In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts (TCFA) is set to host a special exhibit titled "Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts: Past, Present, Future." The exhibit will run from February through March 2024 in the main gallery of TCFA, showcasing the i…

As a new arrival in Ithaca in 2004, Carol Hockett reached out to me to volunteer with young people living behind bars in New York State Office of Children and Family Services limited and maximum secure facilities. She had tutored for years in facilities and knew she wanted to do the same kin…

The Cortland Repertory Theatre is announcing its 11th Annual Little York Fall Fiber Arts Festival, to be held on Saturday and Sunday, October 14 and 15. This fine arts and crafts festival will be held in and around the Little York Pavilion in Dwyer Memorial Park at 6799 Little York Lake Road…

The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University has towered above Ithaca since it opened atop East Hill on May 23, 1973. Over the last 50 years, the museum has brought a little bit of culture and history from across the globe to the City of Gorges.

On walks through downtown Ithaca, it’s hard to miss the litany of painted murals, street art, and graffiti lining the walls of the city’s many buildings authored by the expansive community of artists and creatives who call Ithaca home. The first inaugural Arthaus Residents and Allies Exhibit…

Over the past two weeks, Ithaca celebrated Pride Month with its most centralized and expansive event series to date. Ithaca Pride Week, produced by a committee of local organizers in collaboration with the Downtown Ithaca Alliance, included over 20 events, from parties and parades to book cl…

When it comes to contemporary painting, abstraction and the human body may come across as polar opposites. Conceived of as a radical departure from both Western tradition and quotidian reality alike, abstract painting may be seen to aim for raw subjectivity absent of ordinary human subjects.…

Existing somewhere between the bespoke, one-of-a-kind objects of painting and other traditional artforms and the disembodied nowhere lands of contemporary mass media, printmaking as a fine art offers an affordable, unpretentious — and yet distinctly tactile and present — form of artmaking. L…

Comics are a deep love of mine. So much so that I became a professional cartoonist – working in both comics and animation. Thus, I’ve always loved comic book conventions. And, astonishingly, Ithaca, N.Y. (a small city of 30,00 souls) hosts an annual comic book convention – the Ithacon. And I…

“Behind the Wall”, a traveling art exhibition that is made up of creative works by incarcerated people, will be showcased at the Tompkins County Public Library for the entire month of February. 

For many years, Handwork has offered window displays to help promote community events, fundraisers, and visiting artists. Within the past two years, the co-op has designated a window specifically for artists that are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). The shop has featured the w…

Much of the best contemporary figurative painting strikes a balance—often precarious, filled with ambiguities—between a narrative, storytelling impulse and the physicality of paint and color arranged on canvas or other support. Painting and drawing may seem archaic in a visual culture domina…

The latest, characteristically ambitious group exhibition at Corners Gallery takes inspiration from Katharine Harmon’s 2009 book “The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography.” Out-of-print but well worth finding, the anthology presents work by a wide range of painters, sculptors…

A dynamic new installation will open in the Community Arts Partnership’s ArtSpace in January featuring the mental health stories of ten local youth.

The owners of 15 Steps craft and jewelry store on the Commons honored New Roots Charter School freshman Ayden Githinji by inviting her to be a featured artist in their store after seeing her jewelry on display at the Youth Entrepreneurship Market (YEM) during the recent Downtown Ithaca Allia…

The artistic work of Ithaca resident Brian Keeler spans over four decades and in his recent book titled Light on the Figure: Aspects of Painting People, it includes many oil paintings, as well as pastels, watercolors, drawings and etching. The book was released in late spring and features li…

Like the Community School of Music and Arts in Ithaca, the Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts (TCFA) is a somewhat unusual venue for visual arts exhibitions. As a home for the various arts, gallery shows have to jostle for time and space with music and dance performances, as well as vario…

25 years after Jacob Hascup painted the “Where the Wild Things Are” mural on the side of 301 Taughannock Blvd, Cornell University student of Fine Arts Chloe Mako has given it new life.

The sad truth about art in Ithaca is that the most vital work often goes unseen by the broader gallery-going audience and, when it is seen, it goes unrecognized for what it is. Too many, working artists most egregiously, lack the imagination or the context or the patience to grasp something …