Tales from the Penumbra: Memories of Shadow-and-Light

Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition 2026

Elena Kalkova | Duncan Richards | Luis Mercedes Winter

September 19, 2026 - November 22, 2026
Saturdays & Sundays 1:00 - 5:00 pm
& by appointment

Opening Reception
Saturday, September 26, 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Newburgh Open Studios
Extended hours

TALES from the Penumbra: Memories of Shadow-and-Light
A closing celebration & reading
with Tea and Cookies
in community with Orange County Queer Collective

Sunday November 22, 2026, 1:00pm

Exhibition and events are free & open to the public.

Tales from the Penumbra: Memories of Shadow-and-Light brings together the Fellowship projects of Elena Kalkova, Duncan Richards, and Luis Mercedes Winter, three emerging perspectives in the Hudson Valley region that use storytelling to claim margins, thresholds, and grey spaces as places of agency and connection. Sidestepping the divisive violence of strategies that rely on binaries, these artists seek the liberatory and healing potential of practices that restage, reframe, and reimagine mainstream cultural, historical, and political narratives from transitional spaces. Their practices span installation, print media, sculpture, assemblage, photography, poetry, and spiritual practices as forms of care, knowledge-keeping, and co-creation that make space within inherited narratives for embodied authenticity and productive ambiguity.

Elena Kalkova (she/they) is an artistic researcher and educator born in Tver, Russia and living and working in Newburgh. Working in conceptual sculpture and installation, she draws on the post-utopic landscape of her childhood to address state censorship, political violence, and the politics of memory.

Duncan Richards (she/they) is a Hudson Valley-based interdisciplinary artist and spiritsmith, whose creative work intertwines contemporary art with traditional folk magic. Using ritual and technology, body and image, Richards’ work is shaped by Trans and Queer resistance, folk magic, and esoteric traditions that seek to intertwine those legacies.

Luis Mercedes Winter is a Black, Queer, Jewish, Neurodiverse Earthling based on Mohican Land, colonially known as the Hudson Valley. With photography and poetry, a story of his life is told through a modern-day interpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story in which Winter casts drag kings and a drag queen, and features Hudson Valley landscapes as the background for, and a character in, the story.

The Ann Street Gallery Emerging Artist Fellowship program aims to provide a supportive platform for early-career or under-recognized artists in Newburgh and the Hudson Valley, with a focus on artists from historically marginalized communities. The six-month fellowship supports experimental and substantive growth from June through November 2025, providing three artists with opportunities for mentorship, networking, and professional development as well as a materials and supplies allowance, shared studio space, and a cohort exhibition in the gallery.

The Exhibition Guide can be downloaded here.

Press:

Hyperallergic
10 Art Shows to See in Upstate New York This November
(Download PDF here)

Arts Mid-Hudson
Tales from the Penumbra: Memories of Shadow-and-Light
(Download PDF here)

Safe Harbors Radio Hour
Community Care: Emerging Artist Fellows and the Benefits of Blue Zones | November 2026

Learn more about our 2026 Fellows here and our robust Fellowship Program here.

Elena Kalkova

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@elena_kalkova}

Elena Kalkova (she/they) is an artistic researcher and educator living and working in Newburgh, NY.  Born in Tver, Russia, she had to leave in 2016, first to Hong Kong and then to the United States. This journey, and the losses, freedoms, losses of freedoms it carried, remains central to how she makes work. Working in conceptual sculpture and installation, she draws on the post-utopic landscape of her childhood to address state censorship, political violence, and the politics of memory. Kalkova wants to construct what she calls in-between spaces: dystopian wallflowers that have grown tired of alienation and chosen warmth instead. They resist authoritarian monumentality not through force, though they might look brutal, but through intimacy. Her works often talk about the complexity of a moment when something is being forcefully disappeared, and the layers of grief, anger, silence, fear, resistance that fill that void. Kalkova believes intimate counter-memory is a form of resistance. Her works embody this conviction: they are spaces for reflection, repair, and political activation, inviting viewers into a relationship rather than a confrontation. Her practice feeds equally from her life as an artist, activist, an educator, and a community volunteer - roles she does not separate from her art, but understands as extensions of the same impulse toward collective repair and human connection.

Kalkova holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in Global Arts and Cultures from Rhode Island School of Design. She received her BA from Tver State University. In 2026, she was awarded a NYSCA Grant. Her work has been exhibited widely, including the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, the Ely Center for Contemporary Art, the Romanian Cultural Institute (NYC), The Invisible Dog Art Center, and the Terrain Biennial, among others. In addition to her practice, she has always been an educator; she has taught college classes, kindergartens, community workshops, and worked for boys and girls clubs. She believes in the vital importance of accessible liberal arts and art education. Currently, she works at SUNY with immigrants, volunteers with Ukrainian refugees, and teaches at RISD. She is also currently a member and participant of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance Group (FAR), an international horizontal human rights and activist.

