April 21, 2021 | Staten Island, NY— After a year of being shuttered due to the pandemic, the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden is re-opening its doors to art lovers across New York City. Opening Day on Saturday, April 24 will launch two new exhibitions, Zoë Tirado: Ghoulfriends and JillWrites: On Art and Poetics.
While the exhibitions will be located inside the Newhouse Center’s Building G galleries, with the entrance to Building G on Shinbone Alley, Opening Day festivities will be located in Shinbone Alley, including music from DJ Nazz Raidience and DJ Mikediexverse, all free of charge from 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM. Masks and social distancing are required for all attendees. This event will adhere to city and state guidelines related to COVID-19. Advanced registration is required to attend: https://snug-harbor.org/event/opening-reception-newhouse-center-spring-2021-exhibitions/
“We are thrilled to reopen the Newhouse Center with two exciting new exhibitions exploring local subculture and concepts of identity,” said Melissa West, Vice President of Curation, Visual & Performing Arts. “Both Jill Jichetti and Zoë Tirado’s work prompt nuanced conversations around queer aesthetics, digital technology, and youth culture. We are eager to welcome you back to the Newhouse Center and to invigorate Snug Harbor with new artistry and energy.”
Zoë Tirado: Ghoulfriends
Zoë Tirado: Ghoulfriends highlights the underground, creative, queer and diverse people on Staten Island that often are unnoticed by the local community. The paintings and mixed media on display comes from past photos of Halloween parties, costumed events and performances.
Tirado writes, “these photos reflect my friends and peers as their truest and most bold selves, unafraid, and free to be weird. The feeling of being ‘other’ is something that I feel many Staten Islanders have felt beside the rest of NYC artscape and especially being a young and transgressive artist in a majority red borough this has been something difficult to express for so many of us.”
Zoë Tirado is a multidisciplinary artist living in Staten Island, New York. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts in 2014. Her work is self-reflective and deeply personal; often referencing her own search to define womanhood and femininity, Zoë’s work explores the female body, the abject, and identity.
On May 8 from 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Tirado will co-host Ghoulfriends: Community Forum, a fruitful community discussion on the arts and relationship building, including past events, present opportunities, and ideas for the future. Guests can register for the event here: https://snug-harbor.org/event/ghoulfriends-community-forum/
JillWrites: On Art and Poetics
Drawing from creative non-fiction, aphorisms, conceptual art, and community-based practices, JillWrites: On Art & Poetics is a meta-performance in the quest to delineate, document, and describe the self. Jill Jichetti, under the name JillWrites, is a writer and installation artist whose work explores the performativity of digital media. Jill has been working in self-portraiture through digital photography since 2005, before social media became mainstream. In this work, Jill prompts important philosophical questions on post-modern and post-cyber notions of subjectivity.
Zoë Tirado: Ghoulfriends and JillWrites: On Art & Poetics are both made possible through generous support from the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. JillWrites is made possible in part by a DCA Art Fund grant from Staten Island Arts, with public support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Snug Harbor arts programming is made possible through generous support from the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, HumanitiesNY, The New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden is located at 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, NY and is open from dawn until dusk, seven days a week. General admission to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art is $5 ($4 for students/seniors, free for Snug Harbor members and students grades 6-12 with student ID). Hours for 2021 are Friday – Saturday from 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM and Sun from 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM. Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden is a proud Smithsonian Affiliate.
About Snug Harbor
Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden is an urban oasis where art, history and nature converge. We offer dynamic programming in the arts, horticulture and agriculture for diverse communities and all ages, on our historic 83-acre campus. We envision being a locally impactful, globally renowned destination, true to our values of artistic vibrancy and community, inclusion and discovery, stewardship and conservation.
Snug Harbor is the result of more than four decades of restoration and development to convert a 19th-century charitable rest home for sailors into a regional arts center, botanical gardens and public park. One of the largest ongoing adaptive reuse projects in America, Snug Harbor encompasses 26 historic structures, 14 botanical gardens, a 2.5-acre urban farm, wetlands, forests and park land on a free, open campus. Snug Harbor is a proud Smithsonian Affiliate organization. Learn more at snug-harbor.org.
Download this press release as a PDF here.
