The voice of local soprano Catalina Cuervo soared through the air as she belted out songs from Syracuse Opera’s upcoming production “Maria de Buenos Aires” to a gallery full of Syracuse University students, faculty and members from the surrounding community. It was a fitting way to welcome the Point of Contact gallery to its new home.

On Friday night, Point of Contact, a nonprofit contemporary art organization sponsored by Syracuse University, held an opening event at its new art gallery, located in the recently-renamed Nancy Cantor Warehouse. The event showcased the exhibition “Tango,” a 20-piece grand folio art book written by Pedro Cuperman, founder and editor of the Point of Contact Gallery and associate professor of Spanish in the College of Arts and Sciences at SU, featuring intaglio prints by late New York artist Nancy Graves.

“They came up with the idea that they wanted to create artwork about tango and they went their separate ways,” said Miranda Traudt, Point of Contact’s managing director. “He wrote the text and then gave it to her. Then she created the series of prints, and now they’re side by side in a book.”

The event attracted approximately 300 people, ranging from Syracuse students in various art departments and community members from Syracuse Tango, a local club of tango aficionados, to prominent members of the Syracuse faculty. Key attendees of the event included SU Interim Chancellor Eric Spina, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences George Langford and producing and artistic director of the Syracuse Opera Douglas Kinney Frost. Spina, Langford and Frost all gave speeches that expressed their excitement about the Point of Contact gallery’s new space.

The event opened with Cuervo’s performance. Starring as the protagonist in the upcoming “Maria de Buenos Aires,” Cuervo was brought to the event as a collaboration between Point of Contact and Syracuse Opera. The show was composed by Astor Piazzolla and opens on Jan. 31.

“It was spine-tingling, beautiful and exciting,” Traut said of Cuervo’s performance.

The special “Tango” gallery will be on display until Dec. 19. Afterward, the next gallery, “Domestic Vicissitudes,” a video art exhibition from Argentinian artist Analia Segal, will restart the Point of Contact’s normal exhibition schedule, Traudt said. They hope to have an additional three to four exhibitions within the upcoming year.

The gallery’s new location on the ground level of the Warehouse, at 350 W. Fayette St., never changes its goals. The space provides a venue approximately three times larger than its old Genesee Street location.

“We still have the same mission. We still want to bring in the same level of artists that we’ve always brought in and have very high-caliber artist exhibitions,” Traudt said. “But I think the new space is a lot larger than the old space, so it can allow us to bring in more performances like we saw tonight and collaborate with more organizations to do larger scale events.”

In addition to Cuervo’s performance and the gallery itself, the event also featured a wine and small appetizers bar, provided a large red canvas wall for event attendees to sign their names on and hosted a raffle for a donated pair of Syracuse Opera tickets to help fundraise for the Point of Contact Gallery.

The preparation for the event took approximately six months to plan and two months to execute with a newly hired staff. Shelby Zink, a junior industrial and interaction design major, is one of five part-time student employees at the gallery. Zink helped with graphic design work for the gallery, including a redesign of the Point of Contact logo and creation of the event’s brochures and invitations.

“What’s been so great about this is that they really let me be hands on and have a really creative hand in all the graphic decisions,” Zink said. “And this gallery itself is such a beautiful space. It’s nice, it’s modern and it’s exactly what Syracuse needs. It’s really nice to be connected to that.”

While 200 people were predicted to attend the event, Traudt said that the larger number of attendees was nothing but a “happy surprise.” Traudt also expressed her excitement about the future of the Point of Contact gallery.

“Right now we’re just hoping that people get to know what Point of Contact is and what we do and to build an audience that will come back for more events and exhibitions,” she said.

One student in attendance was Aminah Ibrahim, a senior television, radio and film major, who said she wished more SU students would attend local, art-based events. Doing so would bring the SU community together by creating “an environment where it’s OK for lots of different types of people to come together and learn from each other and express themselves through art,” Ibrahim said.

Published on November 18, 2013 at 12:45 am

Contact Margaret: mglin@syr.edu