Turchin Center for the Visual Arts

ARTtalk: SR Lejeune
2026-02-26 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | TCVA Lecture Hall
Hear from the artists behind the exhibitions
contributing structure, on display in Gallery A through April 4, 2026.
SR Lejeune (b. 1994, Boston, MA) is an artist currently based in Pine Plains, NY. They received a BA with High Honors from Oberlin College (2015), were a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft (2017-19) and hold an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art (2023). SR was the 2023 West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné and has been an artist in residence at the Dirt Palace (2016), lower_cavity (2023-24), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (2024), and Women’s Studio Workshop (2025). In Summer 2026 they will be a Bemis Center Artist in Residence and a Visiting Artist at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Recent solo exhibitions include “sky light” at CHAMBER lower_cavity (Holyoke, MA) and “witness marks” at the Dieu Donné Jordan Schnitzer Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). They have taught workshops at the Penland School of Craft, Women’s Studio Workshop, Dieu Donné, the Yucca Valley Materials Lab and Bard College. In 2025 they received an Arts Mid-Hudson Arts & Culture Project Grant for the collaborative Hudson Valley Paper School, which they co-facilitate with Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. They have upcoming solo exhibitions at The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery at Purchase College (January 2026) and the Delaware Valley Artist Alliance (May 2026). They are currently a Windgate Artist in Residence at the School of Art + Design at Purchase College and are building out a manual machine shop in Amenia, NY.
https://www.sarahroselejeune.com

NEW DATE: ARTtalk and Awards: 23rd Annual Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition
2026-03-06 17:00 - 20:00
An ARTtalk panel will begin at 5:00pm, followed by the presentation of awards. The audience is then invited upstairs to a DJ set from 7:00-8:00pm with Ty Murray/DJ Soularia.
This year’s exhibition will be juried by Ty Murray, artivist and Director of Art & Communications at The Bottom, a nonprofit cultural organization in Knoxville, TN, who chose, “I Know Why the Mockingbird Sings” as this year’s exhibition theme.
In Appalachia, where memories move through mountains and stories echo through hollers, joy can be an act of devotion or defiance. This year’s theme invites photographers to tune into the moments that heal, harmonize, uplift and unburden.

ABOUT THE JUROR
A Renaissance woman rooted in the Appalachian South, Ty Murray views herself first and foremost as a storyteller. Whether behind the lens, spinning vinyl, shaping clay, or simply bearing witness to the world around her, her practice dances at the intersections of creativity and critical thought. Grounded in artivism, her work invites you to feel, think, and move, sometimes all at once.
Photography, for Ty, is an act of presence and praise. With a deep reverence for both scenery and identity, she crafts visual narratives that celebrate the beauty of land, body, and culture. Led by innate curiosity, she seeks to explore, interact, document, and uncover “the overlooked”. Inspired by the spirit of Expressionism, she photographs in living color, producing images that convey movement, vibrance and soul.
Beyond the lens, Ty serves as a community worker, tradition bearer and art director for The Bottom in Knoxville, TN. She curates sensory experiences that honor the past and envision liberated futures. Across all her creative practices, Ty honors art as a force for connection, empowerment, and communal healing.

ARTtalk: Gretchen Ernster Henderson
2026-04-17 17:00 - 18:00
Hear from the artists behind the exhibitions
Dear Body of Water, on display in Mayer Gallery December 5 through May 2, 2026.
Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a body of water, an intermedia artist, and the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Rhodes College near the Mississippi River in Memphis, TN. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023), has been seeping from deserts of the West into intermedia publications, exhibitions, performances, and field practices, including the participatory prompt of Dear Body of Water (with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, and national coalition of Poets for Science): inviting people to share their relationships with bodies of water. Through WaterWays, she cultivates community-engaged repertoires that blend restoring and restorying watersheds. Gretchen is grateful for recent artist fellowships from Fallingwater, Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo Arts Center, the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts, and Leopold Writing Program. In 2025-2026, she is the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. Recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Brevity, Arnoldia, Orion, Landscape Architecture Plus/LA+, TSLL, and Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands. Gretchen is interested in acoustic ecologies and communal practices that sound gaps of cultural and institutional histories to facilitate participatory spaces for exchanging ways of knowing to collectively support our human and more-than-human world. Upstream and downstream, she is grateful to continually learn from and with bodies of water: the lifeblood of our shared planetary home.
https://www.gretchenhenderson.com/
