This year’s Art Affair will showcase the incredible talent of our 2025 Featured Artists, who have been commissioned to create original works for the event. These artists, along with additional guest artists, will collaboratively transform the venue with immersive installations, performances, and exhibitions aligned with our "Interwoven" theme.

• Dylan Gillespie is a representational painter based in Orange County, NY, working primarily in oil, graphite, and charcoal. His practice focuses on plein air and figurative painting, aiming to capture the beauty that quietly surrounds us. Trained at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, his work reflects a classical foundation with a contemporary sensitivity. For this exhibition, Gillespie explores a deeper connection between people and place with ‘A Willing Sacrifice’, depicting early morning commuters along the Hudson River. Those who choose to live amid beauty, even at the cost of daily departure.

• Hot Wrk Ensemble is a saxophone/woodwind and percussion trio founded in 2020 by award-winning musicians Lois Hicks-Wozniak and Brad Hubbard, is committed to creating community through diverse, genre-eclectic “chamber grooves” that include collaborative improvisation. Both questioning and answering, “what is chamber music Hot Wrk explores, deconstructs and wrks out concepts of traditional chamber music and the concert experience. “...a trio of phenomenally talented local musicians, Hot Wrk Ensemble.

• Mike Garda (he/they) is an artist and therapist living in the City of Newburgh. Mike moved to Newburgh in June 2020 and has grown to love life in the Hudson Valley. Last year, he opened his private practice in Newburgh to build closer connections with the local community. Mike has been an artist since childhood and their art practice has been an integral part of their identity and how they see the world. Mike's work often explores themes of mental health and queerness and is informed by their training in art therapy about the healing process through art making

• Vivien Collens is a lifelong artist who began welding and creating public sculpture in 2017 at age 70. Now focusing on outdoor sculpture and the environment as it relates to art. With an irreverent playful approach, Collens develops larger sculptures, inspired by the teachings of Friedrich Froebel, and focusing on urban architecture and fluid energy During a 2017 residency at Salem Art Works, Collens learned to weld which led to her creation of numerous installations at sculpture parks and museums of her large scale public sculptures.

• Guest artists to be announced at a later date.