Our Artists
Mary MacGill regularly curates exhibitions that showcase artists and designers from around the globe, working in a variety of mediums. The thread that connects these diverse creators is a reverence for the artistic process and their chosen materials.
on view
Alice Attie
Alice Attie is a visual artist and poet based in New York City. With an MFA in poetry and a PhD in comparative literature. Attie’s artistic practice explores the space beyond language; that which language itself can not simply express, and the possibilities of communicating understanding through the habitual exercise of mapping. Attie’s series entitled “Class Notes” is a set of drawings made in physics and philosophy seminars at Columbia University. Each drawing is completed within the frame of a single class session and becomes a visual analogue to the intellectual adventure. Her series “Possibilities” more loosely explores the transformative act of organizing marks on a page.
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on view
Ariela Nomi Kuh
Each of Ariela Nomi Kuh’s hand-built sculptural vessels explore the deep human tradition of working with clay. Ariela draws inspiration from nature, as well as from ancient and classical ceramics. Her process embodies a respect for this material’s history and for its ongoing and evolving potential.
Ariela is a dedicated ceramicist working out of Portland, Maine. Mary MacGill represents her work on an ongoing basis.
past exhibitions
Simone Bodmer-Turner
Simone’s hand-built sculptures embody her personal and ever-evolving practice with clay. They are at once architectural and biomorphic, inspired by organic gestures found in nature and the human body. Their exploration of suspension and volume, light and shadow, and the delicate measure of balance impart them with distinct personalities.
Simone is a ceramic artist and designer based in Western Massachusetts.
on view
Peter Cusack
Peter Cusack’s practice is rooted in his drawings of lived experiences, cultural observations, and early 19th Century French art. Many of the figures Cusack depicts are representations of loved ones passed. Their presence in his paintings are both palpable and abstract, much like memories. Through painting, Cusack is at once externalizing his own memory, while simultaneously examining our collective history and relationship to the human form through art.
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on view
Caroline Denervaud
Caroline Denervaud is a multidisciplinary artist living in Paris. Using performative dance as a basis for her paintings, Caroline creates colorful compositions that reflect her current state of mind in response to the larger global landscape. Caroline's smaller works delve into a more intimate practice of exploring the relationships between specific, emotive colors and more contained experiments with composition, while her video work employs a monochromatic lense to focus on the process of movement as a sketch. "L'Importance du Rose" is the artist's visceral response to a world rife with a pandemic and social unrest - an argument for pink - for vivacity, boldness, and joy.
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past exhibitions
Deborah Ehrlich
Deborah is a glassware, furniture, and lighting designer. Her paper-thin crystal glasses are distinguished by their simplicity and efficacy of proportion — a feat she attributes to working “very, very slowly.” Deborah’s work is at once functional and transcendent, elevating the banal act of sipping a beverage into a sensorial experience. She spent her earlier years traveling through Europe, studying at The Danish Design School in Copenhagen, and helping restore the stained glass of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Her time in Europe led to a continued collaboration with master craftsmen in Sweden, who create glasses from her designs, using non-leaded Swedish crystal. Deborah is based in High Falls, New York. She received a degree in anthropology from Barnard College and has collaborated with hardware manufacturer E.R. Butler as well as the restaurant at Blue Hill.
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on view
Sylvia Estes
Sylvia Estes creates sculptures out of found and discarded materials. Each piece is a response to her immediate environment. By giving in to her process, allowing the refuse of daily life and her home environment to guide each form, Estes creates organic vessels and curved light fixtures that direct illumination and space anew.
Sylvia Estes is an assistant gallery curator and artist living in Kingston, New York
on view
Sarah Mijares Fick
Sarah’s practice begins with associative writing and drawing, and works its way into naturally undulating and unpredictable coiled clay forms. Sarah’s relationship with her material is one of admiration — a pure, almost childlike awe of the ability to sculpt with earth. While rolling and layering clay coils, Sarah utilizes a repetitive pinching process to create extraordinarily complex forms that recall intricate sand and rock formations at grand scale. In a nod to the inevitability of growth and practicality, Sarah’s forms are also utilitarian: they are vases for flowers or cavernous coffee tables that house everyday objects.
