Newsletter

BFA/MFA Students Present Thesis Exhibitions

Congratulations to the BFA and MFA students who presented their thesis exhibitions at the Dorsky Museum in fall 2025: Nicole Fumai ’25, Lucia Daher ’25, Orphenus Burger ’25, Lauren Abbott ’25, Alyssa Bardoun ’25, Amelia Pollicino ’25, Gabbi Bush ’25, Tierney O’Brien ’25, Olivia Burgevin Hallstein ’25, Rivka Gorelick ’25, Adrian Rothpearl ’25, Lou Kraeger ’25, and Cole Solis Jativa ’25g.

We wish you all the best in your future artistic endeavors!

Check out photos from the exhibition at the Department of Art's Instagram page.

Visual Arts Grads Host Capstone Exhibition

Congratulations to the latest Bachelor of Science in Visual Arts graduates, who presented their capstone exhibition, "The Last Assignment," from Dec. 5 to 9, 2025, at the Fine Arts Building.

We wish Calum Gunn ’25, Emily Handschuh ’25, Sebastian Hudson ’25, Joey McLaughlin ’25, Emily Pickering ’25, Josie Rosado ’25, Gianna Turilli ’25, Kiara White ’25, and Jenniferanne Youngblood ’25 the absolute best in their post-New Paltz creative journeys!

Check out photos of each artist's work from the exhibition on the Department of Art's Instagram page.

Sound Your Truth

Eddy at New Paltz presented another successful Sound Your Truth event in the Sojourner Truth Library courtyard in October 2025, which featured the contributions of countless Fine & Performing Arts students and faculty.

The evening's theme, "Art as a Bridge to What Comes Next," materialized through the creative sharing and collective expression of music, spoken word, dance, visual art—including a live printmaking table—and more, with the goal of amplifying underrepresented voices.

Be sure to read this essay on the development and execution of this year's Sound Your Truth by graduate photography student Ikechukwu Sharpe, who is part of the core organizing group behind the event along with Aila Moses, Ahya Owusu-Fordjour, and Sarah Berry. 

According to its website, Eddy at New Paltz "is an evolving, open, trans-disciplinary, co-creative, and embodied learning lab. Our educational practices and systems unwittingly support the current paradigm that incentivizes competition, oppression, and extraction. How might we, together, live, learn and educate around values and practices that are care-driven, relational, restorative, regenerative, sustainable, and focused on the long-term wellbeing of all beings?"

Aurora Berger Gives Talk on Photography and Disability Aesthetics

Assistant Professor Eunkyung Hwang invited Department of Art students to attend a virtual talk by artist-educator Aurora Berger, hosted during Hwang's ARE305: Disability Studies in Art Education class, in November 2025. 

Berger shared her practices and pedagogical experiences as a queer disabled artist and K-12 art educator. According to Hwang, Berger's work "engages deeply with disability aesthetics and the politics of representation, making this an exciting opportunity for students to think critically about photography beyond normative assumptions of bodyminds."

Ceramics Welcomes Trevor King for Workshop

The Ceramics program welcomed NYC-based artist Trevor King to campus in November 2025 for a special visiting artist workshop in the Fine Arts Building ceramic studio.

King demonstrated figurative sculpture, underglaze surface techniques, and also gave an artist talk. His visit was sponsored by New Paltz Ceramic Co.

Dorsky Hosts Spring 2025 Exhibitions

In Spring 2025, The Dorsky hosted three well-attended and dynamic exhibitions: The Arrested Image: Identity through the Lens of Law Enforcement and Jean Shin: Bodies of Knowledge.

The Arrested Image takes a close look at the portraits produced by police vision. By turning the gaze back onto how forms of law enforcement see and portray, it poses urgent questions regarding the relationship between identity and notions of truth, liberty, privacy, and justice in the face of rapidly advancing law enforcement technology. It featured works by Zach Blas, Sophie Calle, Paolo Cirio, Dana Claxton, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Hasan Elahi, Harun Farocki, Miguel Fernández de Castro, Tomashi Jackson, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Julio César Morales, Trevor Paglen, Sherrill Roland, Dread Scott, and Julia Weist. The exhibition also included archival objects from The Andy Warhol Museum, Harvard Medical School Center for the History of Medicine, New York State Archives, New York State Museum, and University of Rochester Medical Center Library. 

Jean Shin: Bodies of Knowledge redirects attention back to the living beings and physical substrates on which human knowledge depends. Interweaving craft traditions with fleeting technologies, the exhibition explores the complex ways digital text and textiles serve as vehicles for meaning, identity and social connection. Both are seen as symbolic extensions of the body, forms through which we communicate, and physical materials that impact our environment. 

The fall closed out with the Department of Art's semesterly BFA/MFA Thesis Exhibitions at the Dorsky, which ran Dec. 5-14. Congratulations to all the graduating students who participated: Nicole Fumai, Lucia Daher, Orphenus Burger, Lauren Abbott, Alyssa Bardoun, Amelia Pollicino, Gabbi Bush, Tierney O’Brien, Olivia Burgevin Hallstein, Rivka Gorelick, Adrian Rothpearl, Lou Kraeger, and Cole Solis Jativa.

