Alison McNulty is an artist, educator, curator, and gallery director based in Newburgh, NY. Her interconnected roles serve a collective spirit of community and co-mentorship that tends to the margins, values diversity and nuance, and embraces the non-human. Through all aspects of her work, Alison counters dominant narratives around places, groups, and resources. She prioritizes embodied practices in knowledge and culture-making, offers an expansive and inclusive vision of where and how art might be experienced in the world and who it’s for, and works to compel deeper engagements with attention and care.

Alison’s interdisciplinary research across and outside the arts is characterized by a poetics that weaves intellectual rigor with the somatic and mysterious. Her ephemeral and site-responsive artwork reveals layered histories, beauty, violence, ecological entanglements, and playful absurdities embodied in ordinary reclaimed materials and precarious places. Her work has been presented at museums, galleries, conferences, farms, historic sites, forests, performance spaces, and abandoned and neglected sites throughout the US and in Europe and Columbia. In 2023 she was awarded an Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Commission and a Saltonstall Foundation Residency Fellowship. She received the 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University in St. Louis and the Empowered Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson in support of her “House Project Newburgh,” in partnership with the Artist in Vacancy initiative of the Newburgh Community Landbank (2023).

Selected exhibitions include Casas Riegner, Bogota, Columbia, Maguire Museum, Philadelphia, Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Garden, Stone Ridge, NY, Metro Studios, Bridgeport, CT, Basilica Hudson, Kube Art Center Beacon, NY, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Fridman Gallery Beacon, WAAM Woodstock, PS21 Chatham, NY, International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Santo Tirso, Portugal, Art Lot, Brooklyn, Terrain Biennial, and Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY. McNulty has attended residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, and STONELEAF Retreat, and created House Project, a self-made residency in an abandoned house in Gainesville, FL. 

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 a Part-Time Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design and a union steward for the ACT-UAW Local 7902. She has also taught part-time at Brooklyn College and Marist College, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whitman College and the University of Florida. She served three years on the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee, where her work focused on creating free public programming centering the work and voices of Indigenous artists and cultural producers.

Alison’s curatorial projects include “Listening to Land: Imaginal Technologies, Material Conduits, & Landscape Translations Toward Perceiving Place,” “Back and Forth, Between Names, an exhibition about bodies of water,” and “From the Ground UP,” an evolving exhibition and series of public gatherings co-curated with Jean-Marc Superville Sovak commemorating those buried in what was historically known as Newburgh’s “Colored” Burial Ground.

Since 2023, McNulty is Director of Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY, a contemporary art space thriving under the umbrella of Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a mixed-use, non-profit housing and arts redevelopment project. At Ann Street Gallery, McNulty leads a six-month Emerging Artist Fellowship Program in collaboration with a broad network of regional mentors and community partners and directs a six-month Artist Researcher in Residence program focusing on community-driven interdisciplinary creative research projects. In her role as Gallery Director, McNulty works to create arts programming and exhibitions that are challenging and accessible, serve disenfranchised artists and community members, provide tangible support to artists, highlight underrepresented perspectives and experimental practices, and ground conversations around art in embodied creative practices, diverse communities, and physical places.

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. 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. 

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.