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Staff
Karen Martin, Director
Karen Martin first became involved with the Art School of Columbia County in 2018 when she joined the board after retiring from a 20-year career as a senior business development manager for a large pharmaceutical company. Since joining the board, she has worked closely with each of the previous directors to help grow funding and membership and played a vital role in meeting the challenges that were given by our founders to secure the gift of the school to our creative community. Prior to her role in business development, Karen worked for ten years in business-to-business advertising. She attended Long Island University, Southampton College where she received her B.F.A with a concentration in Graphic Design. Karen is herself a practicing artist, avid gardener and homesteader, and has taught art locally. She is passionate about the school’s place in our community and the importance of connecting community through art.
Board of Directors
Michael Saltz, President
Michael Saltz started spending time in Columbia County in 1952. For almost his entire professional career, Saltz was a senior producer for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in all its iterations prior to it becoming the PBS NewsHour. For most of those years, he traveled throughout this country and various hotspots around the world. His experiences and views about what he saw are recounted in his memoir, The Winding Road: My Journey Through Life and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. In addition, a group of essays titled Down the Rabbit Hole: How We Got to the January 6 Insurrection are available on Amazon.com. Currently, he publishes occasional essays about politics, culture, and life at https://michaelsaltz.substack.com
Ann Marie Farrell, Board Secretary
Ann Marie Farrell and her family moved to Hillsdale in 2006 where she also continued her teaching at Taconic Hills School as a kindergarten teacher. Over the past 15 years until her retirement she taught grades Pre-K through 2nd. Prior to working at Taconic Hills, she taught for 10 years at Wooster School in Danbury,CT and ran the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Program there. For the last 3 years of teaching, she was involved in the Arts Integration Workshops sponsored by ArtOMI with the support of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. While not a visual artist, she incorporated music daily into her teaching by playing the guitar, singing and using hand movements with the children. In addition to teaching at Taconic Hills, she was a past VP and a teacher liaison on the PTO, helped with the Backpack Program and was on various committees of the Faculty Association. for many years. She also served for 3 years on the Board of the Roe Jan Library and was the Board Secretary.
Cliff Keyes, Board Treasurer
Cliff Keyes, CPA and Board Treasurer, has worked with non-profit organizations his entire career and spent the last 31 years as CFO of Hawthorne Valley Association. Recently retired, he remains active in non-profit accounting and is also currently Treasurer for Cadmus Lifesharing Organization in Great Barrington. Cliff has 6 children and now 12 grandkids.
Michele Quigley
Michele Quigley has been a Columbia County resident since the mid seventies, and raised her two children in the Chatham area. She is a former Early Childhood Educator/consultant and mentor through Berkshire County Head Start, where she worked for over three decades. One of her passions is exposing children to the arts and making art accessible to underserved communities. She has been taking art classes at ASCC for the past 8 years and believes art fills a community need. Currently, she volunteers with Meals On Wheels, The Chatham Food Pantry, The Spencertown Academy. She lives in Spencertown, New York.
Jeffrey Neumann
Jeffrey Neumann spent his childhood in New Mexico, California and Massachusetts. Although he lives in Upstate New York, the Southwest continues to inspire his art. He visits as often as he can. He uses his photos from road trips as references for his oil and watercolor paintings. Neumann worked as a radio disc jockey, a graphic designer, art director and advertising account executive before beginning a marketing career in the fine art papers industry, where he was employed for 20 years. In 2005 he left the corporate world to earn his M.Ed. degree in Visual Arts. He has taught art at the high school and adult levels. From 2009 to 2019 he owned Neumann Fine Art Gallery in Hillsdale, NY, where he represented nine artists. Since 2019 he has focused full time on painting.
Tom Chulak
Tom Chulak is a retired Unitarian Universalist Minister who with Nicole Furnee owned the Chatham Bookstore, organized the Art School of Columbia County, and is its President Emeritus.
Christian-Jacques Dewailly
Christian Dewailly was born in Lille, France. With a degree from “L’Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne” he advanced his career in the hospitality industry with increasingly responsible positions in France, England, and Switzerland. He came to the United States in 1992 and managed several private clubs in New York City, including the famed Knickerbocker Club and Cosmopolitan Club.
Christian brought his joy of hospitality, culinary arts, and travel into his retirement in 2016, where he also discovered an enormously rewarding creative outlet in painting. Having enjoyed collecting art from travels around the world, he now had the time to develop his own artistic skills. Thanks to the inspirational guidance of his artist-instructors, Christian has devoted his time and passion to developing his own artistic voice.
A member of the Spencertown Academy Arts Center, Christian exhibited his paintings there in 2018 and 2019. Christian’s focus in painting sources greatly from his frequent travels, and the varied and exotic landscapes that have captured his imagination.
“Painting gives me inner peace, and has opened my eyes to the beauty of all nature and the world around us.”
Christian and his wife, Elizabeth “Liz” Garger, live in Ghent, NY. Enthusiastic “weekenders” in Columbia County for 15 years, the couple moved full-time to Ghent when they retired together in 2016. They continue to enjoy entertaining, travel, music, the arts and expanding their network of friends. Christian is also a fishing and golfing enthusiast.
For information about serving on the ASCC’s Board of Directors, please contact us.