HVCCA: Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art

“I give my parking tickets to the police and they cover them,” Alison Levy said, pulling her car to a halt at the foot of a “No Standing” sign in Peekskill, close to a group of youths painting a psychedelic doodle on a concrete wall beneath the Route 9 overpass. “This project can only really happen because everyone in town is helping out.”

Ms. Levy, 26, is the coordinator of the Peekskill Project, a three-year-old citywide exhibition of up-to-the-minute art and performance by local, national and international artists. It has required the coordination of dozens of places, among them businesses, art galleries, public spaces, factories and other sites throughout the city.

“The response from the community, its business owners, residents and especially the City Council through Parks and Recreation has been overwhelming,” she said. “It is like everyone understands how important an event like this is for a regional community, both in terms of improving the quality of life and bringing outside visitors to the area.”

John G. Testa, Peekskill’s mayor, said more than 3,500 people, many from elsewhere, attended last year’s event. “For visitors, the event provided a wonderful occasion for an introduction to the city, its physical beauty, many shops and galleries,” he said, “while for residents it was opportunity to celebrate our community’s creativity.”

Inaugurated in 2004 to bring contemporary art out of museums and into the wider community, the Peekskill Project has rapidly become the largest single public-art and performance event in Westchester, according to Ms. Levy. This year, she said, over80 emerging and established artists from 14 countries will install work at 50 sites around Peekskill. There are also performances, artist talks and video screenings.

“What differentiates the Peekskill Project is that it provides a virtually open forum for many young and emerging artists to do projects that they might not otherwise have an opportunity to undertake anywhere else,” said Livia Straus, president and co-founder of Peekskill’s newly opened Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, which is the Peekskill Project’s lead sponsor and de facto administrative headquarters.

Ms Straus, along with Ms. Levy and Sarah Pasti, the art center’s executive director, have been working on the Peekskill Project since January.

“The first thing was to pick the curatorial advisers to recommend a theme,” Ms. Levy said. “Then we asked the advisors to recommend artists to participate who they thought would fit the theme, and we also did an open call. We received more than 60 proposals, most of which were accepted.”

Back down under the overpass, the artist Rachel Budde, with the help of two friends, is busy putting the finishing touches to her wheat-pasted, colored-paper wall drawing of a mythological tree of life with animals. “It’s based on a Native American myth about the Hudson River and the beginnings of civilization,” she said. Ms. Budde, 22, plans several more such drawings based on different parts of the myth, to be installed at sites around the city.

Ms. Budde is a member of Toyshop, a Brooklyn-based street art collective specializing in “guerilla” art interventions in the urban landscape. She was invited into the Peekskill Project by Amiel Melnick, a New York-based independent curator who is one of this year’s several curatorial advisors. “I knew Rachel’s work,” Ms. Melnick said, “and felt it would fit nicely into the theme.”

Titled “Ghosts of Peekskill,” the 2005 project focuses on site-specific artwork dealing with local history and memory. Consequently a number of the works explore Peekskill’s social, cultural and geographic history; among them a project looking at an Underground Railroad site and the excavation of a riverside portion of the yellow-brick road that is said to have inspired L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz.”

Another notable art project, extending into the spring of 2006, is Fred Holland’s installation of 5,000 keys collected from residents of the city. Mr. Holland, a New York-based conceptual artist, intends to embed them in a wall of plaster, awakening in viewers memories of their own past dwellings, generation change, time and transformation. Keys, like family photos or old furniture, are powerful triggers for nostalgia.

Back up Main Street, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art is concurrently presenting “Nostalgia,” a theme exhibition curated by Carmen Zita, which is addressing ideas of reminiscence, melancholy and longing in contemporary art. The artists showing here range from newcomers like Clare Woods and Dustin Yellin to veterans like Ann Hamilton and Mona Hatoum. It should be a great show.

In a lot adjacent to the arts center, the Westchester-based artist Laurel Garcia Colvin is working with local community groups to construct an ofrenda, or offering, an impromptu altarlike structure often found in Latin American villages and towns to remember ancestors, saints or lost loved ones, or to mark the sites of important events. The structure will commemorate the destruction by fire on this very site, late last year, of several cherished businesses employing a number of city residents.

The project also has a personal element for Ms. Garcia Colvin, whose studio in Austin, Tex., was destroyed by fire in the late 1980’s. There was a silver lining: she was pushed by circumstances to move to New York, where she has since prospered.

“I’m hoping this installation will provide a space for a collective community response to the memories of the shops and the people that worked here,” she said, “and also the community’s hopes and dreams for what the future space might become. It is not only about looking backwards but seeing how tragedy can create new opportunities.” Given events in New Orleans, it is a salient, timely message.

Return to Previous Page