July 2022 Gallery Night @ Grayhaven

Join us for Gallery Night @ Grayhaven! Friday, July 1 from 4 – 7pm in our gallery guest lounge. This month we are overjoyed to feature Emily Sanders Hopkins’ new work, Velvet and Other Real People…

“Velvet started out life as Donald Trump’s imaginary friend, in a devolving whirlwind of vacation spots and late nights watching cable news, but now she’s a real person experiencing things she never could have when she spent all of her time with Donny: rivers, deep/long conversations, small college towns, minor cults, and camping, to name a few. Emily Sanders Hopkins’s ink drawings and acrylic ink paintings depict Velvet’s expanding understanding of Donny, America, and her own life, which is harder and more interesting than anything she could ever have dreamed up on her own. Just how powerful are imagination and belief in making a life or a world, and when does making the world right require us to ignore some realities, or even make up new ones?”

Emily Sanders Hopkins is an essayist and artist whose cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker and other national magazines. She is a graduate of WVU and the Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a masters degree in fiction writing. Enlisted in the U.S. Army in her youth, she served as a 97E, Interrogator and Russian linguist. She’s had two main careers, one in marketing and fundraising, the other in editing magazines and books. She was Senior Editor for Cornell University’s magazine Ezra for several years and a fundraiser for Cornell’s Prison Education Program. At Scholastic Inc. she served as Editor of Choices, a magazine for teens. Most recently, she is the Outreach and Development Manager for Hospicare & Palliative Care Services. She has also drawn over 60 family portraits commissioned by people all over the country (including nearly a dozen Ithaca families). She writes an illustrated advice column newsletter called Emily Writes Back, which can be found at emilywritesback.com, and she is at work on a novel about Velvet, the woman at the center of Donald Trump’s secret life. She and her husband, fellow cartoonist Marshall Hopkins, live with their daughter in Ithaca.

“Velvet and…” will be up in our gallery through the end of August, viewable daily between 3-7pm.

Learn more about the artist and her work at http://www.esrhopkins.com/