April 30th-May15th, 2016
Open Hours: 12-6 pm (Fri-Sun)
Opening Reception: Saturday April 30th, 4-6 pm
Place: Thornwillow Press Inc.
Add: 7 S Lander St, Newburgh, NY 12550

Re-juvenation is a site-specific art exhibition and art intervention staged within the city of Newburgh, NY. Conceived as an invitation for artists to use the city’s urban fabric as a medium, Re-juvenation examines the adaptive reuse of architectural space and community-driven initiatives for neighborhood revitalization.

Re-juvenation features a wide variety of painting, sculpture, photography, site-specific installation, video, sound, and performance art presented in non-traditional spaces. The organizers of this exhibition hope to explore the potential of public spaces for artistic activities, and to empower artists and creative individuals to realize their potential as agents of change within communities.

The exhibition venues, ranging from lobbies and tunnels to streetscapes and open spaces, pose
numerous site-responsive challenges and opportunities for experimentation. Re-juvenation brings
together artists, architects, urban planners, community organizers and local residents to investigate, imagine, and activate futures for Newburgh in these spaces.

Using the city as a stage, Re-juvenation aims to engage the urban environment and its relationship
to its diverse and evolving communities through site-specific art exhibitions. The artists, working in the Greater New York City region, are committed to exploring the specific urban context of Newburgh, and the possibilities of regeneration through collaborative engagement with those driving the current arts-based urban redevelopment of the city.

Re-juvenation will open with an evening of community centered programming on April 30th, 2016, engaging local residents through a series of artistic activities, discussions, and workshops.

Participating artists: Alison Kuo + Williamson Brasfield, Lizzy De Vita, Leah Dixon, Molly Haslund, Wieteke Heldens, Tuo Wang, Wei Xiaoguang, 100DAS Team, UD Team Alison Kuo primarily makes performance art with food that is interested in social interaction and edible glitter. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY, and a BA from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. Kuo is the Art Editor at the Brooklyn literary magazine GIGANTIC, and the creator of the popular blog Accidental Chinese Hipsters. Currently, she’s teaching a workshop on performative cooking and dining at the Abrons Art Center in NYC.

Williamson Brasfield (b.1983, Palo Alto) is an multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, sound installation, and photography. He received his MFA from Yale School of Art, and his BFA from
Pennsylvania State University. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Lizzy De Vita is a sculptor whose work focuses on the structure and language of relationships. Raised in Pittsburgh, Lizzy received a BA from Barnard College in English Literature and Art History, and more recently an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. De Vita’s work creates small catastrophes, situations where the world does not follow our assumptions of relationality – “I am inside, so that, out there, is outside” – and so allows us to see them as fragile, porous, impermanent.

Leah Dixon’s work addresses labor, formalism, and political correctness via a highly physical processes. She creates refined, yet deconstructed sculptures, which culminate in diverse social interactions with these constructed physical objects and spaces. Dixon has shown widely nationally
and internationally- most recently at The Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, CA, and in The 2016
Nicaraguan Biennial of Contemporary Art in Managua, Nicaragua. She has an upcoming show at Edel Assanti Gallery in London, as well as projects in Berlin and New York. Dixon received her BFA from The Ohio State University in 2005, her MFA from The School of Visual Arts in 2015, where she was a departmental fellow. Leah also attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. Dixon is the co-owner of Beverly’s Bar and curatorial platform in Lower Manhattan, where she is the Creative Manager and curator.

Molly Haslund uses various strategies to explore how ideas, identities and social hierarchies are intimately connected and negotiated. Through bodily gestures, rituals, social designs, and arrangements of our physical surroundings, she incorporates musical compositions, sound, lectures
and objects into interdisciplinary performances and installation works.

Wieteke Heldens was born in Ottersum, The Netherlands in 1982. Heldens works in the medium of painting. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague in 2007. She lives and
works in New York and in The Hague.

Tuo Wang has developed a process combining interview, performative editing and the theatre of absurd to construct a maze of melodramas. Through the manipulation of individuals’ experiences
and intervention in intellectual legacies, Wang’s work attempts to examine the unreliable relationship between the contemporary human status, myth and established cultural archive.

Wei Xiaoguang (b.1986, Inner-Mongolia Province, China) received his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing China and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. Mining pop culture, art history, and commercial advertising for his source material, Wei Xiaoguang creates paintings with a photographic clarity and realism that belies their complex layers of visual and conceptual contradictions. He lives and works in New York.

This exhibition is organized by Zhuoran Zhao, curated by Naiyi Wang, and co-curated by Wei Xiaoguang, Chenxing Li, Cameron Dean Cortez. Academic Advisor: David Smiley, Associate Director of Urban Design Program (MSAUD), Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP); Justin Garrett Moore, Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Design Program (MSAUD), Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP); Lee Altman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Urban Design Program (MSAUD), Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)

Re-juvenation is supported, in part, by the Urban Design Program (MSAUD) at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Thornwillow Press Ltd., 100DAS, and Newburgh Last Saturdays; with generous support from City of Newburgh, Newburgh Community Land Bank, Arts Along the Hudson, Newburgh Restoration, Newburgh Brewing Company, Wherehouse.

For more information on Re-juvenation, including scheduling information, please visit re-exhibitions.com or contact us at re.exhibitions@gmail.com.