Artists at Hawk & Hive
Scott Ackerman
Scott Michael Ackerman is a self-taught artist from upstate New York. Although he is not one for labels, Ackerman is known as an ‘Outsider’ artist because his unconventional and primitive approach to painting rejects the boundaries of traditional culture. Rather than start with a blank canvas, Ackerman prefers to use ‘found objects’ with rough character such as old wood, windows, and doors to help inspire him. Also unique to Ackerman’s personal style is his playful use of words in his artwork. His paintings are celebrated for being honest, raw, and relatable.
Currently living in Kingston, New York, Ackerman resides in an old church that also serves as his studio and gallery space.
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Steve Burnett
Steve Burnett, farmer, artist and free-wheeling word magician makes art that speaks to the human condition in all its foibles and wonders. Aside from his life on the farm, Burnett hosts local radio show "The Tickler" from Roxbury, where he interviews friends and neighbors with genuine warmth and mischievous wit.
He says "My work is of course all about me. The joy and terrors and yearnings of being alone. Its a conversation we all came to these mountains for. The quiet isolation that gives time and permission to look inward and then compels us to say hello when we see a fellow on that road."
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Kaitlyn Danielson
Kaitlyn Danielson is an artist based in Narrowsburg, New York. She holds a BFA in Photography & Video from the School of Visual Arts, where she was awarded the Alumni Scholarship and the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Students. In 2018, her work won the Abstract/Mixed Media category of PDN’s The Curator competition. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States.
Kaitlyn’s practice is rooted in older photographic processes and pushes the boundaries of these methods, both technically and conceptually. By merging historical photographic processes with modern technologies, she explores the monumental gap between the photographic past and present.
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Caroline Fay
Caroline Fay is an Irish artist living and working in Walton, NY. She received a BA in Fine Art from D.I.T. in Dublin, Ireland and studied painting at the the Art Students League of New York.
She has won multiple awards, including the solo award winner of the 2019 Decentralization (DEC) Individual Artist Grant from New York State Council on the Arts. In 2016, she was chosen to exhibit at the prestigious London Irish Art Exhibition at Westminster Abbey. Her work is represented in public and private collections in Europe and in the US.
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Noah Kalina
Noah Kalina is a photographer and filmmaker based in Lumberland NY. His books include Bedmounds and Tiny Flock. He was the primary photographer for Cabin Porn, which has been translated into several languages and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. His self-portrait project "everyday" has been viewed over 44 million times on YouTube and was parodied by the Simpsons.
Kalina's work had been exhibited internationally and is in numerous public collections. He also works as a commercial photographer and collaborators include Gucci, Snarkitecture, Google, General Electric and Disney.
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Parker Manis
Parker Manis was born in Columbus, GA. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design (2003-2007) and the Politecnico di Milano (2006-2007). Most recently, his work has been shown at Alfa Gallery in Miami and Equity Gallery in NYC. He currently lives and works in the Catskill Mountains, NY as an artist and visual concept designer in retail design, furniture, and fragrance design.
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Monica-Lisa Mills
Monica-Lisa Mills makes meditative art that often involves repetitive, abstract mark or shape-making using common or found materials like charcoal, oil, ink, tape, wax, thread and parts of musical instruments. The images and shapes reference horizon lines, heart monitors, seeds and bowls, breathing, and biological forms, many inspired by time spent in the west of Ireland and the western Catskills.
Monica has a background in theater and music, and an M.Div from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA, where she did a joint program with Harvard Divinity School, studying theology while immersed in studio art courses in drawing, painting and sculpture at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. She has spent several summers in residency at the Burren College of Art, in Co. Clare, Ireland.
She and her wife split their time between Brooklyn, where she works as a hospital chaplain, and Andes, NY.
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Melissa Murray
Melissa Murray is a representational painter who works from her home in the Catskill Mountains. Her new series "We breathe in, We breathe out" was made over the last 2 years when she moved Upstate from Brooklyn at the beginning of the pandemic. The work is a deeply personal exploration of her new rural life and consists of
large paintings that represent consecutive moments in a timeline and a series of
small works that capture singular moments throughout the day.
Emily Pettigrew
Emily Pettigrew is a representational painter, whose work is distinguished by a sparseness, subtlety, and timelessness; and emanates a quiet reverence for both history and nature. The aesthetics of Pettigrew's acrylic paintings, which often depict single figures and landscapes, were defined by her formative years in Maine, refined by study in the New York art scene, and are increasingly woven with the spirit of the Catskill mountains. Pettigrew explains: “My love for the starkness of the landscape of my childhood is reflected in a spartanism in my work. My foundational principle of painting is the removal of excess parts—a paring down to an image’s most beautiful elements.”
Pettigrew currently lives and works from her 1822 home in Delhi, NY.
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Guy Richards Smit
In a career that has spanned over two decades, Guy Richards Smit has turned to the sitcom, the pop song, the memento mori and the NY Times for inspiration. He now turns his eye to the lowly lot of the classic gag cartoon.
Always fascinated by the genre, in early 2020 Smit began creating them as preliminary sketches for a series of paintings, but found it so engaging he found himself making as many as he could and earnestly submitting them each week to the New Yorker, which in turn, each week rejected them. (Earlier this year Hyperallergic started running his art-related cartoons as a weekly feature and the New Yorker has finally relented.)
