Hudson Valley – Page 2

May 17, 2023May 17, 2023, by Art Spiel

Frances Smokowski: Biomorphic Abstraction

Featured Artist

Welcoming Good Fortune 2012 graphite 24.8 x 28.6 x 0.8 in. Antique frame hand finished by artist

Frances Smokowski’s intricate drawings are currently receiving their NY debut at Cavin-Morris Gallery. EDGEWALKERS: Sacred and Profane presents a dynamic array of contemporary works. Randall Morris and Shari Cavin have gathered a diverse, international group of artists for this rather groundbreaking exhibition. Randall notes the select do not respond in any intentional way to mainstream movements or trends but for sidestepping, ignoring or living in honest unawareness of them. “These artists are not Outsiders,” he explains. “They are vitally connected to this world, whether spiritually, socially, or politically. We look for the place where labels become irrelevant and the work remains urgent, immediate and singular.”

May 5, 2023May 3, 2023, by Matt Moment

Carl Grauer’s “A QU(i)E(t)ER Interior” opens at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Artist Profile

Portrait of the artist in his studio in Poughkeepsie, NY. Image Credit: Matt Moment

In Carl Grauer’s latest suite of paintings for Carrie Haddad Gallery titled A QU(i)E(t)ER Interior, the Kansas-born visual artist elicits a disregard for distinction between the animate and the inanimate. Throughout, Grauer characterizes the home he shares with his husband Mario in Poughkeepsie, paying special attention to the majesty of light as he portrays his abode and the mementos that adorn it. Hearkening back to his Lost & Found series from 2017—wherein Grauer also documents everyday objects—he now contextualizes his personal artifacts in space and time. At once, he conveys his meditations on queerness, mortality, and the omnipresence of his mother, Janice, who passed away early in 2023 following her battle with Alzheimer’s.

December 19, 2022December 9, 2022, by Art Spiel

whispered conversations at Stand 4

Curator Jennifer McGregor in conversation with the artists

Kate Collyer, Bundle: Alaska, 2022, mixed media and video, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Artists Kate Colyer, Lorrie Fredette, and Megan Porpeglia talk with curator Jennifer McGregor about their framework to create whispered conversations, on view at Stand4 Gallery and Community Space in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The collective was active during COVID via Zoom reading about the natural world. They created bundles in response to their individual trips in 2021. These were shared through the mail to instigate a series of new artworks. Jennifer McGregor was brought in as curator to help shape the exhibition.

August 31, 2022December 30, 2022, by Hovey Brock

What’s Your Golden Spike?

Diagram from the United States Geological Survey, Harvard.edu

What’s Your Golden Spike is the third in a series of three interrelated experimental pieces that combine graphics, text, and hyperlinks based on themes coming out of my Crazy River project, for which I gave an interview on this website on May 16th. Crazy River takes a wide-angle view of the climate crisis, ranging from my own climate grief to an in-depth focus on the many causes and effects of rapid environmental changes on the West Branch of the Neversink in Ulster County. In this piece I investigate the idea of the Catskills as a region, and an incongruous bundle of contradictions and coincidences. The Lands of Kats Kill weaves three timelines together: the geologic, the historical, and the personal. This structure repeats throughout my Crazy River project. The previous piece in this series, Invaders, took apart the idea of invasive species. The following will explore the concept of the Golden Spike in stratigraphy as fact and metaphor.

August 29, 2022October 6, 2024, by Louisa Pancoast

The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Annika Tucksmith, Something, Somewhere, 2022, oil on panel, 40 x 30 inches (image courtesy of Carrie Haddad Gallery)

Carrie Haddad Gallery’s summer offering, The Summer Show, is a playful wink and a poke to bastion of every gallery’s yearly program: the month of August. Much like the title of the show, this selection of work is self-referential and effervescent. Modernities collide in depictions of leisure, wanderlust is shown as both fantastical and intimate, and universally bold palettes are a sucker punch to the senses. Though they span an array of media, each of the artists incorporate detail with nuance and ease, their pith and wit happily imbibable. The Summer Show features Robert Goldstrom, Hue Thi Hoffmaster, Louise Laplante, Andrea Moreau, Kahn & Selesnick, and Annika Tucksmith and includes painting, collage, and photography.

