The Accord-based artist Gillian Jagger, originally British and distantly related to that Jagger family, has been almost ubiquitous of late. A show of her drawings of cows she has come to know was a major hit in Stone Ridge last year. Her massive, gut-wrenchingly emotionalized sculptures, produced over a 50-year career, have finally started to gain international recognition; and word is that it's only time before a major contemporary museum, hopefully in the region, mounts a retrospective of her impressively original and challenging oeuvre.

Now Jagger is reaching outside her own creativity to make her mark jurying what promises to be a major exhibition set to open at SUNY-Ulster's Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery this Friday, March 19, with an artist's reception from 6 to 8 p.m. "Marks that Matter," the name that Jagger has given this show of contemporary drawing, is set to feature both traditional and non-traditional media and applications of drawing. Knowing the woman's exquisite yet far-reaching taste, as well as the manner in which her reputation will draw entries, we expect nothing less than at least a partial epiphany, and some hefty catharsis, from what gets put together in the coming week.

"Drawing for me has always been the place I go to to begin again," Jagger has said of her aesthetic. "The drawing experience is the one place where I feel close to complete freedom. In my life, drawing is a place where we can redefine ourselves."

"Drawing can represent recording, marking or responding," said Suzy Jeffers, SUNY-Ulster gallery coordinator. "A drawing can be a plan, a gesture, an object of scrutiny or an act of defiance. The bare bones of drawing are marks made on surfaces, married to the intention of the artist making those marks. We are excited to see the interpretations by local artists." Talk about reaching back to depictions of horses on cave walls, and forward to the traces left by landed vehicles on alien surfaces far into our future.

The "Marks that Matter" exhibition will run through April 16 in SUNY-Ulster's Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, located in Vanderlyn Hall, open Mondays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and by appointment. For more information visit www.sunyulster.edu or call (845) 687-5113.