Marie Vickerilla
Marie Vickerilla is an abstract painter whose work has an affinity with sculpture. There is an archeology to her process of construction and excavation. By adding and then removing layers she is rediscovering earlier work across the painting and watching as new areas emerge and play against one another. The works, that are constructed and revised over many months, read like maps and divulge the story of their making.
Brigitte Bouquet
Dutch artist Brigitte Bouquet works in ceramics in combination with natural materials such as wood, linen, leather, paper, wool and hessian. She spent several years working as intern and assistant at various studios in the Netherlands before undertaking a course in ceramics at Lill Arts Center in Chicago. She has exhibited most recently at Glover’s Gallery and BWAC in Brooklyn, NY and the Hammond Museum in North Salem. She has created a range of dinnerware sold at the Brooklyn Museum Shop and handmade tile installations for BBTiles.
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Anthony Chase
Anthony Chase has been working with pigments, marble dust and Italian lime plasters for 25 years, creating artisanal wall finishes that stand alone as expansive, subtle works of art. Using the techniques he has mastered, Chase has now created a series of individual works, minimalistic and bold, that assert themselves through contrasting use of tone and abstract form. In these paintings Chase has disrupted the starkness of the minimal shapes with raked lines of textural beauty.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Chase moved to New York in 1982 and now resides in Delhi, NY
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Erika Ehrman
Erika Ehrman grew up in New York City and graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1988. She has worked for over 35 years in the advertising industry as a producer, creating campaigns and commercials for major companies including Swiss Air, American Express, Revlon and Bloomingdales. She went on to become a digital content producer working with the industries leading agencies. In 2002 she launched a jewelry company “Oscar and Nancy” selling to national and international companies including Barneys, Henri Bendels, Fenwicks of London and Mitsukoshi in Japan. Ehrman began painting and sculpting full time in in 2018 and most recently has shown her work at Guild Hall in East Hampton and the Bellport General on Long Island. Her solo show UN-SEEN is currently at Hawk + Hive.
Ann Lee Fuller
Ann Lee Fuller is a studio painter. Stylistically her work is a combination of the literal and the abstract. Her imagined sky and landscapes, painted in oils, are drawn from memory and experiences of different environments.
She lives and works from her homes in the Catskills and the Hudson Valley.
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Gary Gissler
For Gary Gissler language and text are both subject and medium. Harvesting words, lines and even whole chapters from works of literature and psychological sciences he re-types, cuts, weaves and positions text to create intricate artworks that question narrative and meaning.
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Zachary Lank
Zachary Lank (b. 1989) received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2012, and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2018. He has exhibited across the country from Hawaii to New York, most recently at Youngblood X Space Gallery St Barth, NYC, Spring/Break, NYC and Colganhi, NYC. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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Spencer Merolla
Spencer Merolla studied religion as an undergraduate and had embarked on a career in academia before returning to her first love, visual art. Her work has explored the social practice and material culture of grief through various affectively-charged materials. Merolla has shown nationally and in Europe, most recently at Artpoetica in Brooklyn and Corte Dell'Arte in Venice. Her work has been featured on Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, and The Creators Project.
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Joanna Murphy
American artist Joanna Murphy works in her Lower East Side, NY neighborhood and, what she describes as her “transcendental” studio in the Catskill mountains. Now a studio painter, she began her career as an “en plein air” landscape painter and her inspirations remain the same: the land, nature, animals and poetry. She is an alumnus of the Swain School of Design in New Bedford MA, where she received instruction from painter David L. Smith, himself a student of abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman. Murphy studied with Henry Hensche in Provincetown MA. Hensche instilled in his students a profound appreciation for the beauty of nature’s light and color. Henry Hensche studied with George Bellows and Charles Hawthorne's Cape Cod School of Art.
She was awarded a grant from the Gotltlieb Foundation and a Residency at Vermont Studio Center.
Her landscape murals can be found in several towns in the Catskill region and her paintings in numerous Upstate homes and private collections.
Gary Mayer
Gary Mayer has a long-standing love of literature. He has created a series of ‘Lit Portraits’ for the reading room at Hawk and Hive. He says “About 15 years ago I was commissioned to paint a 40 foot mural of authors through the ages. Since then I fairly often make drawings of the amazing faces of authors whose work I enjoy and admire. It’s very different from the large, abstract and complex paintings I create.”
Mayer, originally from Detroit, grew up in an artistic family, studied under Grace Hartigan at MICA and was associated with the Cass Corridor art group. Moving to NYC in the early 2020’s he has shown his work at galleries in Soho and the East Village before moving to Bovina in 2004. He has curated and exhibited at Greenville and Longyear galleries.
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David Young
David Young's career-long interest in emerging technologies has informed and guided his artistic practice. He has a created a series of images depicting dandelion heads that have been re-interpreted using Artificial Intelligence machine learning technology.
In his essay "Little AI", Young writes: "What I've discovered through the process of helping the machine to learn nature, is that it is a symbiotic process. The "artist" must tune the imagery that's put into the "machine" to craft its interpretation of nature. And the artist must continue to select the work the machine creates (much like a photographer would use a contact sheet) in order to make the most unique, and frankly beautiful, interpretations of the natural world."
Young created this series at his farmhouse in Bovina, NY.