Sarah is a ceramic artist living in Chatham, New York. Since 2011, she has developed her practice independently and through various mentorships, including working under noted ceramic artists in New York, New Mexico, and South Korea, before establishing Sarah Mijares Studio in 2020.
past exhibitions
Laura Fischer
Laura’s sculptures begin as familiar whole pieces: found stones of varying shapes, weights, textures, and colors. Using ancient knotting and textile techniques, Laura creates intricately webbed containers for each stone, exploring different patterns, rhythms, loops, and cycles to conform to the existing framework of the foraged object. In direct opposition to the happenstance of picking up a stone along the beach, Laura considers each piece a building site where she can perform her own painstaking practice of patience and discipline. The product and beauty of her finished work is at once intuitive, historical, natural, and obsessive.
Laura currently lives in Bellingham, Washington, and holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and a BA from Colorado College. Her work has been exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Headlands Center for the Arts, Øgaard, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
on view
Colleen Herman
Colleen’s work explores movement and containment, place and theme, wild color and grounded volumes. With a deep adoration for pigment and attention to the juxtaposition of shape and form, Colleen’s dynamic use of paint functions as a conversation between colors. Mary’s 2020 collaboration with Colleen produced “After JoAnn,” an exploration of JoAnn Verburg’s photographs of olive trees and the ethereal light of the Italian countryside. At a time when travel was limited, Colleen spent hours with JoAnn’s transportive works and created a second degree of experience through shared colors, qualities, and compositions.
Colleen Herman lives between the US, India, and Mexico.
on view
Nate Hill
Brooklyn based ceramic and furniture artist Nate Hill’s work embodies a simple, silly, kind of elegance. Utilizing form, pattern and color, Hill’s work explores traditions of painting, folk-craft, ceramics, and design, while also reflecting his intuitive instincts as a maker. He finds joy through creating objects that one can intimately interact with and grow close to. Each piece can help support and sustain us, becoming extensions and reflections of ourselves and our impulses, both creative and practical. Nate aspires to make work that feels universally beautiful, while also being personal and self aware, culminating in something new, curious, and joyous.
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on view
Matthew Johnson
Matthew Johnson is a Hudson Valley based photographer whose work explores recollections of places - those commutes that are familiar and close, and foreign travels receding into time. Experimenting with shutter speed and film, Matt finds a way to capture these fleeting landscapes that outpace our eyes, yet stick in our minds.
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on view
Jonathan Kline
Jonathan Kline’s baskets honor the particular beauty of Black Ash trees. What makes this species so ideal for basketry is the relative ease in which it is possible to separate the tree’s annual rings. Each strip of wood is effectively a snapshot of the tree’s life and growth. Kline shows reverence for each layer by constructing undulating trunk-like woven forms, and highly refined, usable baskets.
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current exhibition
Emma Larsson
Emma Larsson, based in Stockholm, Sweden, works in watercolor and graphite. As a whole, Larsson's work can be seen as a continual exploration of play, delving into poetic compositions that loosely reference the natural world and undefined histories. Composed of organ-like shapes, folksy patters, and unexpected textural moments, Larsson's work creates an entirely new language, at once completely familiar and also, extraterrestrial. In Larsson's own words: "I'm a tireless explorer. What I am constantly seeking for, needs to be unknown to me. Creating my art is about playing and exploring freely."
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on view
Chris Mottalini
Chris Mottalini is a Hudson Valley-based artist known for his portrait-like approach to architectural photography. Chris’ work interacts with the chosen spaces he photographs, intentionally framing each shot to convey the specific light, texture, and ethereal quality of a place.
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past exhibitions
Claire Oswalt
Claire’s artistic background spans textiles, painting, drawing, and sculpture. In the vein of Dada artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Claire’s collages employ an apt understanding of many disciplines in order to create new works that speak more to our natural tendencies than something learned. Using her own watercolors and drawings, Claire tears her work into pieces and layers them, allowing intuition to guide their placement. The result is a deeply compelling composition and an exploration of restraint and spontaneity, grounding and suspension.
Claire’s work has been shown in galleries in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Austin, and Marfa.
on view
Susan Paulsen
Susan’s photographs contain visions of ordinary objects made preternaturally interesting and infused with charm. With a quiet palette and subtly blurred lens, her work is painterly and dream-like, evoking a poetic vision of the seemingly banal. Susan’s subjects — children playing scrabble, freshly cut roses, dogs heading home, a soft nude — are rooted in the everyday experience of family, heritage, and place.
