Thursday, September 4, 2025
Doors at 4pm. Presentation at 6pm.
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
On Thursday, September 4, we welcome artist Brenda Ann Kenneally, along with participants of her CPW monthlong book-making workshop, for a special “Meet the Artist” screening of the projects they created. The wrap of the workshop resulted in our current Community Gallery exhibition, Photographs, Scotch Tape, and Our Hearts’ Desire, which showcases the rich collection of stories created. The exhibition highlights the power of community partnership, showcasing how collaboration can directly uplift and support local residents.
Beginning at 4pm on September 4th, we will celebrate this exhibition at a closing reception followed by a 6pm video presentation of the stories led by Kenneally.
Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.
About the Workshop and Brenda Ann Kenneally:
In July 2024 and 2025, CPW invited seniors and teens, aka legends and legends-in-the-making, to participate in free programs with brilliant photographer, storyteller, Guggenheim Fellow, and CPW exhibitor Brenda Ann Kenneally. Brenda is one of America’s leading documentary storytellers, an artist whose decades-long Upstate Girls series is one of the most fully realized projects to trace the roots of intergenerational trauma to wealth and class inequity. During the July 2025 workshop, Kenneally led local youth and community members to consider the prompt of “our hearts’ desire” as they shared personal photos and ephemera and recorded oral histories together in a lively, collaborative environment.
Brenda Ann Kenneally is a multi-media documentary maker, Guggenheim Fellow, and activist whose visceral, long-form projects have broadened the humanistic scope of the documentary form. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Kenneally has won several major awards, including the The W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, a Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship, The Mother Jones Documentary Photography Award, the World Press Photo Award, a NYFA Grant, the Best of Photojournalism Award by the National Press Photographers Association, and several grants from New York State Council for The Arts.
Her 2006 book, Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood (Chanel Photographics), is a decade-long look at the Brooklyn neighborhood where she and her son lived.
Her 2018 book Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City 2004–2013 (Regan Arts, 2018) sold out. Published with Regan Arts, the book powerfully captures how the paucity of social, legal, and economic opportunities straight-jacket and harm the psyches of two generations of young people growing up in Troy, NY.
Kenneally founded A Little Creative Class in 2018 to address the social, and economic obstacles that deter low-income youth from participation in the idea-based, creative economy.
Banner image: Raisa.
Scrapbook images (from left to right): Ksenia, Nico.