NOV 26 - DEC 24, 2022

“All art is a gift. The wonder of it is that we cannot get the production of these gifts stopped. It is our intractable expressions of love for the beauties, ideas and epiphanies we regularly find. I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.”

~ Vincent Van Gogh 

Featured Artists: Michael Lokensgaard, Arielle Toelke, Julie Hedrick, Jacinta Bunnell, Erica Hauser, Dylan Assael, Christin Ripley, Undine Brod, Lilah Friedland, Olga Joan, Buddy Valentine, Brianna McQuade, Ryan Cronin, Macoon, Mokshini, Cocorau, and others.

The gift is the seed-form of community. 

We end our years with rituals of gratitude to acknowledge and reaffirm our connection with others. 

We’ve been doing so for thousands of years. 

Indigenous communities across the world practiced the tradition of potlatch, where the breadth of one’s willingness to give re-affirms the wealth of the giver. 

Ancient Egyptians buried loved ones with goods and belongings required in the afterlife. 

This holiday season, “The Pleasure of Gift Giving” is a limited exhibition and craft marketplace by ArtPort Kingston offering encounters with the RIGHT GIFT – something uniquely yours to give. 

Artworks, Multiples, Handmade Objects, Silly Stuff, Strange Souvenirs, Small Drawings, and More…

From fun to function, this marketplace of the one-of-a-kind is here for you to discover your offering for this year, waiting to be spread into a world of friends, lovers, beloveds, strangers, family members, or to keep for yourself, because this is the season for SELF-LOVE, too.  

For this exhibition, the Cornell Steamboat Building will become a wonderland marketplace, reminiscent of time-old European, outdoor holiday markets. 

Twinkling lights will deck the halls. Steaming mulled-wine, hot cider and cocoa will be served. 

All the different holidays - Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, the Solstice -  come together as reasons to come together, all ritual reminders pointing towards more gratitude and connection. 

Here is our toast to one of life’s greatest pleasures, and our favorite time of year. 

Welcome to “The Pleasure of Gift Giving” at ArtPort Kingston. 

OCT 15th - NOV 13TH, 2022

FEATURED ARTISTS: Ann Tarantino, Jacinta Bunnell, Harrison Nir, and more.

The fall colors are seeping through the last of the summer’s green, and the whole of the Hudson Valley seems to be contemplating winter’s arrival early this year. 

“Outside In and Everything In Between” is a new installation series at ArtPort Kingston that participates and parallels the natural act of turning inward as the weather turns downward.

We are building up layers, as the natural order reminds us. 

Layers of leaves on the Earth.

Layers of textiles on our bodies.

Layers of mindful, reflective thoughts and emotions. 

As we prepare to layer on another year. 

Underneath the towering ceilings of the Cornell Steamboat building, smaller enclosures have been erected to house experiences where mediums such as sound, light, and textile come together to create intimate art-chitectures. 

Stepping into these various environments, visitors are invited to add a layer around themselves and their perspectives, turning a little further inward towards themselves, organically invited to rest and rejuvenate, before shedding that layer and returning into the expansive shell of the broader gallery. 

“Outside In and Everything In Between” offers a new way to experience ArtPort Kingston’s industrial gallery in the Cornell Steamboat Building and invites our visitors and community to consider art as a necessary, evocative part of creating layered spaces that facilitate the nurturing, reflective, seasonal processes vital to our wellness. 

July 15- September 11

“Secret Project Robot Country Club”, a cheeky caricature of Americana and a site specific fully interactive miniature golf course by Rachel Nelson and Erik Zajaceskowski of Secret Project Robot. The 9-hole course is fully “playable” with trophy paintings and prints available to all golfers. Expounding upon and revisiting their 2013 installation, the show is a cheeky play on Americana, country club life and childhood joy will feature heavily on floral psychedelia, environmentalism and consumer culture. Toying with the current political upheaval along the lines of “Make America Great Again,” the artists explore the question, what was ever really great about America?  From Wonder Bread to the opioid crisis, from mass pollution to corporatization, race riots to labor and class struggles, what exactly are we nostalgic for?  

Country Club, then plays with themes of wealth, inequality, the notion of golf itself as an elitist pass time where “the big decisions” get played out without consideration to the masses.  

 Giant flowers and products, butterflies and sea creatures, nature unhinged or fighting back? It’s psychedelic and dystopian, it is a diorama to walk through and putt at, a place to keep score and relax while the world as we know it unravels…

June 25- July 31

Shuffling Liminal Episodes features drawings by artists Leslie Kerby and Michelle Weinberg, whose works on paper and vellum resemble snapshots of settings, some of specific places, some imagined, capturing an arrested moment from daily life. Both storytellers at heart, the two artists draw objects as protagonists in their visual tales. A desolate bench, a studio table with a lamp, a tiny figure stepping out of a big house —random belongings, furniture, activities of daily life come to the forefront, projecting an inner life while also hinting at human life outside their inanimate existence—always with a lingering whiff of humor. Kerby and Weinberg also share a collage aesthetic which works well to unify their fragmented narratives.

The two artists say that the exchange of ideas and the discovery of commonalities has charged their practices and led to this exhibition. For instance, they have collaborated on an installation in which smaller framed works are mounted within larger backdrop drawings that de-construct aspects of their works. Loosely drawn pattern, geometric elements, fragments of plant life and texts form the backdrop for their individual works. “Is an image a centerpiece, a fixed icon? Or is it a rest stop on the way to the next place, beyond the border of the frame?” they ask.

Kerby and Weinberg say that they both enjoy the fluidity, swapping figure and ground, “shuffling images like cards in a deck, like tunes in a playlist.” Here, Kerby who usually tends to explore in her work social networks and systems, turns inward, to look at the interior spaces of her community. She says the paintings are an outreach to her friends during lockdown, when she asked them to contribute by sending photographs of relaxing places in their homes from which she painted detailed, personal observations of their surroundings. Outside, Kerby says she observed how traces of community re-arranged and interrupted by social distancing, “aware that this too is transient and will slip away.”

Weinberg compares her experience drawing to flypaper—a sticky surface, catching all manner of thoughts, objects, the world on her table. Drawing for her engages a literary feel, filled with flitting thoughts, including scribbled titles on the margins, text and image coalesce into one space. Architectural schemes invite the viewer to project their own experience into—re-arrange the objects on a table, open a door. The hand of the artist is visible through the graphite smudges and thumbprints on the white of the paper. In her drawings, “unserious volumes obey a playful physics."

July 15- September 11

“Wunder…the summer adventure,” a group exhibition traversing the personal and wondrous experience of summertime through pop culture laced with fantasy. Capturing the joy of being carefree, riding on Sophi Kravitz's unicorns or go for a swirl on the Sit & Spin, imagine the freedom of posing nude for a Spencer Tunick group photos, get lost in Jeila Guermian's magical knitted world, or take in journey hanging out with Danielle Klebes painted friends that occupy the gallery. ARTISTS:  Sophi Kravitz, Mary Ann Strandell, Jeila Gueramian, Kristen Schiele, Spencer Tunick, Suzanne Kiggins, Danielle Klebes, Suzanne Wright, Roxy Savage.