Profile
Alison McNulty is an artist, educator, curator, and gallery director based in Newburgh, NY. Her interconnected roles serve a collective spirit of community and co-mentorship that tends to the margins, values diversity and nuance, and includes the non-human world. Through all aspects of her work, Alison prioritizes embodied practices in knowledge and culture-making, offers an expansive and inclusive vision of where and how art might be experienced in the world and who it’s for, and works to compel meaningful engagements with art, each other, and the environment through deep modes of attention and care.
Alison’s interdisciplinary research across and outside the arts is characterized by a poetics that strives to weave intellectual rigor with the somatic, physical, and mysterious forces of nature. Through ephemeral and site-responsive artwork, Alison reveals layered histories, ecological entanglements, beauty, violence, loss, and playful absurdities embodied in ordinary reclaimed materials and precarious natural and constructed spaces.
Using fragile organic materials and architectural traces as a starting point, Alison confronts socio-ecological issues and value systems related to notions of progress, resources, permanence, and individualism. She hopes instead to use her work to approach an ethics guided by relationship, reciprocity, flux, and belonging. The ephemeral nature of her work is meant to reveal or reimagine the ways we participate in cycles of human, seasonal, and geological time. Emerging from research curiosities across the natural sciences, ecology, archeology, poetry, diverse writers and thinkers, and place-based research, Alison’s projects are accomplished through meditative ritual processes, literal explorations of landscape, experimentation with materials, and collaboration with natural processes. She is interested in the potential of art toward invoking long, overlapping, and discordant experiences of time and place, generating relational awareness beyond the human, and affirming our ability to find awe, intangible value, and meaning in the mundane and the natural world.
Degrees Held
Master of Fine Arts / University of Florida, Gainesville
Bachelor of Fine Arts / Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri
Professional Affiliation
Gallery Director, Ann Street Gallery, Newburgh, NY
Recent Publications
2025 Scenic Vistas: Landscape as Culture in Early NY, Boscobel House & Gardens, Garrison, NY, Cur. Jennifer Carlquist
To House a River, Glasshouse, New Paltz, NY, Cur. Lital Dotan & Shanti Grumbine
New Art at the Akin Free Library, Akin Free Library, Pawling, NY, Cur. Dr. Karen Zukowski & Courtney Puckett
Reclamation: Lost and Found in Newburgh, Holland Tunnel Gallery, Newburgh, NY, Cur. Janet Ruskowski & Alexandra Limpert
SCAPE: Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Biennial Sculpture Exhibition, Woodstock, NY, Cur. Jen Dragon (on-going)
Unusual Suspects: Art from Unusual Materials, Hygienic Art, New London, CT, Cur. Carla Goldberg
4 Decades: University of Florida to NYC Invitational, 14BC Gallery, NYC, Cur. Richard Heipp
2024 Transformations: Reimagining Earth and Waste, Crown Gallery Metro Art Studios, Bridgeport, CT, Cur. Carla. Goldberg
Glenlily Grounds, Newburgh, NY, Cur. Lacey Fekishazy
2023 Entanglements, Arts Mid-Hudson Gallery, Poughkeepsie, NY
Manto “el velo que cubre la piedra,” Mantle “the veil that covers the stone,” Casas Riegner, Bogota, Columbia, Cur. Leyla Cardenas
Shifting Ecologies: Contemporary Artists & The Environment, Maguire Art Museum, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA
2022 an/aesthetics: Rosekill Part 2, Rosekill Art Farm, Kingston, NY
MOTHER EARTH, Bull Farm, Rock Tavern, NY
All Hands, Basilica Hudson Gallery, Hudson, NY
SHELTER, White Pines, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY, Cur. Melinda Stickney-Gibson (on-going)
Birds of a Feather, Ethan Cohen Fine Art & KUBE Art Center, Beacon, NY
Spring in Wartime, Bull Farm, Rock Tavern, NY
2021 Marist College Faculty Exhibition, Steel Plant Gallery, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Mohunk Arts Invitational: Fantasy, High Falls, NY
WAAM Radius 50, Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Woodstock, NY, Cur. Alyson Baker & Candice Madey
Time Lapse, Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY, Cur. Karlyn Benson & Ilya Fridman
2020 Creative (un)makings: disruptions in art/archeology, International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Santo Tirso, Portugal
2019 Terrain Biennial, The Fullerton Center, Newburgh, NY
Summer Invitational I, White Rock Center for Sculptural Arts, Holmes, NY
Wilderstein 5th Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, Wilderstein Historic Site, Rhinebeck, NY, Cr. Franc Palaia
Dusklit Annual Interactive Art Festival, Seligmann Center, Sugar Loaf, NY
Slow Archeology, Theoretical Archeology Conference Artist Exhibition, Maxwell Hall, Syracuse University, NY
Research Interests
Interdisciplinary practices, installation, sculpture and craft, site-responsive practices, curation, stewardship, accessibility, community building, multispecies entanglements, intersections of social and ecological issues, material culture, embodiment, performativity, environmental and land art, landscape, contemporary Indigenous art, labor, geology, natural science and philosophy, archeology, architecture and the built environment, theory of time and temporality, poetics, poetry, creative writing
Awards And Honors
2023 Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Residency Fellowship, Ithaca, NY
Individual Artist Commission, Arts Mid-Hudson, NY
Conversation Lab Fellow, Inaugural Cohort, Glasshouse Projects Art.Life.Lab, New Paltz, NY
2022-23 Artist in Vacancy Residency, Newburgh, NY
2022 Empowered Artist Award, awardee for Orange County from Arts Mid-Hudson, NY
Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University in St. Louis ($25,000)
2021 Part-Time Faculty Development Award, Parson School of Design (Dec)
2020 PATHWAYS Program Award for site specific art, PS21, Chatham, NY
2019 Part-Time Faculty Development Award, Parson School of Design
STONELEAF Retreat Residency, Kingston, NY
Part-Time Faculty Development Award, Parson School of Design
2017 Part-Time Faculty Development Award, Parson School of Design
2014 Austin Cary Forest Learning Center Site Specific Public Art Project Finalist, Gainesville, FL, Eccentric Grids: Mapping the Wildness in a Managed Forest, Collaboration with Katerie Gladdys
2005-08 Alumni Fellowship, University of Florida, School of Art & Art History
Graduate Teaching Assistantship, University of FL, School of Art & Art History
2008 Anderson Ranch: Materials in Process with artist Robin Hill, Full Scholarship
School of Art & Art History Faculty Award, Student Juried Exhibition, University of Florida
James J. Rizzi Scholarship, University of Florida, School of Art & Art History
2007 Atlantic Center for the Arts Associate Artist Residency, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, Funded by Joan Mitchell Foundation
Palmer House Residency, University of Florida & New World School of Arts, Miami, FL
University of Florida Graduate Student Travel Grant
2006 House Project, Gainesville, FL, Self-made 4-week residency, legally negotiated with the owner of an abandoned
house
1997-01 Laura & William Jens Scholarship in Art, Washington University in St. Louis, MO
2001 Secor Award in Sculpture, Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Portfolio
www.alisonmcnulty.com
Ann Street Gallery