The Center for Documentary Arts is an independent, nonprofit initiative at the crossroads of art, ethics, faith, and conscience. Broadly defined, the "documentary arts" are narrative and lyric forms of photography, film, oral history, visual art, craftwork, poetry, theater, literature, and journalism that address social themes, bear witness to the human condition, and add to the world quotient of beauty and mercy. The Center exists to present artists of the highest accomplishment who manifest these values, whose work penetrates the heart, awakens compassion, and fosters justice—essentials for the activism Fyodor Dostoevsky and Martin Luther King called “love in action.” The Center serves this mission through exhibitions, film screenings, readings, publications, and any activity that presents and amplifies the work of like-minded creators.
The Center for Documentary Arts was founded in 2009 in partnership with the Sage Colleges, with funds from the estate of Kayla Mitchell. The first public project was the exhibition Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers, October 22 through December 19, 2010, at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, New York. The exhibit, curated by Documentary Center founder and director Timothy Cahill, featured work by Balazs Gardi, Teru Kuwayama, and Pulitzer-Prize winner Cheryl Diaz-Meyer. Critic David Brickman wrote, “It's as though the International Center of Photography opened a branch in Troy. The exhibition Battlesight is that good and that important.”
Selections from Battlesight formed the featured exhibition for the 2011 Rensselaerville Festival of Writers, July 29-31, 2011.
In 2011, the Center premiered its "New Narrative Film Series" at the Opalka Gallery, Sage College of Albany. The public series of contemporary documentaries hosted filmmakers, poets, and others. Among the featured guests were director Hugo Perez, who led a screening of his Neither Memory Nor Magic, a portrait of Hungarian Holocaust poet Miklós Radnóti, and director Julia Haslett, presenting the New York premiere of her essay film An Encounter with Simone Weil. The series also included the area premier of Roko Belic's Happy and a screening of Andrew Himes' meditation on battlefield poetry, Voices in Wartime, with special guest Dr. Ed Tick.
Other activities included an exhibition of Vietnamese children's art, readings by author/activist Helen Benedict, and public interviews of writers and artists.
In 2013, operations at the Center were suspended when founder Timothy Cahill accepted an invitation to pursue studies in art and theology at the Yale Divinity School. Since then, Mr. Cahill has continued to advance the Center's mission through the blog Art & Document.
—updated Summer 2022
