On View

THOSE WHO CAN

Curated by Joe Fusaro 

May 16 - June 28, 2026

Gallery Hours:
Thursdays 4 - 8pm
Fridays 2 - 5pm
Saturdays & Sundays 1 - 5pm

GARNER Art Center is pleased to host its first national exhibition of artist-educators from across the United States and Canada. This gathering of 29 talented artists who teach students of all ages is an opportunity to see art educators as professional artists with practices that extend beyond their teaching and often inform it.

This exhibition will include artists such as Yikui (Coy) Gu, who centers his Chinese immigrant experience as an entry point into exploring contemporary American society, and collaborative art makers such as Whoop Dee Doo, who create performances and inspire meaningful conversations that bring communities together.

Artists such as Marie Elcin utilize plein air painting as a way to be outdoors more often, focus on observation, and find good reasons to travel beyond her hometown of Philadelphia. In contrast, artists such as Shelby Smith focus on more formal qualities and constructions, using non-traditional approaches to sculpture, such as wire dipped in Porcelain clay.

Artists featured in THOSE WHO CAN include: Mary Boo Anderson (CA), Nathan Asplund (CA), Jeannine Bardo (NY), Marie Elcin (PA), Gregg Emery (NY), Alicia Gifford (FL), Mary Goldthwaite (NH), Dennis Greenwell (WA), Yikui (Coy) Gu (PA), Dana Joy Helwick (NY), Jeanne Hoel (CA), Sarah Kolker (PA), Andrea Mancuso/virocode (NY), Jennie Maydew (IL), Danielle McDonald (NY), Alex Mendez (IL), Ariana Mygatt (MD), Hugo Rojas (NY), Jocelyn Salaz (NM), Robb Sandagata (MA), Nikki Sandschaper (NY), Julia Soderholm (CAN), Shelby Smith (HI), Sean Sweeney (CT), Ty Talbot (WA), Jack Watson (NC), Catherine Walker (LA), and Whoop Dee Doo (USA).

The stories and fascinating details about each artist in the exhibition are collected in the THOSE WHO CAN exhibition catalogue, designed by Reid Parsekian, and available at the gallery or by ordering a copy during the course of the show.

For advance copies, please email joe@garnerartscenter.org

THOSE WHO CAN will open during the 25th Anniversary of the GARNER Arts Festival, an extraordinary, multi-sensory arts and cultural destination in the lower Hudson Valley featuring immersive art experiences on a landmark pre-Civil War textile factory complex turned arts & artisan campus. This beloved, family-friendly festival celebrates creativity in all its forms and will feature numerous attractions over the weekend, including children’s activities, live music, local food vendors, and more! Come for the festival beginning at 11am on Saturday, May 16, and then attend the opening reception from 5-7pm to talk with many of the artists exhibiting!

SPECIAL Exhibitions
By Appointment Only
and for
Upstate Art Weekend

KRIS CAMPBELL

Made the USA

Building #3D 2nd Floor

MADE THE USA is a series of large-scale cross-stitch tapestries—monumental, unapologetic, and far from traditional needlework. Each towering 20- to 30-foot piece highlights a plant that played a pivotal role in shaping the United States’ economy, fueling the nation’s ability to claim independence from Great Britain. Yet these same crops thrived on the forced labor of enslaved people, embedding a history of exploitation into the very foundation of American prosperity.

Our nation’s history is rooted in plants. The USA was able to break from Great Britain because of the immense wealth these crops generated. But that wealth was built on brutal, inhumane labor. How do we, as a nation, integrate this truth into our understanding of who we are? Can we acknowledge it, stand with integrity, and move forward without making amends? Or does recognizing our roots demand something more—an obligation to act? When I apologize personally, I don’t just acknowledge; I seek forgiveness and take action to show I mean it. Can we do that collectively, as a nation? As a state? As a country?

THERESA GOOBY

Skirt

Building #5 2nd Floor
Frank Welles Gallery

Layers of paper from sewing patterns suspended in ghostly forms that move as you move around them. Visitors are invited to walk amongst the forms and watch the works gently respond. These works are made with human scale in mind, most are between 5 to 8 feet high. Skirt touches on themes of labor, domesticity, femininity, and memory.  

WAYNE ENSRUD

The Open Eye of Wayne Ensrud

Painting Survey in Dye Works Gallery

May 16 - June 29 2026

Curated by Jonathan Shorr

Painting Beyond Style. Beyond School. Beyond History.

There are painters who master a style. There are painters who define an era. And then, perhaps once in a century, there emerges an artist like Wayne Ensrud — a creative force so instinctively gifted, technically fearless, and spiritually expansive that he absorbs the entire nervous system of modern and contemporary painting and returns it transformed into new consciousness.

Wayne Ensrud belongs in the living lineage of Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Ben Shahn, and Buckminster Fuller, yet he stands radically apart from them because he refused permanence inside any single visual language. He entered directly into the psychic architecture of the twentieth century’s greatest artistic minds, studied alongside them, befriended them, penetrated their oeuvres from the inside out, and then moved beyond them into territories no painter had fully mapped before.

For further information and images contact GARNER Arts Center Curator at Large at jsgalleryinfo@gmail.com

By Appointment Only upon request by email: jsgalleryinfo@gmail.com and call/text: 646-821-7095

Rhea Marmentini

Bird Motion Project

Immersive convergence of Monumental Paintings, Sculpture, Estofado, Ceramics, Live Marble Sculpting & Projected Painting Animations with C51N05

Curated by Jonathan Shorr

May 16 - June 29 2026

At the 2026 Garner Arts Festival, Rhea Marmentini arrives less like an exhibiting artist and more like a geological event. In Building 5, 2nd Floor, Marmentini unveils her monumental Bird Motion Project—an immersive convergence of colossal paintings, white marble sculptures, ceramic works, and projected painting animations co-directed with animation artist C51N05. Outside, beside the waterfall, she will sculpt stone live in real time, transforming raw matter into myth before the public’s eyes.

Marmentini’s practice exists in the rare territory where ancient civilization, industrial force, and ecstatic imagination collide. A stone sculptor trained in Hungary and France and spiritually linked to the lineage of monumental European sculpture; she approaches marble not as passive material but as compressed time itself. “I see sculpting as a silent form of making music,” Marmentini writes. “Stone is a dense, massive accumulation of millions of years—a physical manifestation of time itself.” Her live carving performance at Garner makes that philosophy physical. Audiences will witness the passion, discipline, rhythm, and transcendence of direct sculpting as marble, dust, gravity, and human force converge beside the rushing waterfall.

For further information and images contact GARNER Arts Center Curator at Large at jsgalleryinfo@gmail.com

By Appointment Only upon request by email: jsgalleryinfo@gmail.com and call/text: 646-821-7095

Installation

JOHN MORTON

Minisceongo Overlay

GARNER Arts Center proudly announces the official opening of Minisceongo Overlay, a semi-permanent outdoor sound installation by acclaimed composer and sound artist, John Morton. Situated on a pedestrian walkway and commercial bridge overlooking the Minisceongo Creek within the GARNER Historic District complex, this immersive work invites visitors to experience the creek as both a musical instrument and conduit to the voice of nature.

This project was is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.