For the BAU Invitational, each member of our gallery has selected an artist whose work they admire to participate in a vibrant exhibition that spans painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper. The resulting exhibition features a broadly diverse set of 14 contemporary artists, most of whom have never exhibited at BAU Gallery. "Through the BAU Invitational, our gallery honors its commitment to creating a more inclusive platform for emerging and established artists alike," says BAU president Robin Adler. "Shows like this foreground works that speak to critical artistic and social concerns and encourage meaningful dialogue among artists and visitors to our space." Invited artists: Julia Arstorp, Gülnar Babayeva, Paola Bari, Carol Bouyoucos, Elvira Clayton, Denise DeVore, Kristin Flynn, Meg Hitchcock, Bibiana Huang Matheis, Qiana Mestrich, Anette Millington, Allyson Montana, Thomas (T-Bone) Muniz, and Samantha Palmeri.

Soli Pierce’s new exhibition, Stillness Speaks, brings together long-exposure photography, encaustic painting, and sculpture in a meditation on light, time, and presence. Across these practices, Pierce seeks a "still point"—an anchoring force within an often-fractured world. Embracing duration, materiality, and quiet transformation, the work reflects on vulnerability, grief, and the enduring potential for resilience. Stillness Speaks honors stillness as a way of navigating uncertainty and reawakening vitality and possibility. The installation invites a reverence in which light operates as both medium and metaphor, in which Pierce opens a space for quiet contemplation.

About the artist: A 2025 Artist-in-Residence at KinoSaito (NY) and Jentel (WY), Pierce recently collaborated with sonic artist Bruce Odland on Sound Forest, presented at the Hammond Museum, ArtsWestchester, and KinoSaito Arts Center (2024–2025). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Ars Electronica, with exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe.

The paintings and objects in Surprise Garden take viewers on a search for undiscovered meanings and stories, one that mirrors the artist's own. Through her process-based practice grounded in paint, paper, fabric, and repurposed items, Allen creates a journey into a personal and idiosyncratic "garden" of painting. “My images are dreamlike, as in a Chagall-esque garden," she says. "My imagination peers in from atop a wall of limitations.” Surprise Garden, Allen's third solo at BAU, nurtures a space of memory, loss, and trauma, with an underlying beauty that remains too often veiled from our view in a world of competing narratives.

About the artist: Karen Allen has a BFA from Syracuse University and did postgraduate studies with intaglio printmaker Ruth Leaf and painter Jenn Wiggs. She has exhibited her work at Prince Street Gallery, ArtsWestchester, Upstream Gallery, and Silvermine Gallery, among other venues. Her 12-by-25-foot muralGarden Passage, is on permanent display outside the Jeanette J Phillips Health Center in Peekskill. Her work has also been recognized by the Southern Vermont Art Center and Bethany Arts Community. Allen is a member of Netvverk artist community. She maintains her studio in Verplanck, NY.

Nate Hill's inaugural exhibition at the gallery, The Loop Trail, presents a series of biomorphic wooden sculptures created from locally sourced walnut trees, either scavenged from roadsides or shared by arborist friends. Hill envisions each piece as an "actor" in a role familiar in a forest ecosystem: grazer, producer, decomposer. Together, they connect, create, and play out different scenes within imagined systems and potential futures. Often, they collaborate and work in harmony, but sometimes they get caught in difficult scenarios or spend too much time on one thing. Through their presence in his studio, the actors became co-designers of additional sculptures in the exhibition, made from paper pulp, light, wool, lenses, found objects, and other materials. 

About the artist: Nate Hill’s work spans painting, sculpture, installation, and social practice. Nate is a librarian, artist, and aspiring ecologist. He is a member of the Katonah Museum Artists Association, and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Dokk1 (Denmark). Nate was a past affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, past participant in the International Network of Emerging Library Innovators (INELI) with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he is currently a program affiliate scholar at the Engelberg Center at New York University. Nate has a BA from Skidmore College and an MS in library and information science from Pratt Institute.

 A call to action, a spiritual goal, a plea—"awaken" has a rich set of meanings, all of which seem right for this moment. In this exhibition of photography, drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, BAU artists explore the many ways we can awaken to the world around us, from profound sensory awareness to engagement with pressing issues. Whether offering deep insight into the natural world, a reflection on social concerns, or a still and solitary form, the works are a collective call to viewers to reflect and respond. Participating Artists: Robin Adler, Karen Allen, Bob Barry, Joel Brown, Dan Florin, Nate Hill, Nataliya Hines, George Kimmerling, Linda Lauro-Lazin, Nansi T. Lent, Síle Marrinan, Soli Pierce, Eileen Sackman, and Ilse Schreiber-Noll. Visit https://www.baugallery.org/artists-current for artist information.

George Kimmerling's latest project explores the cultural landscape of Denning’s Point, a 64-acre site on the Hudson River in Beacon. Now a state park, Denning’s Point has a complicated—and distinctly American—history. Once owned by Dutch enslavers, Denning's Point is indelibly marked by racial and class conflict, unbridled industrialism, and environmental degradation. This exhibition includes new black-and-white landscape photographs, works based on archival materials, and studies for new historical markers. Kimmerling hopes the project begins to express a more holistic, inclusive, and complex understanding of this and similar sites as deeply contested and embedded in the social structures that have shaped them and that lie at the core of U.S. history.

About the artist: George Kimmerling's work has been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and numerous galleries and nonprofit spaces across the U.S. and internationally. He has a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art and an MFA from RISD. He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and has had residencies at the PS1/MoMA National Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony. His work is represented in both public and private collections, including at the New Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art archives, and West Collection. He has taught/lectured at the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, RISD, Hunter College, and McMaster University.

