“CPW offers something increasingly unique: photography with intention, courageously challenging and breaking barriers between art and photography, serving social justice and human understanding.
Up those stairs in Kingston, CPW reminds us that great photography doesn’t just capture the world around us, it helps us imagine how to change it.”
-BLIND MAGAZINE, July 2025
At CPW, we see photography as an adept medium to effect social change through innovative and inspiring programs, ones that help us understand ourselves, our community, and our society.
Two current CPW projects–Wendy Ewald’s Sanctuary City and Brenda Ann Kenneally’s Scrappin’–activate creative discovery and dialogue. Both programs empower and motivate participants to know themselves more fully, and to understand their place in an uncertain world. This past spring, due to cuts in Federal arts funding, CPW lost support for these projects. But we are more committed to these relevant projects than ever.
Today, CPW at 25 Dederick Street is full of life, with students filling our hallways, photographers populating our Digital Media Lab, and visitors flocking to our galleries, eager to view art and share meaningful dialogue with others about what they see. We’re just getting started! CPW intends to forge ahead, but we need your support.
Help CPW continue to produce innovative educational arts programming. You can support Sanctuary City, the Woodstock AIR artist residency, year-round workshops, and a host of other learning opportunities by donating today. Your support will grow our capacity to serve artists and communities in the Hudson River Valley and beyond.
Partner with us to build our future!
Led by MacArthur Fellow Wendy Ewald, Sanctuary City nurtures a sense of belonging for Kingston High School ESL immigrant students. Through the lenses of Kodak point-and-shoot cameras supplied by CPW, students document daily life as they interact with their new community and explore their new life, giving them a platform and creative outlet for self-discovery and personal growth.
Ewald combines social engagement, technical skill building, high visual standards, and profound human understanding.
Led by Guggenheim Fellow Brenda Ann Kenneally, Scrappin’ participants–teenagers and seniors–create books and scrapbooks using photographs, writing prompts, and personal ephemera. Kenneally uses storytelling techniques to unlock complex emotions and capture the essence of experiences.
Kenneally is an acclaimed documentary storyteller and photographer whose immersive, long-form collaborations produce personal history portraits focused on resilience within unique, often tough, life journeys.
CPW is a dynamic photography and visual arts center in Kingston, NY that facilitates innovative artistic inquiry, professional development, scholarly research, critical dialogue, and local engagement through its exhibitions, educational programming, library, collection, learning and community spaces, and a 26-year-old renowned artist residency program.
Missed our last message? Here’s a link to read week 1!