Susan lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; Deborah Bell Gallery in New York City; and Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. She has also published three books of her photography with STEIDL: “Tomatoes on the Back Porch” (2005), “Sarah Rhymes with Clara” (2011), and “Wilmot” (2012).
on view
Vincent Pidone
Vincent’s drawings are manifestations of his dedication to the efficacy of materials and process. For Mary MacGill, Vincent employed frottage — rubbing graphite over various textures — to create an analog version of “sampling.” Vincent takes two or three impressions of the same textural material, overlapping each, often generating a moiré pattern. Using various types of graphite on paper, Vincent coats each drawing with a combination of purified beeswax and tree resin. The translucent wax coating serves as a fixative for the graphite and produces a warm color that gives each rubbing a sense of depth.Vincent is a Kingston, New York, native. In addition to his active art practice he works for R + F Handmade Paints. Vincent has exhibited his works in a number of art spaces, including Go North Gallery in Beacon, New York; Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia; and the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy.
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past exhibitions
Kiki Smith
Kiki has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles. Among the most widely recognized and prolific contemporary artists, Kiki is also credited with having forged her own unique path within Feminist art by concentrating on the human figure, itself, when abstraction and performance art were more popular.
Kiki’s work has been exhibited worldwide and received international accolades. She currently lives and works between New York City and New York’s Hudson Valley.
on view
Ralph Stout
A persistent, voracious interest in the visual arts has informed Ralph’s skills as an abstract painter. His works refer to his career in mathematics and often examine the tension between the presumed foreground and background of a composition, the character of the curve, and edge of a straight line.Ralph graduated from Bucknell University in 1960 and currently lives and works in East Hampton, New York.
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past exhibitions
Kassandra Thatcher
Kassandra has been working within sculptural mediums — from clay to plaster to language — for the past 10 years. Inspired by the curvature of the female body and the space where limbs meet, Kassandra creates sculptural works and lamps born out of the abstraction of those shapes. The exploration of these transitional surfaces and joints creates a static gesture: an articulation of spatial relations between time, volume, light, and shadow. Mary collaborated with Kassandra to create one-of-a-kind lamp bases inspired by Edward Weston’s photographs of shells. In examining the photographer’s still-life work, Kassandra explored the process of intricately folding clay upon itself to produce organic and corporeal forms.
Kassandra graduated from Bard in 2016 with a concentration in the written arts. She currently lives and works between Los Angeles and New York City.
past exhibitions
Joann Verburg
JoAnn is a world-renowned photographer best known for her lifesize transportive diptychs and triptychs, which she shoots with a large format camera. JoAnn grew up in northern New Jersey and shot her first roll of film when she was six, developing a passion that was encouraged by her family. JoAnn and her husband spend extended periods of time in Florida and Italy, the latter of which has been a great source of inspiration for her work. She began taking pictures of olive trees near a home they rented there, which eventually became the project “Exploding Triptych,” 2000.
Currently living and working between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy, JoAnn has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, including those at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Kansas City Art Institute.
on view
Rae Wilson
Rae Wilson is a multimedia artist whose fluid practice explores ceramics, florals and movement. Less interested in perfection, Rae is instead attentive to nurturing space for growth. Rae’s process is devotional. By creating ritualistic “alters” to the natural world, she is at once celebrating faded objects of time, while offering something new and tangible.
Rae lives and works in Hudson, NY.
on view
Moran Woodworked
Interested in the interaction of natural and manmade worlds, Michael Moran, a woodworker and tree lover, and his partner Celia Gibson create pieces that are both elegant and honest, paying homage to the unique characteristics of the wood itself. The domestic hardwood trees used for Moran Woodworked’s custom, limited-edition furniture — as well as for Michael’s sculpture — each have their own story to tell, with each knot, curve, and bark inclusion honored as part of that story. Such care and reverence for materials encourage viewers to reconsider the ways in which they interact with, and often take for granted, the natural world.
Michael and Celia have been designing and building modern, yet traditionally crafted furniture since 2004 in their workshop and home in New York’s Hudson Valley.
past exhibitons
Jim Zivic
Jim’s approach to furniture design might best be described as "industrial" and "industrious." Born and raised in a small Ohio town, surrounded by strip mining and his family’s steel trucking business, he was inspired to create objects both useful and artistic. An introduction to architectural metal work in his brother’s Brooklyn, New York, welding shop led to Jim’s 1990s collaboration with clothing designer and artist Morgan Puett, wherein he built interiors for Morgan’s infamous Soho stores. With these projects, Jim began to integrate his signature materials — leather, raw steel, and felt — into architectural elements and furniture design, including a wall-to-wall Joseph Beuys-influenced leather floor for a Tribeca boutique.
Jim lives and works in New York. He has had two solo shows at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in New York City and been a selected participant in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s National Design Triennial.
