This oral history interview is an intimate conversation between two people, both of whom have generously agreed to share this recording with Oral History Summer School, and with you. Please listen in the spirit with which this was shared.
This interview is hereby made available for research purposes only. For additional uses (radio and other media, music, internet), please inquire about permissions.
All rights are reserved by Oral History Summer School.
Researchers will understand that:
Tim Slowinski is an artist and the owner of the Limner Gallery at 123 Warren Street in Hudson, New York. Starting with his time as a young adult in the 1980s in Woodstock, NY, Tim traces his life as an artist and gallery owner from Woodstock to New York City, and back to the Hudson Valley. He talks about his first exhibitions in New York City, his frustrations with the art gallery world, and his decision to open a gallery to exhibit his own work and the work of his friends. He provides insight into the collapse of the East Village art scene and describes what it was like to live in that area after most of the galleries had closed and before it was gentrified. He tells how his gallery moved to different spaces in the East Village, Soho, and Chelsea and how these moves were linked to changes in the art scene and the availability of affordable rental space as the city developed. He talks about his decision to move back upstate to rural Phoenicia, NY and the negotiations he went through to buy a cabin in the cooperative Woodland Valley Park Association. He describes his art gallery in the condemned Phoenicia Hotel and his move to Hudson, NY. He talks about life as a gallery owner in Hudson and reflects on the gentrification taking place in his home of 11 years.
Polly Dewhirst has spent the past 20+ years working at the intersections of transitional justice, trauma and human rights. A program specialist, researcher, and social worker, she is passionate about working with families of disappeared persons, former political prisoners, and other survivors of human rights violations. Born and raised in Connecticut, she has spent most of her adult life overseas. She spent 14 years in South Africa working around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her new hometown is Rangoon where she hopes to work with local activists to build a museum and collect the hidden histories of Burma. A student at OHSS, this was the first oral history interview that Polly ever conducted.
Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”