Shoulder Season

Elizabeth Flood, Adam Pape, David N Wilson, Virginia Wagner, Dave Walsh, Amanda Thackray, Tova Snyder, Chuck Routhier, Georgina Arroyo, Katie Murray, Janine Polak, Lachell Workman

Shoulder Season marks a moment of transition—a shift in temperature, a change in rhythm, an adjustment to new conditions. It’s the in-between, the space where acclimation happens, where we adapt and push forward. But to shoulder something also means to carry weight, to bear responsibility, and to support one another in collective effort.

This exhibition highlights the work of junior faculty in the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, bridging the roles of artist and educator. It is essential that students see the creative practices of their instructors—not just as teachers but as working artists navigating the same evolving landscape. The show is a reminder that art-making, like teaching, is about engaging with challenges, embracing change, and finding meaning in the process.

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning offers an apt metaphor: an arch under pressure does not collapse; it stabilizes as each stone leans into the next. These artists in Shoulder Season are part of a structure—individuals with distinct skills and voices - strengthened by their shared endeavor. This exhibition is about that balance: the push and pull of creative work, the weight of responsibility, and the resilience found in common goals if not different paths.

Shoulder Season is not just about transition—it’s about strength in adaptation, about making and teaching as acts of endurance and commitment. It’s an invitation to witness the work of those who shape the next generation of artists, offering their shoulders in support of something greater.

“What a person actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What they need is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled.”

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning