Downtown Syracuse
Calendar of Events

Realities Within

Realities Within presents four enduring genres of artmaking to explore how artists shape, frame, and inhabit the world. Whether a landscape, cityscape, still life, or representation of the human body, these works show how each artist’s reality is impacted by their lived experience. Separated by genre and installed “salon-style”—a term inspired by the eighteenth and nineteenth century Paris Salons, where paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space—the dense arrangement invites close looking and visual comparison, encouraging viewers to find connections across time, style, and subject matter.

The landscape section explores artists’ responses to the natural world, from expansive vistas to intimate views. In contrast, the cityscape section examines the built environment, capturing rhythms of urban life and the evolving character of towns and cities across America. The still life section turns inward, focusing on interior spaces and objects arranged and captured with deliberation. The section with representations of the body centers on the human presence, revealing varied approaches to capturing likeness, identity, and expression.

Featuring old favorites alongside new acquisitions, Realities Within offers a dynamic survey of artistic observation, highlighting how artists have continually returned to these genres to interpret the visible world.

LIFE: Six Women Photographers

The Annual Charles D. Edelman & Ilene C. Siegler Exhibition. 

LIFE founder and editor-in-chief, Henry R. Luce, was convinced that American political, economic, and cultural power would, and should, dominate the era he defined as the “American Century.” Photojournalism, or “photo essays” as he coined them, could effectively shape an authentically American vision of the United States as an international power, inspiring its people, in Luce’s words, “to live and work and fight with vigor and enthusiasm.” By giving readers vivid images of industrial strength, women and the family, race relations, World War II, labor, and the Cold War, the photographers in this exhibition contributed to this view of the United States as a global player seeking its identity on the world stage.

Six pioneering female photographers were among those who contributed to LIFE’s pursuit of this American character: Margaret Bourke-White, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Lisa Larsen, Nina Leen, and Hansel Mieth. These photographers were among the few women who were retained as full-time staff or on a semi-permanent basis rather than as freelancers. Their cameras captured events both international and domestic, wide-ranging and intimate, serious and playful. Central to LIFE’s reportage was the sometimes contentious relationship between photographers and editors, with each holding a stake in the ideology and content of the final essay. Ultimately, the editorial staff, not the photographers, chose which images would be published, and thus how each story was presented.

In his prospectus for LIFE, Luce stressed the importance for one “to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…” It was not about reading but rather about allowing the images to tell the stories. These six photographers played a vital role in Luce’s quest to achieve that end.

LIFE: Six Women Photographers is organized by The New York Historical. All photographs in the exhibition are © The Picture Collection LLC. All rights reserved. LIFE is the registered trademark of TI Gotham Inc. Used under license.

Canal as Collaborator: Works by Sarah Cameron Sunde & Kari Varner

How do we reconcile our engineered past with an ecological future?

2025 Erie Canal Artists-in-Residence Sarah Cameron Sunde and Kari Varner explore the Canal from an environmental lens.

Kari Varner, a distinguished photographer and educator, explored key ecological sites along the canal, integrating harvested plants into her photographic artworks. Sarah Cameron Sunde, an innovative interdisciplinary artist, engaged with canal communities to create pieces that physically and ecologically connect with the canal. She also developed work in collaboration with Jeremy Dennis, a contemporary fine art photographer and an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY.

Rich Harrington: Fissure

For many people, personal identity flows naturally from their families, the objects they grew up with, and the physical place they are rooted in. These small puzzle pieces connect to construct one’s personality and sense of self. For others, notions of self and identity are more fluid and mysterious—a sum total that is somehow different from its constituent parts. Artist Rich Harrington has spent his career grappling with his own identity and the ways it has been shaped by popular culture.

Harrington digs into his early life experiences by constructing physical and metaphorical spaces to understand his own developing identity and his search for place within the family structure and society. For Fissure, Harrington revisits preconceived notions of gender roles and the popular culture that reinforces them. By appropriating imagery and text that once affirmed conventional ideas of gender, Harrington disrupts their original context, creating a conceptual fissure: a space where the dominant narrative fractures, allowing overlooked, suppressed, or alternative narratives to emerge. The fissures encourage viewers to question inherited assumptions and reconsider the cultural narratives that shape identity.

About the Artist: 

Rich Harrington was born in Binghamton, New York. He earned a BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University in 1980 and an MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1993. From 1978 to 1979, he studied in London with the partners of Pentagram Design Ltd. and faculty from St. Martin College of Art and Design. Harrington’s work examines how popular culture shapes identity, referencing toys, games, teaching materials, and icons from his youth. Using painting, sculpture, video projection, and assemblage, he reassigns familiar images and texts to reveal alternative narratives, creating intersections of memory, meaning, and belonging.

Julia Kunin: Electric Dream Machines

With their lustrous surfaces and evocative shapes, the ceramic works of Brooklyn-based artist Julia Kunin aim for maximum sensory overload. Kunin forges disparate influences like Art Deco, Surrealism, and queer abstraction into shimmering ceramic sculptures. For Kunin, discovery and free association reign supreme. Kunin’s mental process echoes her physical process, ping-ponging from one concept to the next. An allusion to a surrealist artist might lead to a rabbit hole about geopolitics or queer identity. Although her stream of consciousness can seem like a firehose, Kunin follows her trail of breadcrumbs with rigorous research—she has even learned entire languages to facilitate her work. 
About the Artist: Julia Kunin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Pecs, Hungary where she conducts research and develops new work. She received her BA from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has exhibited extensively in Europe as well as the United States. Kunin was a Fulbright Scholar to Hungary in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2010 Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant to Hungary. In 2008 she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and had a residency at Art Omi. In 2007 she received the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Artist Residency. Fellowships have included: MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York; Vermont Studio Center, Vermont; Core Program at the Glassell School of Art, Houston, Texas; and Skowhegan Residency, Maine. Her work has been featured in ARTnews, House and Garden, the Brooklyn Rail, and in Harmony Hammond’s book Lesbian Art in America (Rizzoli, 2000). Kunin’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Applied Art and Design, Frankfurt, Germany; Sculpture Center, New York; and Brattleboro Museum, Vermont. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; German Leather Museum, Offenbach, Germany; the Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida; and the Museum of Art and Design, New York.

Downtown Syracuse Farmers Market

The Downtown Syracuse Farmers Market, organized by the Downtown Committee of Syracuse and presented by Community Bank, Inc., will feature fresh produce, seasonal vegetables, fruits, baked goods, flowers, plants, and more from local vendors and visitors enjoyed entertainment during the “Lunchtime Live Music Series” from 11:30am - 1:30pm each week.

The "Lunchtime Live Music Series" was made possible with funding from the Tier Three Project Support program, a regrant program from the County of Onondaga, with the support of the County Executive and administered by CNY Arts. Additionally, this project receives support through grant funding from Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today.