July 11 - August 16

Opening Receptions:
Saturday, July 11
5 - 7pm

The Rake’s Progress

Brett DePalma

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

GARNER Arts Center is pleased to present The Rake’s Progress, a new exhibition and collection of work by Brett DePalma, as the artist applies sardonic satire to fulfill his self-obligated role as a “muck raker” and contributor of social commentary. 

Satire offers a way to critique, ridicule, or highlight societal issues, focusing on the absurdities and vices of individuals in power. In the enduring power and adaptability of the genre, the core purpose is to reflect, critique, and often challenge the status quo, using humor to understand the complexities of our society. 

Surreal elements are used to express complex emotional and psychological states.  Logic and conventional interpretation are jettisoned, inviting the viewer to delve into a deeper, more introspective understanding of the archetypal image.  These elements can be seen as metaphors for the inner turmoil and enlightenment that define the journey of the modern “rake.”

Artist Biography
Having shown nationally and internationally, Brett DePalma has also taught Advanced Painting at Princeton University and more recently served on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts.    He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education, and a BFA and MFA from Tufts University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 

Brett Depalma is a National Endowment for the Arts award recipient, and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Artforum, Arts Magazine, Flash Art,  and The Village Voice.

Collections Include: Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, The Permanent Collection of Hotel Chelsea, Moderna Kunsthalle, Eli Broad Family Foundation, Tennessee State Museum, and the Maier Museum at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA.

Exhibitions Include: Howl! Happening Gallery in NYC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Arnold Herstand Gallery; Tony Shafrazi Gallery; Fawbush Gallery; Anders Tornberg Gallery, Lund, Sweden; Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston; Emilio Mazzoli Gallery, Modena, Italy: Baron/Boisante Gallery; ; The Drawing Center; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Documenta 7, Kassel; Arch Gallery, Amsterdam; Jean-Marc Patras Gallery, Paris; Laforet Museum, Tokyo. 

Richard Alan Fox

Meditations and Reflections at Rockland Lake, 2011-2016

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

GARNER Arts Center is pleased to present Meditations and Reflections at Rockland Lake, an exhibition of photographs by Richard Alan Fox, whose artistic practice in photography and painting spans more than six decades. The exhibition features a selection of photographs created through Fox's ongoing fifteen-year engagement with Rockland Lake and its surrounding landscape.

Meditations and Reflections at Rockland Lake invites viewers into a quiet visual dialogue with nature. Fox explores the subtle changes that occur over time through carefully composed photographs of the lake's waters, the surrounding trees, shifting light, seasonal transformations, and reflective imagery. The exhibition reflects the artist's enduring commitment to capturing images that demonstrate the profound beauty found in mindful observation.

For more than fifteen years, Fox has undertaken a near-daily pilgrimage to observe and photograph Hook Mountain and the landscape surrounding Rockland Lake. His work focuses on the nuanced interplay of light, atmosphere, reflection, and seasonal change. The resulting images reveal a landscape in constant transformation while expressing a deep sense of continuity and presence.

"These photographs are an invitation to slow down and look," says Fox. "Through sustained observation, familiar places reveal unexpected depth, beauty, and meaning."

Fox's artistic journey began in New York City during the late 1960s, where he was influenced by Andy Warhol's investigations of repetition and variation. During his studies in San Francisco in the 1970s, he developed an interest in the evolving role of images in contemporary culture. These experiences informed a lifelong artistic practice that bridges traditional observation with contemporary visual inquiry.

His work has received significant recognition, including the acquisition of Salisbury Cathedral, England (1978) by The Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Ansel Adams, Paul Cézanne, and Katsushika Hokusai, Fox has developed a distinctive approach grounded in a deep engagement with landscape.

Now residing in Rockland County, Fox continues to explore themes of memory, identity, consciousness, and perception through both photography and painting. His work allows viewers to engage in opportunities for reflection, mindfulness, and connection with one’s surroundings.

September 19 - November 1

Opening Receptions:
Saturday, September 19th
5 - 7pm

Becoming Earth, Becoming Cosmos

Works by Bel Falleiros, Koyoltzintli Miranda, Jessica Maffia, Hanae Utamura

Curated by Bel Falleiros

Becoming Earth, Becoming Cosmos is a collaborative group exhibition that brings together four artists connected by geography (all living on the shores of the Hudson River, from Troy to Upper Manhattan) and by their connection to landscape, ancestral knowledge, and the cycles of life. How can we remember more embodied ways to relate and heal?

Their practices ask us to embrace all cycles of life (and death) so we can be present and actively engage with the issues of our current times. The show weaves their different media, backgrounds, and practices through interconnected work with nature and care, presenting a constellation of works as one and revealing the threads that connect us all.

Throughout the Main Gallery of Garner Arts Center, these four artists have created a site-specific installation of their individual works, both found and made. Surrounding the space, a collaborative new work utilizing sound has been created with the voices of the four artists. This work responds to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call: Could it be the hum of life being made and unmade, composed and decomposed? If we listen very hard, can we hear the soaring sunlit chords of photosynthesis, the countermelody of decay?

