Artist Statement

I am interested in layered histories of materials and sites as they speak to complex social and ecological issues of our time, understanding social concerns to be nested within, and inseparable from, larger ecologies. My work explores the precarity of these entanglements and our desire to relate meaningfully and generously to environments and their inhabitants.

My art practice directs attention to the fragile, entangled nature of our relationship to the material world by compelling curiosity and embodied perception. I am interested in the potential of space and materiality toward invoking long and discordant views of time, a sense of place, and relational awareness beyond the human. I work with materials as both trace and emergent speculation; bodies of memory with agency to create exchange and shift awareness.

Working with ordinary, salvaged materials, precarious forms, and neglected sites, I question systems of value creation in our contemporary world. I practice art in ways that deepen my relation to my surroundings by reclaiming materials with specific and layered histories, such as brick from a particular brickyard, dust or spiderwebs from a dwelling, architectural remnants, or materials associated with local ecosystems, including my body. The ephemeral nature of my work is meant to reveal or reimagine the ways we participate in larger material cycles through human and geological time.

Emerging from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes the natural sciences, archeology, poetry, diverse writers and thinkers, and place-based research, my projects are the result of meditative ritual processes, literal explorations of regional landscape and inherent material properties, and collaboration with natural processes.

My projects take the form of site-responsive indoor and outdoor installations, sculpture, relief works on paper, and architectural interventions, as well as photography, video, and performative projects. Through studio and on-site projects, I invoke a haunted presence both specter and speculative, that reveals ourselves as vulnerable agents, inextricably connected to our surroundings.Recent and on-going bodies of work include investigations of regional landscape history, reflect on traces of entangled human and non-human co-habitation and reciprocity, as well as the process of reflection itself, and associate the language, formal characteristics, and materiality of geology with traces of architecture and my body. 

Bio

Alison McNulty is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator based in Newburgh who explores the layered histories and poetics of ordinary reclaimed materials, precarious places, and ecological entanglements. Her work has been presented at museums, galleries, conferences, farms, historic sites, forests, performance spaces, and abandoned or neglected sites throughout the US and in Europe and South America. 

In 2023 McNulty was awarded an Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Commission and a Saltonstall Foundation Residency Fellowship. She received the 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and the Empowered Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson in support of her work with the Artist in Vacancy initiative of the Newburgh Community Landbank. Her work is currently on view in the exhibition Manto “el velo que cubre la piedra” at Casas Riegner, Bogota.

McNulty recently curated the current exhibition “Listening to Land: Imaginal Technologies, Material Conduits, & Landscape Translations Toward Perceiving Place” a group exhibition at Ann Street Gallery exploring practices of listening in relation to place and the place-making potential of creative acts of listening.

Current and recent exhibitions include Casas Riegner, Bogota, Columbia, Maguire Museum, Philadelphia, Basilica Hudson, Kube Art Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Fridman Gallery Beacon, WAAM Woodstock, PS21 Chatham, NY, International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Santo Tirso, Portugal, Art Lot, Brooklyn, and Samuel Dorsky Museum. McNulty received a 2023 Saltonstall Foundation Residency Fellowship and has attended residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts and Stoneleaf Retreat, and created House Project, a self-made residency in an abandoned house. 

Through her work as a curator, nonprofit Gallery Director and former member of CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, McNulty works to create free arts programming that highlights underrepresented perspectives and undervalued practices, activates modes of attention and care for the more-than-human world, and grounds conversations around art in embodied practices, communities, and physical places.    

McNulty earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and received the Alumni Fellowship from the University of Florida, where she completed her MFA. She is Gallery Director at Ann St. Gallery and Part-Time Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design.

Alison McNulty CV

Statement of Gratitude and Land Acknowledgement

I wish to acknowledge that the lands on which I live and work belong to Native Peoples who possess sacred connections to it and have stewarded the land sustainably for thousands of years before the arrival of white settlers. I also acknowledge the long history and effects of settler colonialism that resulted in genocide, forced removal and relocation, fractured connections to sacred homelands, as well as lost stories, relations, languages, ways of life, and other personal and cultural attributes.  

I recognize the inequities that persist today from this ongoing legacy in society, in academic institutions with which I have been and am affiliated, and in organizations of which I am a member. I acknowledge that I continue to benefit from this legacy. I challenge myself and other white settlers and guests on the land to use their privileges to support Indigenous artists and institutions and encourage engagement with the history of the land, its Native owners, and Indigenous People and institutions. 

I work to create space, resources, and opportunities to critically engage this history as well as honoring the resilience and contemporary conditions and practices of Indigenous artists and scholars through service to CAA’s Services to Artists Committee. I aim to create a platform for Indigenous artists and scholars to share their work, knowledge, and perspective as steps toward inclusion, equity, and world-making that centers and enacts Indigenous values and Indigenous ways of relating to the more-than-human world.

As a non-native guest and visitor, I dwell on the ancestral lands of the Munsee Lenape and Mohican tribes, I live and work on the western bank of what prior to the 16th century was known to the Lenape as the Mahicantuck, the ‘river that flows both ways’, or ‘great water in constant motion’, in what is today known as the Mid-Hudson Valley, about 60 miles north of NYC.  The land in this region and its history, as well as Indigenous ways of knowing and relating inform my personal research interests, the way I practice art, and my way of life. 

The Munsee Lenape and Mohican are now dispersed throughout the US and Canada. The Lenape diaspora includes five federally recognized nations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.  As well, many descendants are still living on and stewarding the land in the area presently known as New York, demonstrating resiliency and generosity.

I offer my deep gratitude and respect to the contemporary and ancestral stewards of this land. They are known to have lived lightly, balancing human needs with those of the non-human inhabitants of this land.