To House a River
An ephemeral art show with works and processes by:
Koyoltzintli, Sarah E. Brook, Lital Dotan, Kerry Downey, Alexis Elton, Shanti Grumbine, Rita Leduc, and Alison McNulty
November 1- 2, 2- 5 pm
Glasshouse Project, 257 Springtown Rd, New Paltz, NY 12561
Sarah E. Brook, Basin, video still, created on residency in Montello, Nevada, 2024 (courtesy of the artist).
To House a River is the culminating project of this year’s Conversation Lab Fellowship. Drawing on five months of conversations surrounding the theme 'A Permit/To Permit,' fellows, alumni, and co-hosts co-create an experimental conversation/exhibition that activates the abandoned Glasshouse site through installation, sound, and scent. This site-specific ephemeral show offers a glimpse into the process, with works spread throughout the house using wild clay, scents, salt, ice, paper, reclaimed wood, sounds, glass, and embodying the river. The fellows explore cultural and systemic limitations on who has access to what and why, and how normative cultural frameworks shape how we see, move, feel, and hear.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Glasshouse will be hosting a fundraiser with a silent auction at our Shed in the adjacent property at 251 Springtown Rd.
Conversation Lab was co-created by Lital Dotan and Shanti Grumbine. It was born out of a need for in-person connection, communion, and discourse in reaction to the isolation of the pandemic and the disembodiment of the internet. We are interested in the various artistic, personal, pedagogical, legal, and civic performances of conversation and how the vibrational space between is a seed for belief, movement, delineation, compromise, and invention.
Kerry Downey, Is It Raining In Your Bedroom, 2025, still from single channel video
Koyoltzintli
Align, enamel on glass, steel, 10' x 2' x 19', 2019. Permanent installation at Crystal Park in Holmes, NY.
Sarah E. Brook (b. 1981, Reno, NV) builds public artworks, sculptures and installations as both perceptual explorations and abstract narratives of identity. They have exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York: Lesley Heller, NY; Field Projects, NY; NARS, NY; Ground Floor Gallery, NY and the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, among others. New York solo exhibitions include Open Source Gallery, Turley Gallery, Sweet Lorraine Gallery, The Vanderbilt Republic and Greenpoint Gallery. Brook was also included in the 2019 BRIC Biennial in Brooklyn, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer and Jennifer Gerow. They were awarded the Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellowship, the Media Arts Fellowship from BRIC, and residencies from Montello Foundation, Stove Works, Marble House Projects, I-Park, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Jentel Foundation, Playa and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Select public artworks and large-scale commissions include: Viewfinding, a year-long installation and collaboration with queer poets, Riverside Park, NY, 2018-2019; Align, a permanent sculpture in Crystal Park, NY, 2019; Reach, Source, Level, a permanent work at City Harvest, a food justice organization in New York, 2022; and The Need You Know It Is A Letting Light, Lena Horne Bandshell, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 2022-2023, commissioned by BRIC. Brook currently lives and works in New York. sarahebrook.com/
Kerry Downey (b. Ft. Lauderdale, 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kingston, New York. Their practice explores embodied forms of experiencing, knowing, and transforming the world. Downey has exhibited at the Underdonk Gallery (New York, NY), Bard CCS / Hessel Museum (Annandale, NY); Queens Museum (Flushing, NY); Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY), Kate Werble (New York, NY); University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ), and Cooper Cole (Toronto, CA). Downey’s book, We collect together in a net, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2019. They are a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and they participated in the Queer|Art|Mentorship program (paired with Angela Dufresne). Artist-in-residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; Triangle Arts Association, Brooklyn, NY; the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, New York, NY; and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Their work has been in Artforum and The Washington Post and their writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Art Journal Open. Downey holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College. Downey is currently Guest faculty in Visual and Studio Arts at Sarah Lawrence College. kerrydowney.com/
Koyoltzintli is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Ultser County, New York. 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.koyoltzintli.com/
