Two Oswego County artists selected for Made in NY 2026

by Submitted article | March 20, 2026 10:36 am

AUBURN, NY (March 16, 2026) – When Donalee Peden Wesley was a child, she watched her mother draw a cat. It was a simple drawing with two circles and two triangles, but it launched an artistic career for Peden Wesley. “I thought it was magic! I still consider drawing magic,” she said. “That was the start of my obsession with drawing and animals.”

Her piece in “Made in NY 2026,” “Down the Pipeline,” shows overlapping drawings of horses – some in color, others in black and white – on their backs. The piece gives the illusion of horses rolling on their backs, but they aren’t frolicking in a field.

“The images are in an upside down position to convey the effect of movement and rolling,” Peden Wesley said. “This is to mirror the horrific trip they endure to get to the next facility. The horses are crammed into huge trucks, and some are unable to stand and are trampled on.”

Many of the artworks in “Made in NY 2026” feature animals. Some, like the two works by Kirin Makker of Geneva, seek to highlight their staggering losses, while others, including an etching by James Skvarch of Syracuse, capture a moment in time that includes animals.

This year is the 30th annual “Made in NY” exhibition, a juried show at the Schweinfurth Art Center located in Auburn, NY, that features work by artists who live in New York State. In 2026, 399 artists applied for the exhibition, of which 70 were accepted. The show includes 74 artworks, including paintings, photographs, jewelry, quilts, sculptures, felted works, and more.

For Peden Wesley, animals are surrogates and symbols for the issues she wants to highlight in her artwork: the exploitation of animals by humans’ greed and inhumanity.

“The most important message with ‘Down the Pipeline’ is to make people aware of the pipeline’s existence,” the Syracuse artist said. “The pipeline is the horrible trip horses, foals, and donkeys take when they are abused, neglected, unwanted, or worked to exhaustion. Some are auctioned off; some just tagged for Mexico and sent to be slaughtered.”

Animal welfare is always in the back of her mind. She cites numerous examples of animal abuse: puppy mills, horse racing, tourist rides, roadside and accredited zoos, marine parks, wolf hunts, torture videos, and more. “Every day, another way to torture animals raises its ugly head,” she said.

Yet Peden Wesley’s drawings are ambiguous and open for interpretation. “I don’t want to shock the viewer,” she said. “Bottom line, I hope the viewer can engage with the drawings and perhaps start a conversation about animal treatment and get involved.”

Artist Len Eichler of Tully has been exploring clay to communicate his perceptions of the relationship between humans and nature for more than 40 years. His piece in “Made in NY 2026,” “Fractured,” reminds the viewer about animals – in this case polar bears – facing dire consequences from climate change.

“I am focused on climate change because our planet will become less hospitable to all life unless we as Earth’s citizens keep sounding the alarm,” he said. “I believe the arts and crafts can be part of ongoing efforts to save our planet for future generations.”

“Fractured” is a round white ceramic wall piece made of porcelain shards. A miniature sculpted polar bear figurine looks lost in this landscape of fractured ice. “Polar bears are threatened with extinction because sea ice from which they hunt is disappearing,” Eichler said.

He created the porcelain shards for the piece by storing unused, mostly dried blocks of porcelain outside during the winter. “I found the effects of freezing and thawing created fractures throughout the clay,” he said. “I saw the results not as disastrous but as an opportunity to create new work.”

Eichler pushed the shards into slip as an experiment, and the piece survived drying and firing. “In portraying landscapes of cracking and melting ice in polar regions and parched, cracked earth in desert regions, I use clay-forming techniques such as surface stretching and cracking, fast drying liquid clay in the sun, and even freezing clay to create fractures,” he said in his artist’s statement.

Kirin Makker’s artwork focuses on broadscale avian loss – a net loss of 3 billion birds since 1970, despite being protected since the early 20th Century – through an unusual medium: eggshells of migratory birds.

Her two photographs, “Absence Presence: Eggshell Collection” and “Absence Presence: Hawks,” show eggshells with cyanotype images of feathers carefully printed inside. “I was after an expression of loss and fragility – of birds, yes, but also ecologies and social structures that shape everyday experiences on earth,” she said. “I wanted to bring attention to avifaunal deaths as a gesture to understanding larger biodiversity losses.”

Although Makker has publicly exhibited the eggshells in the past, she opted to show enlarged views for this show. “The photographs allow viewers to see both the backs and the insides of the eggshells, something that is impossible when observing the actual eggshells,” she said.

She noted that a 2019 study in the journal “Science” found that 90 percent of the bird loss over the past 50 years was from 12 common species, including sparrows, robins, warblers, finches, meadowlarks, and red-winged blackbirds.

“If you were alive in 1970, you saw more birds in your backyard than we are seeing. And those numbers are continuing to decline,” Makker said. “Scientists also contend that these losses of birds indicate that our human-altered landscapes are increasingly failing to support birdlife, which further signals a coming environmental collapse.”

Makker acquired whole eggshells from the museum at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca and collections at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she teaches.
The shells of the unfertilized eggs have a small hole where the collector removed the insides to preserve it. She uses that hole as the starting point for where to chip away until she has removed about a third of the shell.

“I need the opening to be sizable enough for successfully viewing into and also large enough that enough UV light can get inside the shell for adequate exposure to make the cyanotype,” she added.

Cyanotype images require exposure to ultraviolet light, and Makker says this part is tricky. The difficult part is exposing a surface that’s curved inside with parts that are shaded, so either the eggshell or the light source must be rotated to expose the entire interior.

“After exposure, I let the eggshell completely dry in the dark, away from any UV light,” she continued. “Then I wash out the eggshell under cold water and let it dry to expose it to oxygen and (fingers crossed!) hope the print turns out.”

Makker intends to use her project, Absence Presence, to bring attention to recent measures to erode the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a primary piece of U.S. environmental legislation and cornerstone of species conservation.

“The Trump administration has, since last year, been trying to reinterpret the act to focus on deaths due to active shooting, rather than the loss of birdlife from habitat destruction from industrial agriculture, forestry/logging, energy production, and infrastructure development,” she said, noting that a recent House committee has been meeting to determine the future of the act.

“If this continues, we might have slightly cheaper beef, for example, but we won’t hear songbirds in our backyards,” Makker said.

Here are the artists from Oswego County:
Michael Flanagan of Oswego, NY; “Spillway in Moonlight,” 2026
Juan Perdiguero of Oswego, NY; “Perro Nube,” 2023

If you go …
WHAT: “Made in NY 2026,” an exhibition of New York State artists
WHEN: March 28 to May 16, 2026
WHERE: Schweinfurth Art Center, 205 Genesee St., Auburn
OPENING RECEPTION: 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, March 28, 2026. Prizes will be announced at 5 p.m.
ALSO OPENING: “From Regalia to the Street: Photography by Alex Johns-Hamer” in the Davis Family Gallery and “Untamed” by Carla Stetson in the Schweinfurth’s Gallery Julius and the Cayuga Museum of History & Art
HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays
ADMISSION: $10 per person, members, participating artists, active military, and children 16 and under are free; $15 for joint admission to Schweinfurth and Cayuga Museum

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/community/two-oswego-county-artists-selected-for-made-in-ny-2026/

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