There’s a new kind of creative hum coming from 415 N. Tioga Street. MACRE, short for Media Arts Collective + Research Exchange, is still young, but it’s quickly carving out space in downtown Ithaca as a hub for media-making, play, and community skill-building. Opened in June 2025, MACRE’s mission is rooted in expanding access to media tools and creative resources, especially for marginalized and underfunded communities. It also serves as a rentable studio space for a diverse range of paying members. MACRE is essentially a shared “third place” for sustained creative work, collaboration, and experimentation.
On Friday, February 6, from 5-8 PM, MACRE will host a gallery night that looks and feels very different from the typical wine-and-cheese art opening. The evening centers on work by artist and experimental theatre pioneer Leeny Sack, who will present “(my)BODY POLITIC: WA(L)KING in BED,” her first public exhibition in over five years.
Sack has been a significant voice in performance art for decades, and this exhibition carries that lineage forward while also tracing the more recent contours of her lived experience, particularly chronic illness, limited mobility, and the creative life that continues from bed. Sack has been largely house-bound in recent years, and rather than treating that reality as an absence, she treats it as material. The result is an installation that blends activism, prayer, protest, mysticism, and personal narrative.
Visitors can expect a mixed-media environment spanning multiple rooms. In the main gallery, three clotheslines stretch across the space, hung with standard white pillowcases printed, painted, and hand-drawn with poems, slogans, quotes, homages, images, and prayers. Sack likens these to a hybrid of prayer flags, protest posters, disability signage, and fortune-cookie slips; intimate messages elevated into banners. The gallery will also feature recorded personal, political, and spiritual texts playing in a loop, creating shifting, chance-based layers of sound and meaning as visitors move through the exhibition.
An adjoining long, narrow room becomes a somatic space for slow pacing and breath. Sack guides visitors through a gentle walking meditation via audio, inspired in part by the ongoing Peace Walk led by Buddhist monks. The effect is ambient and reflective, an invitation to notice the relationship between personal body and public procession, between bed and street, between inner trauma and collective hope.
Unlike many gallery nights, this one is intentionally quiet and contemplative. Guests are encouraged to linger, return, and experience repeated audio segments as they fall into new dialogues with the visual works. Sack notes that the imagery and sound are meant to “evoke and provoke associations and connections between past and present trauma in our psyches, our homes, communities, cities, states, in our wounded nation,” while also offering “peaceful, artful, soulful content.” It’s less social hour, more ritual; less spectacle, more felt-sense.
Because of health limitations, Sack will not be physically present. Instead, a monitor will provide a live Zoom connection to her bed-studio, where visitors can say hello or ask questions throughout the evening.
The event is free and open to all. For those curious about MACRE, or interested in performance art as activism, or simply craving a quiet space for reflection, “(my)BODY POLITIC: WA(L)KING in BED” offers a rare opportunity to engage art that is both deeply personal and insistently communal.
And as always, let me know about art events happening in our community by emailing me at amicha@wskg.org.