The Focal Point Gallery was founded in 1974 by photographer Ron Terner. Like most artists, Terner felt the need to communicate his work and have some control over its presentation. He has provided a unique forum for both established and emerging visual artists. The organization is committed to educate and expose people to photography and the other visual arts. Focal Point is distinguished for its diverse exhibitions, and its ability to get artists to create.
Focal Point, for years, has bought fine art to City Island for people from the Bronx as well as other boroughs in NYC. Starting a gallery simply seemed a way of achieving those ends. Such an endeavor is, of course, much more easily imagined than realized, especially on a miniscule budget - but the business of artists is to make concrete realities out of impossibilities.
The gallery was launched and remains on City Island, a small-town-like enclave at the edge of the Bronx, and not in Manhattan where most New York galleries are clustered (and where rents are prohibitively high). This location appealed to Terner both because of the congeniality of the community, with its boatyards and shipwrights, and the availability of appropriate space at a reasonable rent.
Work was and is chosen for display solely on Terner's assessment of its strength of vision. Questions of saleability, fashion, or correspondence to a particular aesthetic have no place in his scheme of things, and so work is not subjected to judgments extraneous to its integrity, and an artist's thought can be presented intact. As a result of this and of Terner's wide-ranging comprehension of divergent artistic intents, the work shown at the gallery is not uniform in style, content, or point of view. What unites it is its intensity of vision and discipline of craft.
What we celebrate here, then, is not the mere survival of a particular place, but the exuberant life of an embodied idea and the idea that being committed to art as a serious, communicative, and social act is not some easily dismissed idealism, but a way of being which, even in the imperfection of circumstance, can flourish. The Gallery is open Monday-Sunday 10:00am - 6:00pm, closed on Tuesdays.
