The Beacon Room is a project space at BAU Gallery that allows emerging and established artists to experiment and expand their visual language through multidisciplinary exhibitions and interactive programming in an intimate setting. It is a space for risk-taking, dialogue, new thinking, and cultural conversation.
On View March 13–April 5
Susan Ziegler: Funny Weather
Susan Ziegler, Sphagnum, 2024,
mixed media on paper 13 in. x 10 in.
This series reflects Susan Ziegler's ongoing meditation on nature within the urban environment through a process-based practice of painting and printmaking. Her work begins with drawing from observation, sketching elements such as patterns of shadow and light, plants, and architectural forms. Through a combination of monotype, painting, and collage, she
layers these elements, creating a continual push and pull between the role of chance and a search for balance and visual harmony. Inspired by Olivia Laing’s book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, the work reflects Ziegler's sense of wonder and hope alongside a feeling of uneasiness in the current climate. She aims to capture the complexity, delicacy, and dynamism of her surroundings through abstraction.
About the artist: Susan Ziegler earned a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Ziegler has presented her work at the One River School of Art + Design, Long Island University, Gross McCleaf Gallery, Nahcotta, the LBI Foundation of Arts and Sciences, Hayes Valley Art Center, and the Contemporary Art Center in Peoria, Il., among other venues. In 2017, she was an artist-in-residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space on Governor’s Island. Her paintings are in private and public collections including GlaxoSmithKline, SAS Institute, The Watermark Group, and the U.S. Department of State. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York. Ziegler lives and works in Brooklyn.
On View April 10–May 3
George Kimmerling: The Unfinished History of Dennings Point
Artist Statement
This project explores Dennings Point, a 64-acre site on the Hudson River, as an economic, social, and political landscape. The project includes photographs I have made at Dennings Point over the last year and digital studies for new historical markers that would give visitors broader context for understanding the site.
I began the project after discovering a brick in my yard marked “DPBW,” which, I learned, meant it was produced at Dennings Point Brick Works, one of the largest Hudson Valley brick makers at the turn of the 20th century. DPBW bricks were widely used, including for monumental civic projects such as the Empire State Building. In researching the site, I came to understand that Dennings Point, now a state park, has a complicated—and distinctly American—history, marked by racial and class conflict, unbridled industrialism, environmental degradation, and shifting boundaries between public and private use.
In the 350 years since prominent enslavers took possession of Dennings Point from the Wappinger people as part of the 85,000-acre Rombout Patent, the area has been the site of lavish estates, reported sojourns by Revolutionary War figures, an archaeological dig in the 1880s that unearthed Native American remains, the massive brick factory (which instituted a "whites-only" hiring policy in 1925), a railway project that clear-cut the forest, a public swimming beach, and a short-lived environmental center, from which the sponsoring university withdrew just last year.
Some chapters in this history are well-documented, others often elided, especially in signage at the site. As I continue this project, I hope it offers a more holistic, inclusive, and complex understanding of the site as deeply contested, one whose full meaning is embedded in the power structures that have shaped it and that lie at the core of U.S. history.
Factory Floor, 2026, archival pigment print, 20 in. x 24 in.