About the artists:

Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist living in the Lower Hudson Valley, NY,  whose practice focuses on place and belonging. She creates immersive, welcoming spaces to be in community with nature, with our inner self, and the other beings around us. She is a fellow artist of Sacatar Institute (2014), Pecos National Park (2016), Burnside Farm, Detroit (2017), Santa Fe Art Institute (2018/2025), Socrates Sculpture Park (2020), More Art (2021), El Espacio 23 / The55Project (2025). Solo-shows include: KinoSaito (2024), a commissioned work for the 37o Panorama of Brazilian Art at MAM-SP (2022), and Wave Hill’s Sun Room Project (2023). She served as Dia:Beacon’s artist-in-residence for the Teens Program (2021-2) and will be a fellow of the Recess Session Program (2026). She led embodied performances and workshops at the Tang Museum (2023), Dia Chelsea (2024), Ann Street Gallery (2025), and El Espacio 23 (2025). In addition to her studio practice, she participates in collaborative projects across the Americas, connecting art, community, education, and autonomous thinking.

Koyoltzintli Miranda is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Ulster County, NY. She was raised on the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains of Ecuador. Her work revolves around sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling, blending collaborative processes with personal narratives. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the UN, the Parrish Art Museum, Princeton University, the Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo. Koyoltzintli has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships, including at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA, We Women, the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), and most recently, the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) and included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer, former chief curator at BRIC. She is part of Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art. She performed at the Whitney Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Park, Brooklyn Museum, Dia Chelsea and at Ann Street Gallery, Newburgh, NY.

Jessica Maffia is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in New York City. In reverence and mourning, she honors the natural world of the city and its surroundings through repetitive, meditative processes. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and is currently represented by Pierogi Gallery. Maffia is the recipient of numerous artist residency fellowships, including fellowships at the Albee Foundation and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, as well as two grants from the Hells Kitchen Foundation. She created a permanent mural installation for the National Audubon Society’s Audubon Mural Project, installed a NYC Percent for Art permanent installation in a new public school, and most recently exhibited three of her “Soil Beings” at Smack Mellon.

Hanae Utamura is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist and an educator based in New York, Berlin, and Tokyo. Her work engages with historical memory, ecology, and technology. By decentralizing the human perspective and using the body as a conduit, Utamura diversifies historical narratives and enters the imagination of nature. She received her MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and her BFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Residencies and fellowships include: Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Art Omi (Hudson, U.S.), Santa Fe Art Institute (NM, U.S.), Aomori Contemporary Art Center (Japan), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Changdong Art Studio (Seoul, S.Korea), Seoul Art Space_GEUMCHEON (Seoul, S.Korea), Florence Trust (London, U.K.). She has been awarded the More Art Engaging Artist Fellowship, NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, Shiseido Art Egg Award (by the Japanese Ministry of Culture), the Pola Art Foundation, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary Award, and Axis/Florence Trust Award. Her was exhibited in Asia, Europe and the U.S. She was a visiting scholar at New York University in 2019.

Both

Works by Julia Norton

Curated by Bel Falleiros

Verdigris often forms on surfaces with an unnatural abundance of copper - usually on human-made objects such as rooftops, pennies, plumbing pipes, and the Statue of Liberty. The growth of verdigris has parallels to the much slower formation of the gemstones malachite and azurite, which form through copper sulfate in groundwater in the presence of oxygen and limestone. The patina of verdigris, which is present in much of the work in this exhibition, performs as the “exorcism of copper.” It manifests as part of an expedited acidic corrosion of a material, leading to the formation of another component that appears as the complementary color of its original self (orange to blue/green).

The work in Both acts as a metaphor for the evolution of human-made materials and the perceived binary of what is natural and what is manufactured. The work may lead us to question how we know materials we find in the world beyond the duality of “natural” vs otherwise. Can these seemingly separate categories overlap? Can they be both? Perhaps we redefine what “natural” might mean now that we have forever altered the course of what we would consider nature. This reexamination might help prompt a sense of care for the earth through understanding material and environmental manifestations and the undeniable consequences of our impact. The work in this exhibition addresses the effects of what we will leave behind on the planet and questions the assumptive distinction between the natural and the unnatural. The verdigris-covered copper sculptures, assemblage-style wall works, paintings created with verdigris, malachite, and azurite pigment, and other forms of documentation explore these themes through their materiality and context.

Julia Norton is a multimedia visual artist, educator, and researcher with a primary focus on natural materials. She works with imagery and materials that correlate with her interest in life cycles and regeneration. As an educator, she fosters creative exploration, self-determination, cultural connections, open inquiry, and a critical mindset with students of all ages and backgrounds. Besides being an artist-in-residence and showing her work in galleries, museums, and independent art spaces across North America, Mexico, and Europe, Julia teaches independent workshops and is a teaching artist at Dia Art Foundation, Swiss Institute, and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.