Upcoming Exhibit

Moving through a familiar place, your eyes know where to land, your ears remember the sounds, and your body recognizes the rhythm. A sense of comfort and belonging may settle in, offering a brief moment of ease in a city that never stops. The artists in Familiar Grounds share a connection to the Upper West Side neighborhood, having lived, worked, participated in its community, or drawn inspiration from its streets, nature, or inhabitants. Through painting, photography, carpet weaving, and a specially made site-specific sound work, they respond to the sense of place and the character of the neighborhood, engaging with it as a lived, layered environment.

Akiva Listman works with familiar street objects through a pop-art-inspired visual language, focusing on subway furniture and street signage that have become an inseparable part of the landscape. David Katzenstein turns his camera upward, capturing neighborhood treetops framed by fragments of sky, offering moments in which the city briefly gives way to nature and perception shifts. Gal Nissim presents a site-specific sound work spread throughout the building, inviting visitors to move through the space and experience the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan building itself as a site and a living habitat. Yael Dredsner explores the female body through an intimate installation of small works created in her Upper West Side studio. Robert Beck depicts local places familiar to neighborhood residents with a quiet, personal sensibility, while Patty Horing paints portraits of the people who inhabit these spaces, often linking interior and exterior by positioning her subjects beside windows that reveal the urban landscape. Sherrie Nickol freezes time and place in her series of portraits of local teens photographed in their homes throughout the neighborhood. Ido Michaeli maps Central Park, a vital artery of the neighborhood, weaving the symbolic language he has developed into a carpet.

Familiar Grounds brings together the voices of artists to explore art in the neighborhood and the neighborhood in art, sharing its stories and nurturing connections within the local creative community. Though the Upper West Side is not often recognized as an arts hub, creativity flourishes in its hidden pockets of inspiration. Presented at The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, located within a vibrant community hub at the heart of the neighborhood, the exhibition situates artworks in the very environment that shaped them, inviting visitors to look at the familiar with fresh eyes.