In the final days before opening of her gallery, Karen Ghostlaw Pomarico sounds both exhilarated and spent. The build-out of Pictorial Foundation’s new gallery space at 105 Ann Street in Newburgh has stretched late into the night for weeks, as walls were designed, fabricated, suspended, and repositioned, and as the inaugural exhibition began to take shape. “The space is coming to life,” she says. “That’s the reward right now.”
The 1,500-square-foot gallery opens to the public on Saturday, February 7, with “Foundations of Practice,” a group exhibition bringing together 19 artists whose work foregrounds process—research, repetition, labor, intuition, experimentation—rather than polished end results. It’s a fitting introduction not just to the gallery, but to the ethos behind Pictorial Foundation itself.
The gallery occupies a large, open room within the ADS Warehouse complex, part of a growing arts and creative campus overseen by Gita Nadan. Rather than subdividing the space with fixed walls, Ghostlaw Pomarico worked with her husband, architect Michael Pomarico of Pomarico Design Studio, to create a flexible system of suspended partitions that hang from the ceiling without touching the floor. The result is a light, modular grid that can be reconfigured from exhibition to exhibition, with sightlines opening and closing as viewers move through the room. “The art will define how the space is developed,” she explains. “That was really important to us.”
Pictorial Foundation grows out of The Pictorial List, an international photography magazine co-founded five years ago by Ghostlaw Pomarico and Melbourne-based editor Melanie Meggs. Over time, the publication built a large global community of photographers and visual artists, but the limitations of existing purely online began to feel increasingly apparent. “There’s a growing fatigue with fast visibility—what’s real, what isn’t—living in cyberspace,” Ghostlaw Pomarico says. “We wanted to create a physical place where practice could be encountered slowly, without pressure.”
That emphasis on practice has deep roots for her. Trained at Pratt Institute in the 1980s, she came of age at a moment when photography was pushing beyond documentary frameworks into the terrain of fine art and conceptual inquiry. “The working process was such an important part of the outcome,” she recalls. “It was a place to share ideas, not just finished work.”
Newburgh, she felt, was the right place to test that idea in real space. Ghostlaw Pomarico has lived in the Hudson Valley for more than three decades, raising a family here after returning from Brooklyn. Her husband was born and raised in Newburgh; she grew up in Poughkeepsie. “Newburgh feels like it’s in motion,” she says. “It’s not a finished place. We felt we could grow together—as the city grows, as the gallery grows.”
“Foundations of Practice” reflects that sensibility. The exhibition includes photography, sculpture, installation, printmaking, video, and mixed-media work by artists with ties to the Hudson Valley and beyond, including Jill Enfield, Jared Oswald, Mary Ann Glass, Suprina Troche, and others. Some works foreground research or archival material; others lean into material experimentation or personal history. Rather than presenting a unified visual style, the show emphasizes the many ways artists arrive at meaning.
Ghostlaw Pomarico’s own career bridges those concerns. An exhibiting artist with galleries representing her work in Europe and Barcelona, she is known for photographs built entirely in-camera through layers of reflection and refraction—images that appear abstract or manipulated, but are not digitally altered. “All the abstractions you see are done through reflective surfaces,” she explains. “It’s about navigating layers—of space, of time, of history.”
That same openness to layered thinking informs the gallery’s ambitions beyond exhibitions. Pictorial Foundation positions itself as an art space as much as a gallery, with plans for workshops, talks, and participatory projects. One idea under consideration would transform one of the shipping containers in the courtyard into a large-scale pinhole camera, introducing visitors to analog photographic processes and optics. Other programs would focus on environmentally conscious, non-silver photographic techniques.
The foundation also maintains strong ties to its international network. Upcoming plans include a women-focused exhibition and a collaboration with artist Lady Pink, who will work with local high-school students to design and paint a mural inside the gallery over Memorial Day weekend. Longer-term possibilities include exchanges with cultural institutions in Portugal, potentially bringing exhibitions, film programming, and book fairs between Newburgh and Europe.
At the core of all of it is a commitment to artists themselves. For years, The Pictorial List published work without charging submission or publication fees, relying entirely on donated labor. While some fees have become necessary to sustain the physical space, Ghostlaw Pomarico hopes that sponsorship and community support will eventually allow the foundation to remove that burden again. “Success for us,” she says, “is watching our artists grow—seeing people do things they never thought they could do.”
The opening reception for “Foundations of Practice” takes place Saturday, February 7, from 5 to 9pm, with food, drinks, and music spilling into the adjacent cafe space. More than a launch, it marks the beginning of an experiment: What happens when a global artistic community finally has a room of its own.