Fellowship Project Description
Insidious Pyres considers the ‘oblivion spells’ that authoritarian regimes do very efficiently, quietly throwing memory after memory into the literal and metaphorical fire, book after book, plaque after plaque, history after history, until no one remembers any more…

Recently, U.S. public institutions have begun systematically removing references to diversity, queerness, and non-dominant histories from archives and memorial sites, reshaping public memory to support a narrow narrative of white, militarized nationalism and patriarchy. I have been collecting and archiving documented instances of these removals. Insidious Pyres focuses on three: the removal of a history exhibit at “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” in Philadelphia in 2026, book burnings in the United States and elsewhere historically, and mass book bans in the United States over recent years. These acts of erasure diminish representation and contribute to ongoing cycles of exclusion and violence.

Having been born and raised in Russia, I am acutely aware of these mechanisms and recognize similarities across contexts. I grew up hearing stories about artists, writers, teachers, and family members creating their own Aesopian language to pass Soviet censorship. Later as Putin’s regime unfolded, I was able to see it for myself. Allegory became a safe way of communication, the double bind of what is “officially” and what is whispered after that became apparent. Penumbra for me is a fruitful space for resistance. Concealment, partial shadow, Aesopian language, partial withholding can be a place of agency, not deficiency. Refusing to let the threshold resolve, choosing to stay in the doorway on purpose allows one to see what is left between remembered and forgotten.

My project is not a narrative tale, but rather a group discussion, a dialogue, where all three pieces sit around a table discussing how we could deal with absence, recover from institutionally imposed lobotomies, and consider what remembering and forgetting means for each of us.

My fellowship project, Insidious Pyers, includes What the Fire Read, Samizdat, and What Stands in Its Place.

Duncan Richards

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@where_the_water_flows_}

Duncan Richards (she/they) is a Hudson Valley-based interdisciplinary artist and spiritsmith, whose creative work intertwines contemporary art with traditional folk magic. Her work emerges from the understanding that we live in an inspirited world . Matter is never inert; image, object, body, land, and memory are all in continuous relation with forces both visible and invisible; for what are we if not spirits within a body? To create within an inspired world is also to refuse the colonial fantasy of the isolated artist in favor of remembering the self within the plural: composed through ancestry, environment, community, spirit, and the many forms of exchange that make up this little life we all share. Richards is interested in art as a co-creative act, a place where the small daemons that live in her heart can take shape in visual form. As a Trans artist, that sense of plurality is bound up with Richards’ relationship to change. Transition taught her early that the self is not singular or still. It shifts, opens, doubles back, sheds skin, and becomes. Change, for her, is not a problem to solve. It is the condition that makes creation possible. Using ritual and technology, body and image, Richards’ work is shaped by Trans and Queer resistance, by folk magic, and by esoteric traditions that seek to intertwine those legacies.

Through her moniker, WhereTheWaterFlows, she creates through sculptural, multimedia, and mediumistic techniques. Duncan’s work has been featured in collaborations with the Kolaj Institute of New Orleans and the National Folklore Collection at the University of Dublin, and has appeared at Red Dot Miami as part of Art Basel week. In addition to her artistic pursuits, she holds a master’s degree from NYU’s Silver School of Social Work with a focus on Trans/Queer populations and postgraduate certifications in Trauma specialization from the International Trauma Training Institute (ITTI).

Fellowship Project Description
Angels in the Operating Room investigates the Trans body as a site of angelic re-formation. Tracing the TransAngel’s transition as an archival locus of story, we explore these illuminated beings through their wounds and openings, merging bodily experience with a collective struggle for narrative liberation. Structured around three interconnected species—God, Angels, and Humans—this series considers the process of embracing one’s humanity through their more-than-human self.

I created this series to explore the ways I have felt alienated from my own humanity, while still finding ways to return to myself. In the decade since I first transitioned as a teenager, I have repeatedly found myself grieving the uneven and often contradictory shape of “progress”. That grief, that anger, has spurred me to turn back the clock to old scriptures to explore deliverance, or lack thereof, to the creatures that permeate divine revelation in Abrahamic faith. The angels, like me and so many others, continue to create ourselves in our own image, again and again, despite an ever-growing hostile socio-political climate. There is something profoundly sacred in that act of self-making. We are divinity on earth... and I think that’s pretty damn cool. I love you all, my angels, we happy firebrands of unfurling light.

