Cohoes Showcase celebrates 10th year.
Cohoes Artist Showcase to be online for 4 months
For its 10th year, the Cohoes Artist Showcase is on view months longer than it ever has been. Normally a one-weekend event held in a donated space in the Spindle City, the exhibit, like so many art world events in 2020, had to go online this year. Restrictions on public gatherings as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic forced organizers to make the Cohoes Artist Showcase a virtual exhibit, but, because it isn’t in a physical location, its 25 artists’ work will be available for viewing for about four months, through the end of September.
There are photographs; multimedia collages; paintings and drawings in pencil, pastel, watercolor, gouache, acrylic and oil; and other types of work. The art may be seen on the website of the sponsoring organization, Choose Cohoes for Art, choosecohoesforart.org.
“We’re really open to any kind of art,” said CAS curator Fred Neudoerffer, who is vice president of Choose Cohoes for Art. “It’s about bringing the community together,” he said. While organizers have yet to receive submissions for video installations, music or other performed art, Neudoerffer said the organization would welcome them for future shows. A commercial and fine-art photographer with a studio in Cohoes, Neudoerffer has exhibited in all 10 CAS shows.
CCFA was founded about a dozen years ago as an offshoot of a since-defunct business-promotion effort called Choose Cohoes. The late Lise Toch, co-founder of Ragged Edge Printmaking Studio in Cohoes, suggested Choose Cohoes needed an art component. She spearheaded the establishment of CCFA and, in 2011, the launching of the Cohoes Artist Showcase.
While the annual exhibit originally accepted submissions only from Cohoes artists, “After the first couple of years, we found that every Cohoes artist who had participated had showed every piece they had. We needed to expand geographically,” said Neudoerffer. Artists represented this year hail from Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady counties, and the featured artist in 2019, Matt Chinian, is a landscape painter who lives in Cambridge, Washington County. He was chosen in part because he paints on location and had done urban landscapes on an easel set up in downtown Cohoes.
“It was a terrific experience,” said Chinian of being in CAS. “I met a lot of great people, and there’s such a sense of community about it.” He said he chose not to participate this year, as he prefers to exhibit in physical instead of online galleries, but he intends to submit next year if CAS returns to its original format.
Some of the artworks are for sale, from $25 to more than $1,300, “But that isn’t really what the show has been about,” said Kathy Klompas, who co-founded Ragged Edge with Toch and became sole owner when Toch died, in 2013. CCFA normally charges artists a nominal fee to participate, though it was waived this year for the virtual show. The organization directs interested parties to contact artists about purchases and does not take a commission, Neudoerffer said.
Klompas, who makes her own art and teaches printing and dyeing, on fabric and paper, said she has been thrilled by the resurgence of downtown Cohoes in recent years. Like Neudoerffer, she has been part of CAS since the beginning.
“To come out at 9 on a Friday night and see people walking on the new sidewalks on Remsen Street, going from the (Cohoes) Music Hall to dinner — wow! That’s exciting,” said Klompas.
Klompas and Toch met when the two were taking printmaking classes at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy. They enjoyed it so much they launched their own studio, and now, Klompas said, some of her own students have exhibited at CAS.
“For some of them it’s been the first time they’ve ever showed their art,” she said. Speaking of her late partner, she said, “She was the real visionary for what (CAS) could be. I think she would be so proud.”