PKX Festival
This countdown has been ended already!
Coming: September 15-17, 2022
The annual PKX Festival, in and around the Trolley Barn Gallery serve as the building blocks for the development of a Youth Arts Empowerment Zone in the City of Poughkeepsie. The Youth Arts Empowerment Zone is a 10-year plan to establish a youth arts district along Main Street. It will focus on youth-driven placemaking in and around the Trolley Barn. In its early stages, The Art Effect will host youth-led arts festivals to engage the community with creative placemaking project support from the National Endowment for the Arts. There will be annual arts festivals around community-inspired artworks, created by local youth and professional artists, all of which will empower the local community.
Sponsor The Festival
Sponsoring the PKX Festival gives your business the opportunity to get your name in front of hundreds of people, to be associated with youth leadership, great art, and to be known for helping bring change to Poughkeepsie.
Featured Artist
This April, a group of Poughkeepsie teens from The Art Effect had the opportunity to spend their spring break working alongside BoogieRez, a duo artist team inspired by the Hip Hop culture that incorporates a creative blend of music, photography, illustration, painting, graphic design, dance, fashion design and sculpture into their work. Alongside The Art Effect’s youth, BoogieRez began working on a unique public art piece we are thrilled to unveil at this year’s PKX Festival. From a whirlwind trip to BoogieRez’s studio in New York City, to learning how to use sewing machines for the first time, the youth had insightful conversations about the influence of public art in the city of Poughkeepsie and spent a lot of time creating, laughing, and planning this year’s PKX Festival!
“Honestly my creative adventure really started in Poughkeepsie once I met Rez. It’s a magical place, Poughkeepsie, it really is. It is amazing that there is just so much different culture in Poughkeepsie. There is a lot of hidden and not-so-hidden talent in the city” – Riiisa Boogie of BoogieRez.
“Hopefully we are beacons to help you get wherever you want to get to creatively” – Rez Ones of BoogieRez.
Wonderland International Juried Exhibition
Juror: Allison M. Glenn in collaboration with youth from The Art Effect’s Curatorial Program
Exhibition Dates: Sept 15 – Oct 20, 2022
The Wonderland International Juried Exhibition is the point of entry to the PKX Wonderland Festival, Wonderland reimagines the Trolley Barn 3,000 square foot gallery as an otherworldly empire of wonder, illusion and surprise. We invite work that disrupts standard notions of reality through sensory excess (texture, color, light, sound) and/or unexpected visual mischief. We ask, and wonder, how can your art help us reimagine our reality and create positive change in our community? Allison Glenn works collaboratively with The Art Effect’s Youth Curatorial Team to curate the Wonderland exhibition, selecting artworks from submissions from around the globe. Glenn received substantial critical and community praise for her curatorial work in the groundbreaking exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky titled, Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition that reflected on the life of Breonna Taylor, centered on her portrait painted by Amy Sherald. The New York Times selected the exhibition as one of the Best Art Exhibitions of 2021.
What’s Going On
PKX Youth Committee
As a part of the youth-driven placemaking through the YAEZ, a group of youth is taking part in the PKX Youth Committee to plan the community arts festival. Youth earn a stipend as the planners and developers of the PKX Festival. They are responsible for every aspect of choosing a featured artist, engaging with city officials for festival permits, and community organizing throughout the city. The PKX Youth Committee works closely with the city, local artists, stakeholders, and community partners as they plan the first PKX Festival. Youth in the PKX Youth Committee learn about community organizing, art, and nonprofit administration, civil service, and public speaking skills in community events and civic settings as they establish a youth arts district along Main Street in the city.
Sessions run in the Spring (January-May) and Fall (September – December). Applications for the PKX Youth Committee are accepted in November (for the Spring) and August (for the Fall)
Partners
PKX Youth Committee works with community partners across the county including;
- MASSDesign
- Celebrating The African Spirit
- Hudson River Housing
- FallKill Creative Works
- Dutchess Tourism
- The YOU (Youth Opportunity Union)
- The City of Poughkeepsie
- Arts Mid-Hudson
- WomensWork.Art
- Poughkeepsie Public Library District
- Local Artists
Staff
Destiny Kearney is a New York-based artist who graduated from Bowdoin College, with a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies, Art History, and Visual Arts. After entering her first technical art classes during her sophomore year of college, she encountered a teaching style that excluded Black people. The gap in her artistic training led her to pursue the study of race in arts education. During Kearney’s time within Bowdoin’s Visual Arts program, she continued to learn from and rebel against that pedagogy. Taking the skills she acquired through self-teaching she continues to focus on depictions of Blackness in art. Over the past year, Kearney has used painting, photography, and collage to explore her Black and Indigenous identity, with a focus on land, lineage, and language. Her works address the hypervisibility, visibility, and invisibility of her racial and cultural identities. Bowdoin College Awarded her with The Richard P. Martel Jr. Memorial Prize in Visual Arts which is awarded to the students who, in the judgment of the Visual Arts Faculty at Bowdoin are deemed to have produced the most creative, perceptive, proficient, and visually appealing art works exhibited at the college during this academic year. Embarking on her post-grad journey, Kearney joins the Art Effect team as the Trolley Barn Fellow. She will be with us for the next two years as a member of the first cohort of Lead for Poughkeepsie Fellows, a branch of the Lead for America program.
The PKX Festival is funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
