Hudson Valley artist Norm Magnusson’s “kuh-myoo-nih-kay-shun” exhibition at Mount Saint Mary College’s CMA Gallery is open from October 4 through December 13 at 330 Powell Ave., Newburgh, N.Y.
Mount Saint Mary College’s CMA Gallery recently kicked off its newest exhibition, “kuh-myoo-nih-kay-shun,” featuring the work of Hudson Valley artist Norm Magnusson.
The gallery, free and open to the public, is located on the first floor of Aquinas Hall on campus, 330 Powell Ave., Newburgh, N.Y. It’s scheduled to run from now through December 13. It’s open Monday through Friday during normal business hours, or by appointment. Email cma-gallery@msmc.edu for more info.
“I've tried and tried and studied and thought and considered and crafted and been extremely careful with my words, and yet still I find that it’s rare to be heard exactly how I intend to be heard, understood precisely how I wanted to be understood,” notes Magnusson. “At some point in the course of thinking about all this, I started to see that it could be the foundation for a really fun and engaging body of work: an exhibition devoted to the difficulties, frailties and fickleness of verbal and non-verbal communication, in both the analog and digital domains.”
Magnusson is a Rhinebeck-based artist and political activist, with a background in advertising as well as education. He began his career creating allegorical animal paintings with pointed social commentaries. He became more and more interested in political art and its potential for persuasion. Magnusson is the founder of the art movement “funism,” whose basic tenet is that art should be as much fun to look at as it is to think about.
His work has been shown in galleries and museums in the U.S. and abroad. It is held in private and museum collections around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and has been reviewed extensively, including in the New York Times, Washington Post and other well-known publications.
Magnusson has been awarded many prestigious grants, including from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2008 for the realization of “On This Site Stood: Lower Manhattan,” a project to put plaques with contemporary social content around lower Manhattan, which was completed in summer 2009. In 2014, he received a New York State Council on the Arts grant and in 2015, was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for sculpture.
The mission of the Mount’s CMA Gallery is to exhibit professional art and media picked by Mount faculty from among the rising population of artists who live and work in Newburgh, Beacon, and throughout the Hudson Valley. The gallery space features focused lighting to highlight the artwork on the first floor of the college’s main academic building.
The gallery was made possible through the committee efforts of Christopher Neyen, assistant professor of Art and Graphic Design; Dean Goldberg, associate professor of Communication Arts and Film Studies; Maryann Pilon, executive director of Facilities and liaison for Strategic Space Planning; and Barbara Petruzzelli, director of the Kaplan Family Library and Learning Center at the college.