The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) was founded in 1977 as a regional hub for photographers and has evolved into a nationally recognized platform for photography grounded in social context, community participation, and critical engagement. In 2022, CPW moved to Kingston, NY, expanding access for the surrounding Hudson Valley.
The Rose, Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), Kingston, NY, May 24–August 31, 2025. Courtesy CPW. Photo: Ryan Rusiecki
Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950–Today, Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), Kingston, NY, May 24–August 31, 2025. Courtesy CPW. Photo: Ryan Rusiecki
Over the next three years, CPW’s curatorial team will present a series of exhibitions and community-based projects that examine photography’s role in shaping collective memory, honoring vernacular image-making and amplifying overlooked narratives. CPW’s curators present photography as a tool for documentation, engagement, and connection, anchored in lived experience, regional histories, and public participation.
In fall 2025, CPW will present
Kinship & Community, co-organized by guest curator Nicole R. Fleetwood and Brian Wallis. This group exhibition draws from the Texas African American Photography Archive to highlight Black vernacular photography and the role of community photographers as cultural historians. Concurrently, Marina Chao will organize a solo exhibition of Rahim Fortune (Chickasaw; b.1994, Austin, TX) that explores Black and Indigenous life in the American South through large-format portraiture, presented in tandem with community programming involving local artists and youth.
In 2026,
Toward a People’s History of Kingston will build on the themes presented in
Kinship & Community. Organized by Adam Ryan, this growing community archive and exhibition documents the everyday lives of Kingstonians, exploring the city’s cultural history through the personal photographs of its inhabitants.
Brian Wallis joined CPW in 2022 as Executive Director. Formerly, he was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at ICP in New York from 2000 to 2015. Under his leadership, ICP presented more than 150 exhibitions and installations, including Weegee: Murder Is My Business (2012); African American Vernacular Photography (2005); Only Skin Deep: Visions of the American Self (2004); and Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2003). Before joining ICP, Wallis worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the New Museum in New York. More recently, he served as Curator for the Walther Collection, a museum of photography with facilities in New York and Neu Ulm, Germany. He oversaw numerous exhibitions there, including Imagining Everyday Life: Encounters with Vernacular Photography (2019–21), which was awarded the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Prize for Photography Catalogue of the Year in 2020.
Marina Chao joined the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) in 2023 as Curator. She has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. As Assistant Curator at ICP, she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship for a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.
Adam Ryan joined CPW in 2022 as Curator. He is a photography specialist and curator based in Poughkeepsie. He gained experience working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where he focused on the museum’s permanent collection of photographs while also managing its Collection Study Center. He collaborated on multiple exhibitions, including Selections from the Sack Photographic Trust and Nothing Stable Under Heaven (both 2018), as well as Japanese Photography from Postwar to Now (2016). Previously, he worked in the Photography Department of the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), where his primary focus was a major retrospective on the work of renowned artist Duane Michals—Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals (2014). As a student, he learned photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and continued into graduate school at Toronto Metropolitan University.