My fellowship project, Angels in the Operating Room, includes The weight of human eyes, Death is the Only Road to Awe, Fledgling Watch, The Fall, and God, Can You Hear Me?

Luis Mercedes Winter

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Luis Mercedes Winter, aka Louie from the block, is a Black, Queer, Jewish, Neurodiverse Earthling based on Mohican Land, colonially known as the Hudson Valley of New York. With photography and poetry, the story of his life is told through allegory. As his existence is politicized, his work is inherently political. For Mercedes Winter, to live while Black, he must practice Anti-Racism. His “effeminate” nature is the target of hate, which necessitates his actions for Feminism. He declares his Love with Pride. Intentions are irrelevant in the face of impact, so rather than focus on intent, he looks to actions that repair the world. Mercedes Winter acts up by documenting, photographing, and making Art that speaks to this moment. He grounds his words in soft images, so their meaning is easier to digest. He sprinkles in absurd humor to disarm the reluctant. This work frees him from the public theater that this oppressive, fascist system expects. Here, he can speak with honesty and clarity to his experience. He is free to write it as he sees it and capture moments that reflect the full picture of Shadow-and-Light.

Born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and raised between three boroughs, Luis lived in Los Angeles from 2013 to 2018. He learned how to question at Phillips Exeter Academy and how to Art (to Be) at Bard College. His photography is often based in literature while his writing is visual and sensory. His work is colorful, like his Afro-Latinx roots. Mercedes Winter recently participated in group exhibitions at Photoville Festival and Sprout Society in Brooklyn as well as the Dwyer Cultural Center in Harlem. He has been featured in Dispatches Magazine and Hey Alma. His photobook, Moses of the City, is part of the collection at The Library for Arts & Culture in Brooklyn. He was previously a fellow with The Workshop in 2023 and 2024.

Fellowship Project Description
Daddy Issues is a modern day interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac. The patriarchal understanding of this tale paints Abraham as beyond reproach and focuses on his perspective. Luis Mercedes Winter’s story empathizes more with Isaac’s point of view; a son who learns a healthy boundary is not going to harm his one and only body. Humor is used to provide a valve as themes of domestic violence are explored. The cast adds to this humor by ‘hamming it up’, delivering Camp Theater. Drag is used to bring attention to the ideas of gender that this ancient tale has been made to imply, namely that “masculinity” permits one to harm, to lie, to dominate. These notions are challenged here.

Mercedes Winter made this series by working with his communities. First, he connected with his friend and fellow artist Sage to cast the roles and hire the crew. Then he produced the story behind the scenes and brought it all together. The cast got into character while the stage was set. Once ready, they paused and meditated to ground themselves into the story. They proceeded to play for the day and broke sushi for lunch. The 120mm and 35mm film was lovingly processed and scanned. Mercedes Winter wrote the story that shaped the images and then, once the images were produced, he edited the words to sharpen the pictures.

Art as Catharsis is part of Mercedes Winter’s practice. He made this series to process his experience of being raised in a home with domestic violence. At age Thirty, after Seventeen years of being low contact, he decided to estrange himself from his father. Children are programmed to love their parents even in the face of physical and/or emotional abuse. And yet, since estranging himself he has noticed that people always say, “But that’s your father,” and never ask, “What could a parent do that is so terrible even a child would run away?”

The answer to this question lies in the Penumbra. In a society obsessed with binaries, narratives are often limited to the Shadow or the Light. The place where these two meet reflects our reality; it is where they communicate with each other. It is in the Penumbra that folks can embrace both the beautiful and the difficult of life. Where a son can accept that sometimes, his father is kind and generous, and other times, he is violent and withholding. Accepting this fullness allows him to make choices based in reality, as hard as those decisions may be. For example, the son chooses distance over being close to a man who hits his son for being himself, for being what the father deems “feminine.” The same man chokes the boy’s mother in front of him and wonders why that kid never wants to be around him. The mother is her own angel and smashes a vase in that man’s face to free herself. While people can and have defended themselves, they should not have to nor should they be attacked for being who they are, as G-d made them, especially at home, where one takes off their armor to rest and recover from the battles of the outside. How frustrating to hear over and over again that one is being traumatized to prepare them for the real world as if they don’t walk out the door every day and face it, experience it, and encounter men like this periodically. The penumbra acknowledges this violence and frustration, alongside the joys and laughter of a life lived authentically.

My fellowship project, Daddy Issues, includes twenty images.