link to the facebook event. (As I write this, their site isn't yet updated.)
About our Exhibit:
Ithacans may know Ithaca College by its dual towers at the top of South Hill, but that’s just part of the story. In actuality, the South Hill campus has only been the home to Ithaca College for the last 55 years. Prior to 1965, Ithaca College was located in downtown Ithaca. At various times residences, commercial buildings, public schools, churches, and movie houses were rented or purchased for the college's needs.
In this exhibit, we’ll explore photographs of some of the buildings that comprised Ithaca College and its previous incarnations. Some buildings still stand and function in different capacities; other buildings have been demolished to make way for other uses as the City of Ithaca has grown and evolved.
Ithaca College began in 1892 as the Ithaca Conservatory of Music by local musician, W. Grant Egbert. The Conservatory grew during the following decades and was joined by affiliated schools: the Williams School of Expression and Dramatic Art (1898), the Ithaca Institute of Public School Music (1910), the Ithaca School of Physical Education (1916), and the Conway Military Band School (1921). In 1926, the Ithaca Conservatory and Affiliated Schools (ICAS) was licensed by New York State to grant baccalaureate degrees, and in 1931 all of the schools merged to become Ithaca College. Ithaca College continues its tradition of schools to this day: School of Business, Roy H. Park School of Communication, School of Health Science and Human Performance, School of Humanities, and School of Music.
Ithaca College in the Downtown Era was curated by Dan Taylor and Abby Juda. The archival images are available in Ithaca College’s New York Heritage Digital Collection.
August Featured Artist
"Brightly Visions," with Sue Brightly.
Check out Sue's virtual exhibit here
"A lot of people say my paintings are cute or whimsical. And sometimes they are.
"But I invite you to look a little closer. A lot of times there's something else going on. When I get an idea for a painting it's often because something is troubling me. Sometimes I don't even realize it until I'm deep into the painting. Ideas start falling into place as I layer on the colors; insights take shape along with the painting.
"Painting is a really revelatory process for me, rather than something I plan extensively. I like the freedom of that process; it's what keeps me engaged and enjoying the challenge of bringing a vision inside my head out into the world.
"I like to paint animals and trees and nature. They just seem to be the frequencies I'm tuned into. I feel viewing our human experiences in the guise of animals can provide a fresh perspective compared to seeing a human in a painting. We judge humans differently, with different biases. For example, a mouse protesting is seen differently from a human protesting.
"I hope my paintings give you a pause to think, to imagine, or simply to enjoy."
Sue received a BA in Art from UC Santa Barbara, and has spent most of her career as a graphic designer. She participates in the Greater Ithaca Art Trail and has shown works in several local group exhibitions.
Along the way, she's also worked as a soundperson for TV and documentary projects in Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, and other international travel; wrangled trail horses for dude rides in California, and lived in London, England as a child.
Sue lives in Ithaca, NY with her wife, two dogs, a cat, and 16 chickens; and is the proud mom of an adult son and stepdaughter.
July Featured Artists
Sculptures of Treacy Ziegler & Gary Weisman
"Share Vision-Separate Vision"
Treacy Ziegler and Gary Weisman are artists and a married couple living in Newfield New York for the past 22 years. This exhibition brings together their sculptures. With the shared vision and hope that sculpture can be the aesthetic manifestation of compassion and care, Ziegler creates sculptures of animal imagery, while Weisman uses the human form. Weisman creates his sculpture in bronze. Ziegler creates her sculptures of paper; cast from thousands of letters she receives from prisoners through the Prisoner Express project of the Center For Transformative Action, affiliated with Cornell University. It is her hope that the sculptures reflect the range of emotion evidenced in the letters; hope, regret, sadness, loneliness, and love.
Ziegler is the recipient of two Puffin Foundation awards for art in social justice, the Constance Saltonstall grant, Community Art Partnership grants, New Hampshire Percent Grant for the Arts and other awards. She is the volunteer art director for the Prisoner Express and has taught art in prisons for the past 10 years. She has had several solo museum exhibitions including the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University, Ithaca; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California; Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio. Her solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in Atlantic City, New Jersey scheduled for April 2020 was postponed due to the pandemic. This exhibition is rescheduled for October, 2021. Ziegler is also participating in the MoMA PS1, Brooklyn, NY, exhibition on prison art scheduled originally for April 202. This MoMA exhibition was also postponed and has not yet been rescheduled. Ziegler will have a solo exhibition at the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA, from September 2020 through August 2021.
Gary's Artist Statement: Everyone would probably agree: Art is not obligated to follow reason. In fact, some would assert that art gains authority when its source is not reason; when it "comes from the heart" or other clichés that assume an emotional, political, or illogical but provoking source for the art. This bronze sculpture asks that we experience art outside of reason and outside the cliché of emotions; that we not “outsource art” to reason and emotions but experience art as an origin. My sculptural attempts, from maquette to over life size human figures composed in a compassionate naturalistic approach, ask us to abandon our preconceptions of space and gravity. But, explanation is a pale shadow of the art experience.
The bronzes do not speak of containment, but of participation. The figure is in dialogue with the surrounding space and demands acknowledgement of that space as an ontological factor; not as container. The figure does not exist outside that participation and as Gadamer states, the conversation never ends. The bronzes are the origin of a particular art experience claiming ground only in the immediate phenomenological relationships of art to viewer to space
June Featured Artist
Jessica Stratton, Resilience
Click here for her artist talk (It's great!)
My work is rooted in the physical breakdown of the human body alongside the persistence of the human spirit. Investigating my own illnesses in a series of visual works led me to the realization that being repeatedly broken and put back together resulted in my tenacious character. Instead of being ashamed of my weaknesses, I began to take pride in them. Seeing how my life experiences shaped who I have become, I began to wonder: What makes us resilient? How do we embody trauma and move forward? My work is biographical but aims to honor how we collectively endure.
JOIN OUR EMAIL LIST
Follow us on Facebook
See our Pinterest page