Rita Leduc is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative relationship with ecosystems informs additional relationships on human and societal scales. Recent sites of engagement include Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (NH), MacLeish Field Station (MA), and Nantucket Harbor (MA). Leduc has taught, shown, and communicated her practice widely, including exhibitions, publications, courses, and events at the Museum of the White Mountains (NH), Syracuse University (NY), The Nature of Cities Festival (Berlin), and Art.Earth’s “Sentient Performativities” (Dartington Hall, UK), among others. Leduc has attended several residencies and received support from entities including NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, Atlas Obscura, Oika, and Rutgers University. She is founder and director of GROUNDWORK and a member of The Place Collective. She teaches in Rutgers University’s interdisciplinary program, Creative Expression and the Environment. Leduc received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BA from the University of Pennsylvania. ritaleduc.com/
Alexis Elton is an artist working with site-as-material to form connections with plants, soil, and other living beings. Her work creates ephemeral sensory encounters where art and agrarian systems meet. Committed to exploring place, her work continues to take form through native seed-saving initiatives, farm and art education programs, and food production. Merging everyday tasks of land-based living with studio art sensibility, she creates opportunities to experience the natural world through physical labor, slowness, and the senses. Alexis earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has shown her work internationally and nationally including Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India; 5 x 5, Washington, DC; Kingston Sculpture Biennale, Kingston, and NY; 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM. She has received awards from Joan Mitchell Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, NYFA, and American Museum of Natural History, among others. Alexis lives in the Hudson Valley, NY. . alexiselton.com/
Alison McNulty is an artist, educator, curator, and gallery director based in Newburgh, NY. Her interconnected roles serve a collective spirit of community and co-mentorship that tends to the margins, values diversity and nuance, and includes the non-human world. Through all aspects of her work, Alison prioritizes embodied practices in knowledge and culture-making, offers an expansive and inclusive vision of where and how art might be experienced in the world and who it’s for, and works to compel meaningful engagements with art, each other, and the environment through deep modes of attention and care. Alison’s interdisciplinary research across and outside the arts is characterized by a poetics that strives to weave intellectual rigor with the somatic and mysterious. Through ephemeral and site-responsive artwork, Alison reveals layered histories, ecological entanglements, beauty, violence, loss, and playful absurdities embodied in ordinary reclaimed materials and precarious places. alisonmcnulty.com/
Shanti Grumbine is a New York-based multi-media artist. She has been an artist in residence at the Millay Colony, Ucross, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Saltonstall Foundation, Wave Hill Winter Workspace Residency, Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM), Women’s Studio Workshop, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, BRIC Workspace and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. Fellowships and grants include the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant, RVAC Money and Materials Grant, Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Grant,Taking Care Fund, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship and the LABA Fellowship at the 14th Street Y. Select exhibition venues include The Bronx Museum, Dorsky Gallery, Dorsky Museum, CCA Sante Fe, Love Apple Art Space, Magnan-Metz Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Planthouse Gallery, PS 122, Smack Mellon, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and IPCNY. Shanti received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. shantigrumbine.com/
Lital Dotan is a visual artist who organizes and writes of performance art. She is currently a doctoral fellow in Theatre and Performance Studies at CUNY Graduate Center. She works in live performance, as well as video, installation, and playwriting. Themes of socio-political conditions and the aspect of time as a form are significant concerns in each work and as a whole. She is the co-founder of Glasshouse Project, a performance art space that has supported performance artists continuously since 2007. Lital Dotan’s artworks and performances are exhibited in rural farms, deserted barns, ruins, and museums and galleries. She currently teaches in the Department of Theatre and Speech at The City College of New York (CCNY). litaldotan.com/
Glasshouse Project Inc. is a 501 (c) (3) registered non-profit dedicated to the research, preservation, and presentation of live art, with a focus on durational performance art. Glasshouse Project supports the process of live artists through a residency program, an event program, workshops, and publications. We work with a diverse roster of local and international artists and scholars to develop and sustain cutting-edge works of contemporary performance art.
‘To House a River’ is made possible by the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts.