The Cornell Creative Arts Center, an art exploration space on Cornell Street in Midtown Kingston, regularly hosts a plethora of events and workshops for the community. It’s a program with a goal of creating a space for people with all abilities and the underserved population to experiment with art in a multitude of ways. Their classes include anything from yoga and belly dancing to drawing, sculpture, scrapbooking and more.

The center also houses and hosts galleries, and coming up is a combined gallery opening with two notable features: “Pressing Forward” by the Kingston City School District 12th-graders in connection with the Women’s Studio Workshop and “Ivars Sprogis: The Colors of My Life” by the local Impressionist painter of the same name.

Sprogis is a local master painter with, according to Cornell Creative Arts Center Director Jo Ann Campise, “incredibly beautiful paintings, seascapes and florals and lilies that will all be for sale.” Known for his watercolor and oil works in a Realistic Impressionism and minimalist style and color palette, his bucolic landscapes and florals teem with familiar scenery of the Hudson Valley and far beyond. Sprogis’ show will be up through December.

The center has been working with the Kingston City School District and the Women’s Studio Workshop in the past in a variety of different exhibitions, including the WSW’s recent “Desire, Rinse, Repeat” show back in September and the KCSD’s district show every June for the past two years.

This exhibition, though, is part of the WSW’s Art-in-Education program, which, started in 1985, is one of the longest-running programs they offer. They have been working with the KCSD almost the entirety of this time. The program is funded by NoVo, Klock Kingston Foundation, and the New York State Council of the Arts.

The program consists of having students come to the WSW facility in Rosendale once a week for four weeks, learning from their artists-in-residence in three of their different studios: intaglio, silkscreen and paper making. For the first three weeks the students spend time in each studio, learning the lay of the land and the foundational elements of each practice. On the fourth week the students each choose which studio they’d like to revisit to create their art.

There are around 11-12 high school students that participated this fall, according to Andrea Andalis, the Summer Art Institute and Education Program coordinator with the WSW, which lent space to around 3-4 students per studio each day. The group, Andalis provided, was “smaller than normal,” but “having a smaller group let us dive into details.”

Andalis was working in the silkscreen studio and said the smaller crowd allowed her to “show them things that I couldn’t in the past. They saw more of the cleanup process that they couldn’t see previously. Some students got to make more work because there was extra time.”

In the silkscreen studio, the students layered two different colored prints, burning an image on each screen. In the papermaking studio, students did pulp paintings and stencil papermaking, resulting in images of realistic or abstract forms. The intaglio studio worked with holographic prints, which is a process of adding material onto a board, inking the board and putting it through a press to print an image on it.

The reception for both openings is on Friday, Dec. 6 from 6-8 p.m. at the Cornell Creative Arts Center, 129 Cornell St., Kingston. It is free to attend and all are welcome.

To learn more about the Cornell Creative Arts Center and see what workshops and events they will be hosting coming up check them out on their website ccacny.org. To see what else the Women’s Studio Workshop is up to, check them out here.