Sicilia (detail)

Bubble Glaze Bowl (detail)

Heron (detail)

Mother Nature Too (detail)

Hidden (detail)

Entropy Undone Silver Fire

Paunches (detail)

Sharon Florin's work has been exhibited since 1980 in solo exhibitions and in juried shows. She also does commissioned work of specific sites and buildings. Her work has received awards from the National Association of Women Artists, the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, and the Butler Institute of American Art, among others. Her paintings have been reproduced as cards, calendars and book covers. Florin is a painter of the urban landscape, and is endlessly fascinated by the texture, detail, and light of the city, particularly its architecture. She describes herself as an artist in the tradition of such painters as Edward Hopper. In her own words "as he [Hopper] told the story of time through the buildings of a small town, so I narrate the city of New York, each building, window and architectural ornament telling its unique tale." Numerous examples of her paintings may be found at sharonflorin.com.

The Chrysler Building
Revisited (detail)

Blow Up (detail)

Deborah Garwood is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her photography explores landscape imagery as an elixir of fantasy, astronomy, and collective memory. This piece is from a project entitled Evans Pond: A Long Term Study of a Single Place. Bringing a variety of cameras and films to the same site, Garwood has documented and interpreted this space for almost ten years as a personal reflection of the duration of this forest on the edge of suburbia. Her work is in the collections of The New York Public Library and MoMA Library, and she had a recent solo exhibition of landscape photographs and photo-based drawings at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. Garwood earned a BA at Oberlin College and an MFA in sculpture at Hunter College. Her arts writings have been published in journals and newspapers including PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press) and Art Journal. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Pratt Institute; her work may be seen at home.earthlink.net/~dagarwood.

Mary Teresa Giancoli lives and works in Sunnyside. Her photographs of the traditions of Mexican migrants in New York and their families left behind in Mexico have been shown in solo exhibitions at Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Mexico; Universidad Metropolitana Atzcapozalco, Mexico City; St. Lawrence University, and group exhibits at Athens, Georgia, Institute of Contemporary Art and A.I.R. Gallery, NYC. She received a Queens Council on the Arts grant in 2005 for the Long Island City: The Creative Path exhibition at Flushing Town Hall; her work may be found on their site at queenscouncilarts.org/html/art_giancoli.

Sunflower (detail)

Audrey Gottlieb lives in Flushing, Queens, where since 1985 she has been photographing urban immigrant communities. She has spent her life mapping cultural landscapes around the globe, from Paris to Tokyo, from Quito to Mogadishu; more recently, she has focused on celebration in today's multicultural America. A three-time recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts individual artist grants, Gottlieb’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US, Europe, and Japan. Numerous examples of her photographs may be found at audrey-gottlieb.com.

7 Local (detail)

Chinatown Cat (detail)

Do Nothing (from the
Antimacassar Sutra
Series) (detail)

Robyn Love is an artist who lives and works in Sunnyside, Queens. She received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1988 and has exhibited at galleries and museums internationally. She has received project grants to create new work from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as from The Hess and Helyn Kline Foundation and the Pouch Cove Foundation (Newfoundland, Canada). She has completed numerous site-specific projects including an ambitious New York City Percent for Art commission for the High School for Law Enforcement and Public Safety in Jamaica, Queens, and a large-scale, multimedia installation titled The House Museum in Gillams, Newfoundland. Love was a finalist for the 2004 Creative Capital awards and in 2005 she received a fellowship in sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts. View examples of her work at robynlove.com.

Ellen Mandelbaum lives and works in Queens. She established an artisanal glass business in 1980 and has received awards for a number of the many architectural commissions she has completed since 1996. Her work has been exhibited in group shows from Tokyo to Cork, Ireland, and her most recent solo exhibition took place at Queens College Art Center in Flushing. Mandelbaum studied at the Pilchuck Glass School, WA, and also holds an MFA in painting from Indiana University. Her work may be seen at emglassart.com.

Khosrow Moradian, a native of Iran, is an architect and city planner, now retired from the faculty of Howard University’s School of Architecture and Planning. In 1999 he was appointed by the Washington, DC mayor’s office to head the Bicentennial Mural Project (Millennium Washington 1800-2000). He has studied at the Art Student League of New York and Washington Studio School, and currently teaches art in SCS’s after-school programs, Senior Center, and Adult Day Services Program.

Grand Central (detail)

Roxie Munro is the author/illustrator of 30 children’s books, a New Yorker magazine cover artist, and an internationally exhibited painter. She specializes in cities and architecture and has published books on New York City, Washington DC, Texas, London, and Paris. Munro illustrated The New York Times What’s Doing Around the World; Doors; Gargoyles, Girders & Glass Houses: Magnificent Master Builders; Ranch; Mazescapes; Amazement Park; and, just out, Mazeways: A to Z. She has exhibited galleries and museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; the High Museum, Atlanta; and the Detroit Museum of Art, and has work in numerous private and public collections, including the Delaware Art Museum, AT&T, Banco-Italia, Carnegie Hall, Pfizer, Unilever, National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), and AOL Time Warner. She has a BFA in Painting from University of Hawaii, and received a Yaddo fellowship. See more of Munro's work at roxiemunro.com.