For Robin Adler, storytelling is the most powerful way for people and cultures to share information and gain insight. Her new exhibition, In the Future When We Can See the Past, celebrates stories as steppingstones that help us clarify who we are and where we need to go. Her large-scale monotypes ask: How do we face the current crises? Since we live in the footprint of other civilizations, what lessons do we learn from stories of the past? Thus, in her Pompeii series, Adler invokes stories pieced together from a civilization changed in an instant. What can we learn from the ashes once we uncover them? In Adler’s The Crescent Moon Bear series, each challenge met by the protagonist is an opportunity for a deeper level of insight. About the artist: Robin Adler's work has been featured at numerous galleries, including the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Equity Gallery, Limner Gallery, and the Lockwood Gallery. Adler is a member of the Spliced Connector and The Drawing Galaxy art collectives. Her work can be seen online at Artsy.net and in the Visionary Art Collective directory. Additionally, she has been featured recently in Create! Magazine (issue 41), Dutchess Magazine (spring 2025), and Hyperallergic (December 2025). She was a 2024 resident at Chautauqua Visual Arts in 2024. Her work is in private collections across the United States. President of BAU Gallery, Adler lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Bob Barry works primarily in ceramic sculpture, exploring humanity’s fractured relationship with the natural world and our growing distance from its rhythms. Through clay, he seeks to honor nature and create spaces to hold memory and myth. In The Past Future,an exhibition of new work, Barry continues to explore themes he pursued in his last two BAU solos (Florescence presented flowers gone wild, evoking abundance, disorder, and nature unchecked; The Other World reimagined through a contemporary lens animal forms influenced by ancient Mayan, Inca, and Pueblo traditions). Here, Barry focuses on the delicate veil that separates our present reality from the natural and spiritual worlds. His art reflects a longing for reconnection—a recognition that the boundary between human and nature is far thinner than we acknowledge.

About the artist: Bob Barry is a ceramic sculptor, functional ceramic artist, and photographer based in High Falls, New York. A retired professor and former chair of Visual Arts at Long Island University, Brooklyn, he has exhibited internationally and completed artist residencies in Japan, France, and the United States. He has shown at BAU Gallery since 2024.

This series reflects Susan Ziegler's ongoing meditation on nature within the urban environment through a process-based practice of painting and printmaking. Her work begins with drawing from observation, sketching elements such as patterns of shadow and light, plants, and architectural forms. Through a combination of monotype, painting, and collage, she
layers these elements, creating a continual push and pull between the role of chance and a search for
balance and visual harmony. Inspired by Olivia Laing’s book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, the work reflects Ziegler's sense of wonder and hope alongside a feeling of uneasiness in the current climate. She aims to capture the complexity, delicacy, and dynamism of her surroundings through abstraction.

About the artist: Susan Ziegler earned a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Ziegler has presented her work at the One River School of Art + Design, Long Island University, Gross McCleaf Gallery, Nahcotta, the LBI Foundation of Arts and Sciences, Hayes Valley Art Center, and the Contemporary Art Center in Peoria, Il., among other venues. In 2017, she was an artist-in-residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space on Governor’s Island. Her paintings are in private and public collections including GlaxoSmithKline, SAS Institute, The Watermark Group, and the U.S. Department of State. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York. Ziegler lives and works in Brooklyn. 

Fernando Martinez explores how language can express the ineffable nature of words like eternity, love, and spirit, which we can name but never fully understand. In this exhibition, which features the tactile surfaces of Martinez' collage-approach to ceramics, the works hint at the tension between the object as it is and the meaning it emanates. The longing that arises from such encounters with art points to a distant language that Martinez fears we are losing. BAU awarded Martinez this solo show based on his work in the gallery's August 2025 Open Call Annual. About the artist: Born in Argentina, Fernando Martinez uses wood and ceramics as base materials, often incorporating metal, plastic, string, and glass to create narratives about the effects of time and use, and the sacred and profane. A finalist in the Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist 2025 edition, he is a graduate of SUNY Purchase. Martinez lives and works in Port Chester, N.Y.

This two-person exhibition examines the utility, impact, and aesthetics of often-unseen external and inner systems. Dove, a ceramic artist, is drawn to the hidden structures that operate just beyond perception, like seawalls restraining tides and ventilation shafts breathing beneath our feet. Her work, both resilient and fragile, prompt reflection on what protects and sustains us. Munkus, primarily a painter, uses abstraction to distill and analyze inner emotional and psychological systems, creating a material inquiry about the nature of self-reimagining. His work encourages contemplation and a non-mechanized perspective of time. BAU awarded Dove and Munkus this show based on their work in the gallery's August 2025 Open Call Annual. About the artists: An artist and educator specializing in ceramics and textiles, Rachel Dove earned a BFA from the Columbus (Ohio) College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Tennessee. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. A 2025 resident artist at Watershed Center for the Ceramics Arts, Dove has exhibited regionally in both juried and invitational shows and is an adjunct ceramics instructor at Suffolk County Community College. She lives and works on Long Island. Dan Munkus has a BFA from the University of California Berkeley and an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College. Currently pursuing an MA at Columbia University Teacher College, Munkus lives and works in Peekskill, N.Y.

BAU Gallery is pleased to present CRAZY, an exhibition featuring the work of 31 female-identifying and non-binary artists that creates a safe space for rage, protest, and performance. Guest-curated by Jaime Ransome, the exhibition of 55 works is a vibrant celebration of creativity across media: painting, photography, installation, light art, video, performance, and sculpture. The exhibition confronts the centuries-old stereotype that expressive, opinionated, intelligent women are “crazy” by making space for authentic responses to the contemporary world and presenting those emotions as fine art. Inspired by Afropunk art movements and feminist punk music, CRAZY showcases art that embraces maximalist self-expression as a method of personal and political advocacy.