May 16 - June 28, 2026

Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 16th
5 - 7pm

THOSE WHO CAN

Curated by Joe Fusaro 

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 Yi 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), Yi 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!

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.