As Hudson Valley One reported last November (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2023/11/27/unison-arts-has-big-plans-for-holsted-house-as-it-takes-leave-of-longtime-hq), one of New Paltz’s most venerable cultural institutions, the Unison Arts and Learning Center, relocated over the winter from its longtime home on Mountain Rest Road to a new site closer to town: the Holsted House, an 18th-century building donated by owners Daniel Getman and Janice Pickering in 2021. Later that same year, the not-for-profit organization brought a dynamic young executive director on board, Faheem Haider, who prioritized expanding Unison’s audience while also getting renovations of the Holsted House underway.
With the move to 9 Paradies Lane now completed, Haider has stepped down and moved on to other endeavors, necessitating the hire of a new director. The initial ambition of the search committee was merely to find an interim leader, but the Unison board of directors seems to have struck gold in recruiting Marielena Ferrer-Harrington. “I do believe that the board is comfortable with me,” she says. “I was hired as ‘managing’ director, but things are going really fast.”
Before settling into her new role, Ferrer-Harrington had a few things to get out of the way – notably, completing her MFA in Sculpture at SUNY New Paltz. Her commencement this weekend included special recognition for academic excellence as a spring 2024 Outstanding Graduate. It was her MFA coordinator, Unison board vice president Matthew Friday, who told her about the job opening, she says. Another of her SUNY New Paltz faculty mentors, Michael Asbill, also has a long relationship with the organization.
Ferrer-Harrington’s education in the arts has been a process spread over several decades. She first studied architecture in her native Venezuela, but stopped short of a degree and went to work doing special effects and animation for film and television. “But there was a lot of stress, so I pivoted more to human development and coaching,” she says. During these years she got married, had three children and eventually divorced. In 2003, during the political and economic upheavals of the Chávez regime, she left Caracas for Spain.
It was there, while taking leadership and management courses at the Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia, that Ferrer-Harrington founded her diversity and inclusion consulting firm, Humanamente. As an immigrant, she says, “I learned how inhospitable society was with certain populations. There are psychosocial challenges when everything changes.” Besides offering career counseling to immigrants, she opened a bookshop, became a radio personality and conducted workshops on “Spirituality and Politics” and “Migratory Mourning.” She also continued her own studies in psychology and sociology. “I always wanted to know what was inside people’s heads – why people do what they do, and how we work as a system.”
In the course of her work, Marielena Ferrer met an American journalist and communications strategist named Gerry Harrington — then working for UPI, but today known widely around Kingston as the guy who organizes the Movies with Spirit film series. They became romantically involved, and she followed him back to New York in 2011. After they married, she soon found work as community services coordinator for the Agri-Business Child Development (ABCD) program. After three years, she moved on to the Healthy Families program at the Institute for Family Health.
Ferrer-Harrington continued her higher education in the US, this time with the primary goal of becoming more fluent in English. “I enrolled in SUNY Ulster, figuring it would force me to think in English about different subjects.” At first, she focused primarily on sociology, but also took a night class, Introduction to Drawing, for the fun of it. Having grown up in a “humble working-class family,” she says, “I never looked at art as something you can do as a career.”
Her instructor, Dina Pearlman, saw great potential in Ferrer-Harrington’s talent, however, asking her, “Why are you not in the Fine Art program?” The answer was that her work schedule at the time didn’t allow her to attend classes during the day; but that became more flexible when she changed jobs to director of community engagement at Health Alliance. “I was doing night events, so I could take classes two mornings a week – and then I couldn’t go back,” she says. “Once I had that pencil in my hand, I didn’t want to drop the pencil anymore.”
As she participated in her first big student exhibit of her work at SUNY Ulster, Ferrer-Harrington became an accidental cause célèbre on campus when one of her paintings – His Panic, a depiction of an immigrant family separated at the border, featuring an image of the Baby Trump hot-air balloon – was torn off the wall and shredded by an unknown vandal. Fellow students, faculty and administrators rallied around her, scandalized by this infringement of academic freedom, and a photo of the lost work was widely distributed in a brochure for the exhibition.
She left Health Alliance when WMC Health took over the company and became a full-time student, transferring to SUNY New Paltz. Her BFA project, Broken Monarchs, which uses painted tissue-paper sculptures of thousands of monarch butterflies to represent immigrant children, has subsequently been widely exhibited, from Woodstock to Guam. “And now here I am, finishing my MFA,” she says in wonderment.
While all this was going on, she plunged into volunteer work in the arts and human services, conducting workshops at the O+ Festival, serving on the boards of Family of Woodstock, Arts Mid-Hudson and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She is now chair of both the Kingston City Arts Commission and the Alianza Cultural de Kingston, and a teaching artist at DRAW in Kingston, where she was the first artist invited to mount an exhibition in the organization’s new space in the Energy Square building. She also presents a monthly program on Spirituality and Politics on WKNY Radio. “I cannot do just one thing,” Ferrer-Harrington says. “I want to do everything in this life.”
She will surely have her hands full with managing Unison’s transition to a new, smaller space that is still under restoration, picking up where Haider left off. It will begin with a strategic planning process. “First, we’re going to pause and figure out where we are and where we want to go… The dreams need some structure.” Future sustainability for Unison will require greater inclusivity, she says, noting, “The business model did not evolve with the times. The new location is forcing the business model to change.”
Ferrer-Harrington points out that programming never completely stopped, with monthly open mics and poetry nights. “Person/all,” a pop-up exhibition celebrating the queer experience, curated by Eoin Dennis, was held this weekend. For kids, MovieLab Summer Camp will return in July and Wayfinder Experience Day Camp in August, all at the new location. Unison will participate in Upstate Arts Weekend in 2024, and host two New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists projects with Shani Richards and Tara Asgar.
An Open House will take place on Saturday, June 22, beginning at 4 p.m., and plans are already underway to celebrate the organization’s upcoming 50th anniversary. “There’s a lot of potential with Unison,” says the new director. “It was an easy yes for me to be jumping in. How could you resist to be part of that history?”
To learn more about Unison Arts, visit www.unisonarts.org.
Join the family! 
