Wired Gallery is an art gallery in High Falls, NY, that shows and promotes artists based in the Mid-Hudson Valley region. It was founded in 2012 by Sevan Melikyan, a marketing professional as well as an artist. It started on the upper floor of an old barn, next to the Depuy Canal House restaurant. The walls of the barn were all wood paneling and unsuitable to showing art, so a hanging system using
materials found in any hardware store was devised to present the work suspended on wires and “off the walls” (thus the name Wired Gallery). A few months after opening, the gallery relocated to another space in High Falls, half-a-mile west of the hamlet center where it stayed for about a year before moving to its current location at 11 Mohonk Road in April 2014. Since its inception, the focus of the gallery has been to exhibit and champion artists from the Mid-Hudson Valley region, with a particular attention to those based in Ulster County. The gallery achieves its mission by mounting exhibitions not only in its High Falls location but also in several off-site locations, fairs, festivals, resorts, and pop-up spaces. In 2013, Art Society of Kingston presented Melikyan with its ASKars award in recognition for his “significant contributions to the arts” and The Ulster County Executive recognized Melikyan as an Arts Ambassador. In 2014, Wired Gallery co-produced The Gunks Art Trail, an illustrated map showing places to view art along the Gunks region, for which it received the “Best of” distinction for New Arts Initiative by the Hudson Valley Magazine. During the pandemic, Wired Gallery has adopted a new format dubbed (Re)Wired which consists of forgoing opening receptions, rotating shows lasting three weekends and only using a portion of the gallery space (called 1-Wall Shows), and showing a variety of works by local artists in the remaining of the space.
