The newly hired director for the Atkinson Gallery hails from New York and has a comprehensive experience with working in art administration.

Sarah Cunningham, 44, was born in Syracuse, NY. She has worked with gallery and art management for 20 years.

“For me, art is voice,” Cunningham said. “Art is full expression. I’m most excited about being engaged with art. The object becomes a dialogue between artist and audience.”

Art Department chair Stephanie Dotson hired Cunningham because of her experience working in galleries.

“I expect Sarah to continue the gallery excellently,” Dotson said.

Cunningham comes from an artistic family. Her father, a wood worker, owns an art studio and contemporary American craft gallery in New York state, where she created her own art while in high school. There, she saw other artists working with a variety of media and learned the different ways to make art.

Cunningham graduated from Tufts University, where she majored in art and American studies. She discovered arts administration and program planning while at Syracuse University as a graduate student.

She co-organized the Committee on Women and Art during her tenure at Syracuse University as a graduate student. Undergraduate students who created the “Matrilineage Symposium,” the year prior inspired Cunningham and she coordinated the second annual symposium in 1993. The Committee continues to host the symposium at the University.

“I was so excited, not only by the presentation by the artists, but also the audiences’ response and the whole dynamic of being the one to bring the audience and the art together. … For me, it was really kind of transformational moment of true epiphany,” Cunningham said.

Her first full-time curating job was as executive director and curator at the Albany Center Galleries in Albany, NY.

She also worked curator of exhibitions and public programs at the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, and gallery director at the College of New Jersey. She also worked as a teaching artist for elementary and middle school students in St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota.

When she found her job at City College, it seemed like the perfect balance of her previous two artist jobs working with the community and in academia. It was rewarding for Cunningham to be able to do find a way to bring the two jobs together.

“As I met with the faculty, dean and vice president to discuss the job further, I really felt that was compatible both with what my vision of what an academic gallery would be and its relationship with the community should be,” Cunningham said.

The Atkinson is a critical adjunct feature of the  art department. The gallery hosts six exhibits per year, representing works ranging from students to artists of national and international renown. Both studio art and art history teachers use the gallery extensively for classes and for a popular annual lecture series.

All funding for the gallery and Cunningham’s $73,668 annual salary is provided through private grants administered by The Foundation.

“I’m always looking for a job where I can learn something new,” Cunningham added.

The Atkinson Gallery is located in West Campus classroom 301 while the Humanities building (the original location of the gallery) is under renovation. She is replacing the previous director, Dane Goodman, who retired after last semester.

For further information about Cunningham, visit her website.