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Art | 7/9/2009 |
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The empire state of wilderness
Major exhibition opens this Saturday at SUNY-New Paltz's Dorsky Museum |
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| | Greg Miller//Digital photograph | |
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by Paul Smart
You've got to hand it to SUNY-New Paltz's Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art for taking the blue ribbon for lending this year's Hudson/Champlain Quadricentennial celebration the gravitas and historical hoopla that it needs, given its start-and-go funding for the last 12 months. The Dorsky's new "Hudson River to Niagara Falls: 19th-Century American Landscape Paintings from the New-York Historical Society" is opening as part of a larger "Art & the River" group of exhibitions and events. The series has included a regional show, currently up in the Museum's west wing; an ongoing installations work, "Habitat for Artists," involving sustainable workshop structures put up around the town and campus; and a new Hudson River panoramic, featuring a century-old work matched by a newly commissioned portrait of the Hudson River's shores from the Statue of Liberty to Albany, that will be opening alongside the blockbuster historical show this Saturday, July 11 from 5 to 8 p.m. Its unveiling of 45 key landscape works from the painters of the Hudson River School, as well as antecedents and carriers-on of their torch, will be a first viewing of several recently conserved paintings not seen in over half a century.
The paintings portray identifiable landscapes, historic sites, natural wonders and waterways of New York State, from the mouth of the Hudson River in Manhattan north to the Hudson Valley, Adirondacks and then westward to Niagara Falls by way of the Erie Canal. They also chart the history of painting as a cultural phenomenon in the state, during a heyday later lost to the vagaries of time as the entire Hudson River School fell from favor for a generation before being brought back to prominence in the last 40 or so years.
Curated by NYHS senior art historian Dr. Linda S. Ferber and organized by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and the New-York Historical Society, the exhibit will be on view through December 2009 and will appear only at the Dorsky. The opening reception on July 11 will include remarks by Dr. Ferber, who has also helped put together a new book on the show, including essays by herself and others, as well as a conference on the role that period of art history played in tourism, nationalism and our ideas of nature, the transcendental, the sublime and progress, to take place in early November.
Important Hudson River School painters in the show include the likes of Albert Bierstadt, John W. Casilear, Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and George Inness, organized geographically starting at the mouth of the Hudson in New York's harbor and following the river's course northward and westward along the Erie Canal, "enabling the visitor to explore themes that illuminate the sites that drew both artists and travelers," according to Ferber. The span of time covered by the works will be from 1818, just after the nation's stabilization following the War of 1812, to 1892, just before our great years of imperialist surge beyond our shores and borders.
Incorporated into the curation of the show is a sense of how we appreciate the world we inhabit, sometimes turn our backs on such appreciation and yet find ourselves drawn back to all that is natural.
Opening alongside the "Hudson River to Niagara Falls" historic show is a more contemporary epic project, the Dorsky-commissioned "Panorama of the Hudson River: Greg Miller." It is comprised of two recently created 80-foot-by-three-inch digitally composited panel photographs of the east and west shores of the mighty river, by Orange County-based landscape photographer Greg Miller. The works will be shown in tandem with a 19th-century photographic and etched piece that inspired Miller's new works.
Future "Art & the River" exhibitions will include a September retrospective of Miller's works, along with a second commissioned piece by Dutch artists Carolien Stikker and Phillipine Hoegen, who recently spent a month working on their unique vision.
For more about these shows and the Dorsky, visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum or call (845) 257-3844. The Dorsky Museum will be open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, national and university holidays. For more on the Quadricentennial, visit www.Hudson400.org.
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