July 30, 2022July 30, 2022, by Melissa Stern

My Upstate Art Weekend Adventure

Macintosh HD:Users:melissa:Desktop:ETTY:1. Vanessa German.jpg — Vanessa German, *Black on Black*, 2021, Handmade folk art cloth Black woman pin cushion, glory, wood, love, astroturf, Black seed beads, confusion, Black rhinestone trim, Black bead trim, (they traded your grandmother for a handful of beads), vintage hand purse, rage, old doll parts, ptsd, the fallout from white supremacist delusion, cork, Black pigment, sorrow, vintage mirror, self loathing, cotton, a miracle, twine, tears, yarn, heartbreak, love. 26 x 18 x 9 1/2 in

Last weekend was the third annual Upstate Art Weekend, a wildly ambitious and fun three-day art fair that winds its way from Westchester to Catskill NY. Founded by impresario Helen Toomer in 2020, Upstate Art Weekend celebrates and promotes visual arts throughout the Hudson Valley. One hundred and forty venues participated this year, and there was everything from art in a big-box truck in Kerhonkson to the gallery/studio campus of Foreland in Catskill. The intense heat of last week made this year’s event a challenge, but totally worth the sweat. Here is a brief travelogue of my schlep around the Hudson Valley:

July 21, 2022December 30, 2022, by Hovey Brock

The Lands of Kats Kill

The Lands of Kats Kill is the second in a series of three interrelated experimental pieces that combine graphics, text, and hyperlinks based on themes coming out of my Crazy River project, for which I gave an interview on this website on May 16th. Crazy River takes a wide-angle view of the climate crisis, ranging from my own climate grief to an in-depth focus on the many causes and effects of rapid environmental changes on the West Branch of the Neversink in Ulster County. In this piece I investigate the idea of the Catskills as a region, and an incongruous bundle of contradictions and coincidences. The Lands of Kats Kill weaves three timelines together: the geologic, the historical, and the personal. This structure repeats throughout my Crazy River project. The previous piece in this series, Invaders, took apart the idea of invasive species. The following will explore the concept of the Golden Spike in stratigraphy as fact and metaphor.

July 11, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Eric Wolf: When There is a Solid Fog on the Lake

Background pattern

Description automatically generated — Eric Wolf, Mooselookmeguntic Lake, 2016, ink on paper 22” x 30”. Courtesy of Pamela Salisbury Gallery

Eric Wolf’s landscape paintings are made with ink on paper and reference nature—water, sky, trees. In their sharp light and dark shapes they resemble woodcut, linoleum prints or even highly contrasted black and white photographs, but the more you look at them, the immediacy of the painted ink comes through—from the artist’s direct observation of nature, through his mind, to his hand—in a magical transformation ink flowing on paper fibers becomes river and white floating shapes become clouds.

March 23, 2022March 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Melissa Stern: Chat & Chew at Garvey Simon: Previewing

In her solo exhibition Chat & Chew at DFN Projects, multi-disciplinary artist Melissa Stern features drawings, assemblages, and sculptures which probe into the surface of social decorum not only with a biting wit but also with a tender gaze. Her outlandish characters invoke in the viewer an unsettling tension between elusive simplicity of forms and deep psychological complexities. Couples stare or reach out to one another, mouthless faces seem to whisper—whether rendered with graphite, pastel, and colored pencils, or molded with clay, these figures form an array of characters we may interpret as archetypes in dreams or comic strips. They remind me of duos in a Becket play or characters in Saul Steinberg’s absurd universe—with Stern’s very own take. Stern’s protagonists express distinct attitudes and appear to have lots to say. Underneath the verbiage, you can sense a vulnerable core that is silent, on the verge of coming up to the surface.

February 21, 2022January 7, 2022, by Jennifer McGregor

Landscape Deconstructed at the Hammond: Mimi Czajka Graminski

Part 2: Mimi Czajka Graminski – Interview with Jennifer McGregor

Mimi Czajka Graminski, *Petal Series Rose 1,* 2020-2021, archival pigment print of photograph of rose petals, 10 x 10 inches

Landscape Deconstructed: Mimi Czajka Graminski and Linda Stillman is a virtual exhibition on view at the Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden website (hammondmuseum.org/virtual-galleries) until June 2022. It is curated by Bibiana Huang Matheis. The opening on September 11, 2021, included a virtual conversation with Mimi Czajka Graminski and Linda Stillman moderated by Jennifer McGregor which has been distilled and reformatted for individual interviews with each artist.

The Hudson Valley artists met in 2011 and were immediately struck by the similarities in their work and have continued a dialogue since then. Landscape Deconstructed is the first time their artwork is presented in tandem and underscores the way that both artists discover elements of their surroundings and reassemble them in ingenious ways. Through distinct processes, they each preserve fleeting moments of beauty in nature while documenting a particular time and place.