PROUDLY HONORING Community Heroes
Artist Activist
April Gornik
Sag Harbor Cinema and The Church
April Gornik is an artist and community activist/organizer working with the Sag Harbor Partnership and is Chair of the Board of the non-profit Sag Harbor Cinema. She was Campaign Chair for the restoration of the Cinema. With her husband Eric Fischl, she is co-founder of The Church, an artist residency, exhibition space and creativity center in the heart of the village of Sag Harbor. She has fundraised for local and national causes and believes in the power of art and culture to unite and move a community forward.
April Gornik shows in New York City, where she had been a resident since 1978, and since 2004 lives in North Haven, Long Island, NY. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1953, she received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1976. She has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Cincinnati Museum, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Modern Art Museum of Art of Fort Worth, the Orlando Museum of Art, and other major public and private collections. She has shown extensively, in one-person and group shows, in the United States and abroad.
Some noteworthy one-person exhibitions have been at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in conjunction with the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 1998; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, 1994; the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, 1993; and the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, 1988. She had work represented in the 1989 Whitney Biennial in NY, the 10+10 Show of American and Soviet Painters originating at the Fort Worth Museum in 1989, the Art Museum of the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1988, and "Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained" at the American Pavillion of the Venice Biennale in 1984. April Gornik is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City, and has had one-person shows in New York regularly since 1981.
She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Guild Hall Museum in 2003, and was the Neuberger Museum’s Annual Honoree in 2004. A mid-career retrospective began at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY in early fall, 2004. It traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum in Nebraska, and its final venue was the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, from March–June, 2006. A monograph, also serving as catalogue for the show, was published by Hudson Hills Press and the Neuberger Museum. Another retrospective took place at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, NY, in summer 2009. Gornik's latest monograph was published in 2014, titled April Gornik: Drawings which is an extensive look at charcoal drawings done since the mid-'80s. The book includes essays by Steve Martin and Archie Rand, an interview with Lawrence Weschler, and a downloadable piano and cello composition by composer Bruce Wolosoff, played by Wolosoff and Sara Sant'Ambrogio of the Eroica Trio.