Art Opening Receptions: Friday, November 7, 2025 / 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Arianne Wack – Victorian Gallery @ 9 Vassar Street
Arianne Wack
Artwork by Arianne Wack
Arianne Wack is a landscape painter working in acrylic. She graduated from Ringling School of Art and Design in 2008 with a concentration in printmaking and received her master’s degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU in 2013. Arianne has traveled and studied in the UK, Spain, India and Japan as a painter, writer and gardener and aims to combine these interests and skills in her painting practice. “My work is an exploration of a specific kind of beauty existing at the intersection of the natural and the artificial,” she explains. “Most of us expect to have moments of awe in the historically ‘beautiful’ scenes or subjects of a landscape painting, but perhaps the expectation that a beautiful sunset will inspire awe prevents us from experiencing awe in other places.” In addition to her prolific visual arts career, Arianne is also the Managing Producer at WNYC’s Peabody award-winning podcast and public radio show, Radiolab, where her co-workers teach her daily about the “power of good editing and deep listening.”
Alfons Rodriguez and Maria Kransnopolsky – Reception Gallery @ 12 Vassar Street
Alfons Rodriguez
Alfons Rodriguez is an award-winning documentary photographer and videographer as well as a freelance contributor for international media. His works encompass documentaries on a wide range of social issues to anthropological and archeological expeditions. He sees his work as the way to live and a true spiritual exercise. “Photography became the tool to express in a tangible way my gaze and perception of existence,” he relays. “During the last 30 years, I have been travelling across more than 120 countries that have included reporting from Iraq conflict, North Korea, Jaffna war, the Potosí Mines, San Pedro Penitenciary and Choquequirao Citadel; my latest project, The Melting Age, focuses on the global climate crisis that affect more than 30 countries from seven continents.” Alfons has held exhibitions in Spain, United States, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mauritania, Morocco, Arab Emirates United, Mexico, Italy, Gambia, Brazil and Senegal. He teaches photojournalism in private schools and Universities in several countries, and his work has been published in National Geographic Magazine (Spain, Italy and Portugal editions), National Geographic History USA, Vogue, Photo Magazine, El Mundo, The British Journal of Photography, Lens New York Times, and 5W Magazine, among others.
Maria Krasnopolsky
Maria Krasnopolsky is a visual artist based in New York City, working primarily in oil on canvas, as well as watercolor, chalk, and charcoal on paper. Born in Eastern Europe and raised in the Middle East, her work carries the imprints of many geographies — a quiet yet persistent tension between memory, place, and longing. Maria has lived, studied, and created in New York for most of her life and is currently in her final year at the Academy of Art University working toward an MFA in Painting. She has found the city’s intensity and layered emotional landscape offer a continuous stream of human moments that reflect the complexity, fragility, and resilience of the mortal condition. Maria’s paintings are often meditations — fragments of lived experience rendered with a sensitivity to both form and absence. Her practice is a search for aesthetics in ephemeral gestures, where light, texture, and emotion intertwine and she continues to explore the intersection of personal mythology and universal themes, using paint not only as a medium — but as a language. Maria’s plein air series, Renditions, that will be exhibited at the Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center explores the universal language of landscape through paintings of water, forests, and mountains created both in plein air and studio settings. “The work was completed during many years of traveling the globe and reflects on the fragility of natural resources and the urgency of sustainability in a rapidly changing environment,” she explains. “Using oil on canvas, I aim to capture the raw presence of natural spaces while acknowledging their impermanence; the act of painting outdoors allows for a direct, unfiltered engagement with the land — one that informs both form and perspective.”
Elise Pittelman – Hancock Gallery @ 12 Vassar Street
The Dance by Elisa Pittelman
Elise Pittelman is a multifaceted and internationally known artist who was educated at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Her solo exhibitions of her paintings have been held in Jamaica, Chicago, and in Woodstock, NY, and she was one of five artists selected to represent Woodstock at Kundstendagz – a ten-day art festival in Bergen, Netherlands. Elise mostly paints her pieces from photographs to create “collection series” of her works that include Family Album – a series of black and white paintings from photographs of her family, Images of Jamaica – a series of paintings inspired by her travels to Jamaica, The Bar Mitzvah – a series of paintings from borrowed Bar Mitzvah photo albums of friends and family, The Borscht Belt – her homage of the cultural phenomenon of Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains that have all but disappeared, and her current project of retro-TV Kids Shows. “Painting is my salvation…the very act of dipping my paintbrush into a dab of paint and applying it to a beautifully primed canvas is a visceral joy,” she exclaims. “To be able to bring to life an idea I have through line, color and form is a blessing.” Elise is a long-time resident of Woodstock, NY and lives with her husband of 56 years with whom she started a successful and highly regarded jewelry business that was in operation for 28 years and served as the company’s principal jewelry designer. She is also a fine artist creating exquisite ornate bird houses and an accomplished musician, singer and songwriter.
