GALLERY HOURS: W, Th, F 2-7pm & Sat. 12-4pm

A Hmong grandmother with sacred strings of good will

An award-winning photographer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, Mike Greenlar traveled 10 times to a remote mountain region of Laos to document the effects of cluster bombing on the Hmong people. The US covert bombing campaign, between 1964 and 1973, gave Laos the distinction of being the most bombed country in the history of warfare — over two million tons of ordnance was dropped.

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Veterans Reclaiming Their Lives Through Art

Celebrating our 5th Anniversary, we have brought COMBAT PAPER back to Syracuse! An earlier version of this exhibit featuring images on paper made out of shredded combat uniforms was our Grand Opening exhibition in October 2008. The Combat Paper project began as art therapy utilizing paper as its medium and has been generating hope and inspiration for war veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan and yes…Vietnam.

While anti-war activists are portrayed as unpatriotic and focused only on the negative, the project has proven to have a positive impact on veterans, serving as a visceral statement of the long lasting effects of combat and as a catalyst for community discussion and activism. The art comes to us from all across this country with a special nod to the work from the Combat Paper Studio in Ithaca, New York.

A companion piece to the paper-making project is the Warrior Writers’ Project where veterans are encouraged through workshops to write about their feelings since coming home. The words have been printed on hand-made combat paper and bound into books. This project provides an opportunity for veterans to come together and connect, reconcile and heal through sharing their words with each other. We will feature a Warrior Writers’ event and journal making workshop with vets from Ithaca during the exhibition.

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Tied Up in Red Tape © Pamela Palmer 2012

Splitting of the Land © Sharon Bottle Souva 2013

Spoken Threads is a collection of fiber art that takes its inspiration from the traditional women-made crafts such as quilting, knitting, weaving, sewing and cross-stitch. It features women atists from across the USA, including Central New York, as well as those from Canada and the UK who use their art to speak wisdom on a variety of social and environmental issues. During the time of year that many consumers reach for something mass-produced off an end-cap display, this exhibition is a celebration of the handmade.

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Vernacular Photographs From the Collection of Dan Lenchner

Dan Lenchner’s collection of photos of Third Reich life makes the power of the “uncanny” visible.  They are both strange and somehow familiar, these snapshots:Nazi officers at family picnics, weddings and christenings, relaxing off-duty and courting their sweet-hearts, along with mischievous boys at Hitler Youth summer camps, smiling nurses, teen-age girls practicing their goose-step, nuns posing with former students in uniform. Here are the threads in the fabric of a nation given over to war, close to 70 years ago. Still we struggle with what to make of their deeds, which lie so outside the frame. Lenchner, a photographer himself, is acutely attuned to this quality about the truth of any image.  His book quotes Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, that the “trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him…terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

Curated by Nancy Keefe Rhodes.

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Forclosure © Max Ginsburg 2011

Max Ginsburg is a New York City artist with a conscience who earned his BFA from Syracuse University. He is regarded as one of the most respected and accomplished contemporary realist painters who paints the provocative issues of our time to comment on issues of class, gender and race.  A Social Realist, he is outraged by war, the hypocrisy of our leaders and the social policies of a government leaving its’ people behind. His concern for social justice makes him a humanist but not a sentimentalist.

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Proof through the Night © Paul Pearce 1986

Proof Through the Night is a retrospective of traditional silver-based photography and lithographs by Paul Pearce, a certified disabled combat veteran who now declares himself to be a “backward observer”. His photography focuses on issues of war and morality and questions the very notion of civilization. In his words about what inspires him to photograph he states: “In spite of growing cynicism, I have a calling to declare a point of view, a mandate to cry out that (in my opinion), the sky is falling, and a gnawing need to expose a system that turns innocent children into monsters.”

Pearce was raised as an All-American boy, Sunday school attendee and college-bound Eagle Scout. He was drafted into the Army, commissioned as an artillery Lieutenant and ordered into combat in Vietnam as a forward observer with the 114th infantry. He returned from the war motivated to raise consciousness about the evils of war. Armed with a camera and a printing press he taught himself photography, struggled for peace and justice as an artist and anti-war activist, and participated in and documented antiwar protests including the massive action in Syracuse following the killings at Kent State.

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