Boda Atlixquense (detail)

Cristian Peña was born in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico and studied at Simon Bolivar College Preparatory. In 1993, he moved to New York and studied Liberal Arts at LaGuardia Community College, and photography at the International Center of Photography at the Point. As a photographer and writer, he is documenting social movements and indigenous traditions in his native Mexico and in the US. His photographs have been exhibited in the X Bienal Guadalupana at the Museo Nacional de Las Culturas Populares; Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco; Casa de la Primera Imprenta de America, Mexico City; and Universidad Iberoamericana, Puebla, Mexico.

Lucy (detail)

Christopher Reiger, originally from rural Virginia, is an artist and writer currently living and working in New York City. He attended the College of William and Mary (BA Studio Arts, 1999) in Williamsburg, Virginia, before moving north. Since graduating from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in 2002, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions and, in 2006, had his fist solo exhibition. Additional work can be seen at christopherreiger.com and essays on art and ecology can be read at hungryhyaena.blogspot.com.

Summer Landscape VI (detail)

Elinore Schnurr's work has been shown in museums and galleries across the US, including the Queens Museum and MoMA in New York City. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Museum of the City of New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art in Petersburg, Florida, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. Summer Landscape VI is about light and space in the natural world. Schnurr has been selected for numerous private commissions and has won several awards, including a CAPS fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts and a Mid-Atlantic/NEA fellowship. Her work also is in corporate and private collections across Europe and the United Stateswww.elinoreschnurr.com.

Purple Shadows (detail)

Forbidden Fruit #3 (detail)

Maria Spector, who lives in Astoria and works in Long Island City, has shown at PS 122, LMCC, NURTUREart, Gallery Korea, and the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Through the Queens Council on the Arts, she received Individual Artist Support grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. The artist received her MFA in painting from Queens College. Her work may be found online at galleryartist.com/mariaspector.

Little Leap (detail)

Alise Spinella received her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design and currently makes her home and studio in Long Island City. She has shown at numerous galleries in Rhode Island and New York, most recently at the School of Visual Arts. Spinella incorporates photography, digital imaging, silkscreen, monoprinting, collage, sculpture, and installation into her painting process. The paintings are low reliefs in which some parts are meticulously crafted while others are raw and hang off the surface, as if not fully formed. Most recently, she has made "paintings" with found objects, and is working with a sliding scale between two- and three-dimensions. Her artwork depicts organic machinery and hand-crafted nature: tree machines, emotion machines, and sea kites, or byproducts such as factory-generated insects and sunlight circuitry. In each case, the mechanism almost works properly. She paints about fragility and hope; see more at alisespinella.com.

Yellow Gerber (detail)

Joel Weber is an artist who lives and works in Jackson Heights. He focuses on informal images of people in his commercial, portrait, sports, and event work (and in his wonderful photographs for SCS’s publications and website), but he is currently concentrating on landscape and botanical photography. Landscape locations range from the Rockefeller State Park Preserve in Westchester County to the Rockies (Colorado and Canada), and to the state of Washington.

New York State Theater
in Disarray, Flushing
Meadows Park (detail)

Louise Weinberg looks for unexpected and often overlooked images that convey a specific mood. She is interested in recording transitory and often fragmented images that one might catch out of the corner of the eye. For more than 20 years her award-winning work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, in five books on photography, and in numerous magazines and newspapers. See more of Weinberg's photographs at neoimages.net.

Melissa Wolf has been immersed in the New York art world for over 30 years. She grew up a half-block away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was visiting galleries and museums by the time she was 15. She is the founder of Women's Studio Center in Long Island City, and president of its Board of Directors. Wolf studied at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and co-taught art in a public school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She is a member of ArtTable, College Art Association, National Sculpture Society, and New York Artists Equity Association, among others. In addition to Women's Studio Center, her professional experience includes the Visual Arts Project at ASTRAEA, Studio Manager for James Youngman from 1995-98, and working in the art supply retail industry at Sam Flax and A.I. Friedman. Wolf has also juried and organized over 50 exhibitions.

Pears (detail)

Always Playing (detail)

Janett Zamalloa is an artist and art teacher who lives and works in Queens and Lima, Peru.

Silhouettes #17 (detail)

Shitao-van Gogh, Color
Study 07-3 (detail)

Zhang Hongtu was born in China and has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. His work mixes traditions of Eastern and Western art, with results intended to blend and reconfigure our fixed cultural stereotypes. The mountain-water paintings in his Alternative History of Painting series each follow a single, seemingly simple formula: execute a famous Chinese composition in a well-known Impressionist or Post-Impressionist brush manner, Ni Zan as if painted by Monet, Dong Qichang done by Cézanne, Guo Xi and Shitao by van Gogh. But the works are anything but simple; they are often as jarring as they are beautiful. Zhang is interested in challenging viewers' expectations, raising questions of value(s), and triggering audience response, in contrast to the way one was expected to behave in the Chinese world in which he grew up (excerpted from Jerome Silbergeld's "Zhang Hongtu's Alternative History of Painting," which may be found on the Bibliography page of the artist's website momao.com).