For over a quarter of a century, The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center has brought New York’s vibrant visual arts scene to Staten Island. The Center has become the home for Staten Island’s and international emerging artists. While remaining proud of its Staten Island heritage, the focus of The Newhouse Center’s exhibits extends well beyond its home borough. Past exhibits have highlighted a wide-ranging retrospective of portrait-painting by one of the founding lights of the Feminist Art movement, the freakish fun of a Coney Island sideshow with a serious look at a uniquely American art form: sideshow banner art, a visual and verbal debate on the primacy of color or drawing in contemporary painting. The Newhouse Center also remains committed to improving arts education in its community. It is located in New York City Public Schools Region 7, covering Staten Island and Western Brooklyn. In an era of funding cutbacks for the arts, Snug Harbor offers inner city and economically disadvantaged school children a place to experience the visual arts perhaps for the first time while nurturing the talent that lies within. More recently, SHCC has evolved an international access to the arts education program. This program will offer visual arts beginning with a Museo Italiano in conjunction with the Italian Government. This will include extended loans ranging from classical antiquities from Pompeii to Renaissance and Baroque art from the Uffizi. The visual arts program will encompass an inter-museum study center incorporating Smithsonian collections.
|