Among the most reliable summer pleasures of the mid-Hudson, whether you’re a local or a visitor, happens each year on the second weekend in August: the Saugerties Artists’ Studio Tour. Painters, sculptors, collagists, ceramists, printmakers, fiber artists, jewelers, furnituremakers, earthworks creators, videographers and multimedia artists will once again throw open their studios to visitors from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Saturday and Sunday, August 10 and 11.
The self-guided tour is free, and can be pursued on foot in downtown Saugerties or by car in the surrounding hamlets and rural byways. Don’t even try to take all of it in, though; the offerings are simply too rich and plentiful to digest all in a single weekend. That’s why attendees tend to come back year after year.
“This year is the largest tour we’ve ever had, with 45 artists,” enthused Barbara Bravo, who has been the tour’s lead organizer for most of its 22-year history. Nine of these are participating for the first time: Dan Shornstein, Joanne Pagano Weber, Ed Lederman, Richard Levy, Stephen Whisler, Sabine Reckewell, Betsy Wilson, Lisa Samalin and Lauren Bergman. Reckewell and Samalin both identify themselves as installation artists, bringing a novel twist to the media lineup on display. “More and more artists are moving into Saugerties all the time. Sometimes it takes them a few years to actually apply,” Bravo noted. “People who’ve taken the tour year after year are often drawn toward the newest artists.”
Though it’s exciting to see new artists participating, Bravo seemed equally pleased to see nine past participants returning this year, after having taken a hiatus of a year or more: Barbara Tepper Levy, Tracy Philips, Sarkis Simonian, Robert Sherman, Michael Nelson, Kristin Barton, Fay Wood, Angela Gaffney Smith and Allen Bryan. “One guy, it’s been five years,” said Bravo. “Some people need to take a break. Some of those having drifted back into the tour.”
Even the core group who open their studios year after year are keeping things fresh. “They always have new work. They’re always innovating, even switching media. You just get to a point where you feel like you’ve run out of ideas. This year, the clay was calling me back,” said Bravo, who had been focused more on her collage work the previous couple of years. “People are getting back to drawing and pastels. We haven’t had a lot of that in the past.”
Besides getting their latest work before the public and making sales, a big part of artists’ motivation to get involved in helping to organize the annual tour is to connect with their own community, “meeting other artists and feeling that bond,” according to Bravo. “I have a list of artists that want to be interviewed for 2025. I tell them, ‘Be sure to take the tour!’”
The comings and goings of various artists from one year to the next certainly help keep the mix exciting, but there’s a melancholy aspect as well, as aging artists retire, become disabled or die. The latest loss to the Saugerties arts family is Shelley Farkas Davis, who was felled by an aggressive sarcoma on July 23. Robert Langdon, who had shown her work at almost every show he mounted at Emerge Gallery, announced her passing on social media last week: “Shelley was one of the first artists that I met when I opened my gallery in 2016. Over the years I got to know her as a friend and prolific artist. She was always challenged to create to the themes of my shows, and I was always thrilled to see the wonderful work she would create for my prompts. It felt like a collaboration…I’ll miss her visits, our talks and seeing what piece of art she’d come up with next. They kept getting better and better.”
Known then as Shelley Farkas, the Brooklyn-born artist came to SUNY New Paltz in the 1960s, where she attained her BFA and MFA, building her skillset in drawing, painting, photography and design and getting certified to teach. She held court at the “yellow barns” at Half Moon Farm in Tillson, immersed in the radical artistic ferment of New Paltz’s hippie heyday and collaborating with many feminist artists, including Carolee Schneemann. A lifelong “dog whisperer” and passionate advocate for animal rights, Shelley was never seen around town in those years without her canine companion Khadija.
It was in the darkroom during graduate school that she made her most influential stylistic breakthrough, inventing a technique of painting with acrylics on exposed photographic paper that she dubbed “photofusion.” Baffled as to how to pigeonhole them, exhibitors at first resisted these mixed-media works; but in time they were shown and collected all over the world, and other artists began to copy the technique.
Davis took a long break from the art world to move to Manhattan, teach in a public school and later at NYU, marry and divorce. She founded a company called Shelle Designs that specialized in wearable art items, creating thousands of pairs of bespoke rhinestone-studded sunglasses that became the height of chic for a time. She worked with other animal advocates to create one of New York City’s first dog runs in Washington Square Park and the right of hospital patients to bring their service animals with them. Her beloved last dog, a Samoyed named Hina, was a rescue from the dog-meat trade in Korea. Eventually moving back to Ulster County, Davis established a home and studio in the Saugerties hamlet of Malden, where she spent her final decades.
Her artworks were eclectic in style, continually evolving, often involving paint or collage applied in layers to three-dimensional objects, such as Easter eggs covered with strips torn from handwritten letters. A typical month’s output might include a series of shadow boxes featuring illustrations from Victorian advertisements or children’s books, framed in antique lace edging, hanging side-by-side with paintings of rusted business signs from the 1950s. Any era, any source of inspiration was freely incorporated into the mix. “To create from the soul, to have fun, to express, to share what I create with others is the force that drives me. Anything that can exist in life can be recreated with beauty and wonder,” she wrote in an artist’s statement for one of her shows.
Bravo remarked on how Davis’ most recent paintings, prior to her illness, had been trending toward bright tropical colors following a period of darker images. “She’d do multiples of similar things, and then suddenly there would be this big surprise.” Consequently, the artworks left behind by the artist’s passing represent a wildly varied gamut of visual treats – and they will be on view for one final tour this weekend. “Her friends will be preparing her studio and welcoming the public during the tour,” Langdon announced. “Please stop by Studio 21 (1170 Main Street in Malden) during the tour and pick up one of Shelley’s works to add to your collection. Art was Shelley’s first love and she put her heart into each piece that she created. One of her requests was that each find a new home.”
Added Bravo, “The past year wasn’t very good for her. But in the hospice, just before her passing, word came back to me that she had expressed how important it was that her studio be open during the tour, whether she was there or not. I found that really moving – that was what she was thinking about. I’m glad we could honor her last wish. She strongly identified with being an artist, right to the bitter end.”
In addition to the above-listed artists, the 2024 Saugerties Artists’ Studio Tour will include open houses hosted by Aaron Myers-Walls, Alex Kveton, Ana Bergen, Anne Leith, Charley Mitcherson, Gus Pedersen, Hugh Morris, Iain Machell, Isaac Abrams, Jan Wallen, Jen Hicks, Jerelynn Mason, Josepha Gutelius, Josephine Bentivegna, Justin Love, Kate Mitchell, Kay Kenny, Marsha Kaufman Rubinstein, Meredith Morabito, Michael Ciccone, Raymond J. Steiner, Cornelia Seckel, Serena Wehr, Tara Bach, Viorica Morris Stan and Yvette Lewis. You can see samples of all their work and learn much more about each artist, as well as download tour maps, at www.saugertiesarttour.org. No registration is required to participate in the tour.
Join the family! 
