Student Select 2026
SUNY Cortland Juried Student Exhibition Sponsored By Art Exhibition Association
Dowd Gallery presents Student Select 2026. An exhibition of Student artwork from the 2025-2026 academic year. Sponsored by the Art Exhibition Association, this annual exhibition demonstrates the excellence in studio arts achieved by students enrolled in studio courses at SUNY Cortland.
This semester, AEA invited participants to submit two works for careful consideration by Brookley Abbate. Abatte, SUNY Cortland alumn and local Homer Junior High School art teacher, has accumulated years of experience working with students and community members through visual art by teaching classes, organizing/juring exhibitions, and coordinating field trips to SUNY Cortland for prospective students. After an invitation to sit in on a critique in advanced Drawing, the Art Exhibition Association thought Abbate’s background in mixed materials would be ideal in the deliberation between the nuances in the artwork of varying levels of students from studio art courses and independents.
Representing all levels of professionalism in academic arts, submissions for this exhibition included ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, painting, digital animation, and examples of techniques within these disciplines. Many of the foundational skills for these subjects take root first in NYS junior high curriculum allowing Abbate's practiced experience to analytically isolate exceptional works among a field of great examples.
Molly K Williams opens the exhibition in the hallway gallery with her piece Matthew 27 : 31. Her intricately woven diptych leads into the gallery, where our west wing holds second and third place winners, David Barry, and Bella Chuley. David Barry’s painting It’s Cold Outside, oil on panel, depicting a childhood encounter, juxtaposes with Chuley’s serene, hazy landscape painting. (oil on canvas. north wall, west wing) Dowd’s main gallery exhibits many wonderful examples of the variety of artworks that our student body created, and is also the current display area for AEA’s Student Select 2026 Best of Show winner, Josefina Jimenez Garcia. The animated EPIC short Penelope and Odysseus captured the heart of this year’s juror in her first viewing, and combined with the processes of drawing, digital editing, and animating the short took first place.
Dowd Gallery, the Art and Art History Department, and Art Exhibition Association of SUNY Cortland would like to thank all the talented participants in this year’s exhibition. May your overwhelming talent shine bright and lead the field in the academic pursuit of the visual and performing arts.
