The Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History in Downtown Kingston has a full line-up of events this summer, including an exhibition of local immigrant stories and a fundraiser event at Opus 40 celebrating immigrant culture and art.

These events are part of a large-scale effort to highlight immigrant voices and bring awareness to the efforts of the center, which preserved the legendary Reher family bakery at the corner of Broadway and Spring Street and created exhibit space in the building’s upper floors. Kingston Wire had this week the pleasure of speaking to Jackie Lieske, Reher interim executive director, about what’s happening at the center and its history.

The Reher Center building was formerly owned by the Reher family, Jews who emigrated from Poland, for 80 years. They soon became popular in the neighborhood, which was heavily populated by immigrants from many different places. The bakery became known for their delicious rye bread and rolls; the Reher Center today, as Lieske puts it, is also here to “break bread with the community” of Kingston, with the ultimate message being “to foster belonging by engaging people with stories of their community’s culture in part to celebrate immigrant voices in Kingston past and present, and also to acknowledge that most of us come from immigrant backgrounds.”

Its message resonated in a city with a deep history of immigration; the center quickly built strong ties with the community and enjoys local collaborations with the Kingston Library, Radio Kingtston, Bard College, the Culinary Institute of America and others.

Tales of arrival

The center’s current art exhibition, “Taking Root: Immigrant Stories of the Hudson Valley,” features 36 immigrant narrators from across the globe who ended up in the Hudson Valley, and the event’s purpose, according to Lieske, is “to amplify immigrant work” by having these individuals share the stories of their family’s history and culture. The event, Lieske tells us, “was years in the making, we started working in 2019 on it” and started as a “oral history project where we recorded stories from immigrants throughout the Hudson Valley. These people shared their personal and family experience coming to the Hudson Valley and creating a life, adapting, and creating a community.”

Since the opening day, Lieske said that visitors to the exhibit were “moved,” as they event “touched them and excited them to think about their own families and their own types of resilience”.

The event includes tintype portraits by Judit German-Heins, herself an immigrant from Hungary. She uses the photographic process created before the Civil War era which creates evocative images that seem both antique and modern: As Lieske puts it, the portraits make “a literal connection from the past to the present.”

Along with the portraits, QR codes are posted throughout the exhibit so viewers can listen to each person’s story. These soundbites are 30 to 40 seconds long and include a variety of immigrant stories from across the world, such as Abibou Badjie, a 15-year-old from Gambia who told a story about starting school in the Hudson Valley and the warm welcome he received, along with Essi Zahedi from Iran who fled him homeland in 1979 because his life was in danger after his publishing English translations of Persian texts made people believe he was working for the CIA. In addition to the auditory and visual aspects, there’s an olfactory one too — canisters have been placed so people can smell different spices and aromas from global cuisines and even kitchen tools that are used to make specific food items from these cultures. It all adds up to a multi-sensory, multimedia creation which completely immerses the viewer into the lives of immigrants from across the world. The center, Lieske said, was intent on making the exhibit not only about immigrants but created by immigrants, thus giving them agency and a voice to shape this collection.

The exhibit may be viewed at the center, 99-101 Broadway in Downtown Kingston Fridays-Sundays from 1-6 p.m. There’s a $10 admission fee for adults and $5 for students, children and seniors.

Fiesta of the Arts Fundraiser

On Wednesday, Aug. 30th, from 5-8 p.m., the center will stage its Fiesta of the Arts, a fundraising event and silent art auction at Opus 40 in Saugerties (356 George Sickle Road). This fundraiser came to be when the committee at the Reher Center were discussing possibilities for the event and, as Lieske states, “we wanted to follow the thread of work of immigrant contribution followed by food, and we thought, ‘What would be an interesting food thing that people don’t have access to?’ Filipino food.”

According to Lieske, many of the center’s committee members are Filipino and introduced their cultural concept of “fiesta,” where everybody in the community in puts a spread of food outside to share with their neighbors. Lieske said the entire committee thought it was a wonderful way to incorporate a communal and cultural tradition into this event, while also integrating into it the silent art auction so patrons can enjoy the selection of food alongside the collection of art.

Some of the vendors include Harana Market and Lamisa Events, specializing in Filipino cuisine, and beverages provided by Whitecliff Vineyard and Kingston Standard with an ambient musical performance by Day 41. Lieske said the center was intent on “taking the idea of celebration and immigrant contribution connected with the arts and use this as an opportunity to raise [the center’s] profile.”

The auction at the event features emerging and established artists with ties to the Hudson Valley, who graciously donated their artworks in full to the center because of their interest in the center’s mission and values. What sets this auction apart from typical ones, according to Lieske, is that “the paintings themselves range from industrial to landscape, each artist has diverse backgrounds but they all care about this work, which is beneficial because anyone who comes who wants to purchase art has a variety of options to choose from.”

Some featured artists include Kim Do, whose spiritual landscape paintings speak on the artists sense of release while moving towards the effortless, creative space where the paintings exist. Norm Magnusson is known for his replica historical marker signs; placed in Kingston, Woodstock and elsewhere, they make sharp points about life in America today. His work is also directly related to the center’s ideas about the identity of immigrants. Cary Leibowitz, whose bold, modern pieces investigate politics in the art world and offer his own satirical point of view of the world, created a piece especially for this event. Early bidding for the auction starts online at rehercenter.org on Aug. 21; those interested in viewing the artwork can do so on the website as well.

For tickets, visit rehercenter.org. Because the event is outside at the Opus 40 sculpture park, it’s recommended that patrons wear sensible shoes.