Dorsky Hosts Family Day Events

The Dorsky hosted Family Day events in spring 2025 inspired by the semester's two exhibitions, The Arrested Image and Jean Shin: Bodies of Knowledge. Designed for children and their caregivers, these special events feature hands-on activities, artist-led workshops, and interactive discussions inspired by the Museum's current exhibitions at the time of the events.

The Dorsky Hosts "Holigays" Cookie and Crafting Party

The Dorsky Museum hosted its annual Holigays cookie and crafting event just before the winter break in December 2025.

Art AID Features Skill Share Series, Pop-Up Show

As part of the Department of Art's semesterly weeklong Art AID (Advising, Information & Dialogue) event, students presented a full day of Skill Share sessions—including ceramics demos with Alex Paton (pictured) and Maia Moosmueller, decals in the Digital Fabrication Lab with Ali Conway and Myrkos Diaz, and cyanotype with Orphenus Burger, to name a few.

Art AID closed out with the Freaky Little Art Show pop-up, where students were invited to bring their "small freaky works" in all mediums and enjoy Halloween-themed snacks.

The week also included MFA interdisciplinary critiques, first-year reviews, and drop-in advisement sessions. 

Art History Kicks Off Lecture Series on Art & Activism

The theme for this year's Art History Association Lecture Series is "Art and Activism," and the series kicked off with a lineup of dynamic speakers throughout the fall 2025 semester:

The series kicked off Sept. 25 with a virtual talk by Miriam Basilio, associate professor of art history and museum studies at New York University. Her virtual presentation, "Fighting Fascism: Art for the Masses During the Spanish Civil War," discussed how visual culture, fine arts, and exhibitions intersected during the Spanish Civil War as part of a highly complex matrix of propaganda that sought to define and mobilize a nation torn apart by war.

The series continued in October with a presentation by Gregory Sholette, professor of sculpture and social practice at Queens College, titled "Time Against Itself: Cultural Resistance in the Radical Unpresent." Sholette's talk explored how, in an era when our very sense of time has become disjointed and when past and future collapse into an uncanny, hollow present, the brightening of cultural "dark matter" –those numberless overlooked yet essential creative laborers– has revealed not only progressive forces at work, but also reactionary energies coalescing into movements like MAGA (Make America Great Again). 

November brought a lecture by Kevin Repp, curator of modern European books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, whose virtual presentation "Art, Protest, and the Archives" took attendees on a quick tour of the history of activist art in Europe and America over the past hundred years. 

MFA Composium Draws 100+ Visitors

The MFA Composium, a three-day symposium in September that brought together artists, makers, and thinkers exploring the deep connections between materials, process, community, and the environment, attracted than 100 attendees, including 59 from outside the New Paltz community.

Among the highlights of the week were the building, loading, and firing of a rocket kiln with Lisa Orr (pictured); a keynote presentation by sTo Len; an artist lecture with Venetia Dale; an artist talk and natural pigment workshop with Natalie Stopka; and a public meal of foraged food cooked over charcoal made from the remains of fallen ash trees to close out the event.

Learn more about the Composium and see the full schedule on the event's website.

Theatre Arts Kicks Off Mainstage Series

The Department of Theatre Arts kicked off its 2025-26 Mainstage Production series with three powerful performances:

"Artaud, Artaud," a comedy of madness about famed Theatre of Cruelty creator Antonin Artaud, opened on Oct. 3, 2025. Directed by Assistant Professor Tony Speciale and written by Matthew Minnicino, the play follows the French artist and avant-garde theater pioneer, who finds himself locked in a sanitarium with his Double—his complete opposite—whom Artaud has tasked with presenting as himself so he can focus on writing. The show centers on the complex relationship between Artaud, a preeminent theatrical sensation, and his free-spirited Double, while they each discover a sense of self and find their respective desires at odds with each other.

November 2025 saw the opening of "The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs," a lively comedic story of a woman exacting revenge on her fickle ex-lover. Directed by Carmela Marner and was written by famed Hispanic Golden Age playwright Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, the play asks the question: What if Don Juan had to face the woman he ghosted? And what if she were transformed into a sword-wielding, powerful opponent? 

The semester closed out with a December 2025 run of "Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England," which was also the debut production of the newly formed Student Explorations in Theatre (S.E.T.) group. Written by Madeleine George and 
directed by Aditri Khaldikar ’26, the latter of whom also made the experience directing the play the subject of her Honors Thesis project, the play follows Dean Wreen, whose university is experiencing financial woes that threaten to close its on-campus natural history museum. Wreen's troubles also extend to her home life, as her ex-lover is living with her, much to the chagrin of her current and much-younger partner.

Music Presents Fall ’25 Concert Series

The fall 2025 edition of the Department of Music's Concert Series featured an eclectic lineup of 13 shows spanning an array of genres, cultures and traditions.

Art Lecture Series Welcomes Two Speakers

The Student Art Alliance's semesterly Art Lecture Series brought two dynamic speakers to campus in fall 2025: Photographer Leonard Suryajaya, who uses photography, video, performance and installation to show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings and potential, in October; and Joyce Lin, who discussed her sculptural furniture practice—  which investigates the relationship between surface and structure and the erosion of boundaries between the natural and the man-made—in November.