Alison McNulty

Biography

Alison McNulty earned her BFA at Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA at the University of Florida, where she held an Alumni Fellowship. In Gainesville she created House Project, a self-made residency inside an abandoned house, and she has since taught at Whitman College, the University of Florida, Brooklyn College and Marist College. She teaches part-time at Parsons School of Design.

McNulty moved to Newburgh in 2014, and the Hudson Valley's geology and industrial past became central to her work. She builds sculptures, architectural interventions, site-responsive installations, videos and works on paper from ordinary reclaimed materials: historic Hudson Valley bricks, salvaged slate and wood, raw sheep's wool, bone black pigment, her own hair, dust and spider webs. Her Hudson Valley Ghost Columns, Fault Trace (BAU Gallery, Beacon, 2018) and Seismographic Sketching Device (2019) treat these materials as records of long, overlapping stretches of time and of lives beyond the human.

She received the 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University and an Arts Mid-Hudson Empowered Artist Award for House Project Newburgh, developed with the Newburgh Community Land Bank's Artist in Vacancy program in 2023. Her work has appeared at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, Basilica Hudson, Kube Art Center, Fridman Gallery, WAAM and in Portugal and Colombia. As director of Ann Street Gallery, she runs emerging-artist and artist-researcher programs and co-curated From the Ground UP with Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. In Reclamation (2025) she showed quiet, fragile pieces made from uncovered paint chips and spider webs.

Practice. Ephemeral and site-responsive sculpture, installation, video and works on paper made from reclaimed and fragile materials (brick, slate, wool, hair, dust, spider webs, paint chips), exploring geological and human time and relationships with other species.