Upcoming Events

Join us on Thursday, November 20, for an engaging evening with exhibiting artist Marion Wilson. Marion will discuss her artistic process and creative approach, offering insight into the works currently on view in the Art Center’s Main Gallery exhibition, All That Consumes Me. Following the discussion, Marion will participate in a Q&A session moderated by VACNJ Curator Jordan Horton, allowing visitors to ask questions and explore the ideas behind her work in greater depth.

The evening will also include food and wine, offering guests the chance to continue the conversation and connect with fellow art enthusiasts in a relaxed, social setting. Click here to register!

Marion Wilson’s art investigates landscape as a way to foster connection to self and place. Through painting, photography, and installation, she explores our relationship to nature amid climate change and ecological loss. Her work often bridges art and science, partnering with botanists, architects, and urban communities to imagine more just and sustainable futures.Wilson approaches social and ecological challenges through the lens of creative inquiry, using scientific tools and observational methods to “look closely and pay attention to what is small, omnipresent, and frequently overlooked—drawing parallels between the natural world and the most fundamental aspects of human presence.”

Wilson is the founder of MLAB and MossLab, mobile eco/art labs that examined moss species along the East Coast while also serving as classrooms for hundreds of Syracuse students each year. She also founded 601 Tully, transforming an abandoned residence in Syracuse, NY into a neighborhood art center, and more recently reimagined a houseboat in Vineyard Haven, MA as a floating studio and public platform for environmental dialogue.

A former Associate Professor at Syracuse University, Wilson created the award-winning New Directions in Social Sculpture curriculum and collaborated with botanist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose teachings on Traditional Ecological Knowledge continue to inform her practice.

“Compost/Composed”, Marion Wilson’s work in the exhibition in the galleries is an exploration of humanity’s connection to nature, community, and self through food. Working from political, cultural, and ecological lenses, I investigate how these entanglements have been complicated by COVID-19, which has caused major shifts in the way communities access and experience food together, furthering issues of scarcity. At the core of the project is an exercise in testing the limits of confinement both artistically and practically: how can art both transform and be transformed by scarcity? Through photography, painting, and natural dye-making, this new work will present each component as both process and product, following the transformation of food from decomposing compost; to natural, hand-made dye; to the final artistic work, to social gathering.

Marion Wilson divides her time between Brooklyn, NY and a houseboat on Martha’s Vineyard.