2021 JURY

Anna Conlan is a museum worker and art historian who has worked in museums and the arts for more than twenty years, including The Royal Academy of Art in London and The Museum for African Art in New York. Anna is currently serving as the Neil C. Trager Director at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, New York. During her time as Curator and Exhibitions Manager at The Dorsky Anna curated “Totally Dedicated: Leonard Contino, 1940-2016”, “Collecting Local”, “New Folk: Hudson Valley Artists 2020”, “Stay Home, Make Art”, “Lewis Hine Child Labor Investigator” and the forthcoming exhibition “Life After The Revolution: Kate Millett’s Art Colony for Women.” She was a curatorial consultant and catalog author for the award-winning “Art After Stonewall: 1969-89” exhibition that toured nationwide. Anna’s research on queer feminist cultural history is published in Feminist Theory Journal and Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader. She has an MA in Feminism and the Visual Arts from the University of Leeds, UK, and an MA in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University, NY.

Sevan Melikyan is the director of Wired Gallery in High Falls, New York, a founding member and director of Chagall in High Falls, Inc., a lecturer on art museums, a tour guide for Artful Journeys, and an artist.

In 2013, Art Society of Kingston presented Melikyan with its ASKars award in recognition for his “significant contributions to the arts” and The Ulster County Executive recognized Melikyan as an Arts Ambassador. Prior to the U.S., he lived in Paris, France and Istanbul, Turkey, where he was born of Armenian parents.

Ransome was born in North Carolina and moved to a New Jersey suburb as a teenager. He received his MFA in Studio Arts from Lesley University.

He was a tenured professor in the School of Visual Performing Arts at Syracuse University for thirteen years before retiring to pursue his dreams of being a studio artist.

In his practice, Ransome often combines acrylic paint with an array of found, made, and purchased papers. The materials he uses are conceptual statements on an often-overlooked African-American societal legacy that managed to make something out of nothing. The pictorial narratives he creates are personal, yet the symbols he employs are universal and interplay with larger social, racial, ancestral, economic, and political histories that inform our nation to this day.

His work is part of both private and public collections including the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African- American Art. He lives in beautiful Hudson Valley of  New York.

website: https://www.ransomeart.com/

Instagram @ransomegart