Art Intelligence
In the Galleries At the MuseumsDia-fied: Blinky & Co. at Beacon and Bard
by Scott Baldinger
“Art is not innocent (Oscar) Wilde says ... Violence can be done in its name. Indeed, the twentieth century brought forth many Dorian Grays: fiendishly pure spirits so wrapped up in aesthetics that they become heedless of humanity.” This quote, from a recent New Yorker article by Alex Ross about the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Grey, reminded me of the somewhat dissolute (though definitely not, from any account I’m aware of, similarly sexually oriented) German artist Blinky Palermo, who died in 1977 at age 34 in the Maldives under not completely un-Dorian-like circumstances (most likely a drug overdose). Palermo’s “fiendishly pure,” monochromatic yet stunning aluminum panels that form color patterns suggestive of the West German flag, seem to be, in the sunlit, grandly spacious exhibition galleries of Dia:Beacon, a complete sacrifice to aesthetics—the engagement of the eye over any emotive or coolly ironic expectations.
Born Peter Schwarze, Palermo adopted his new name in the sixties, the legend goes, at the suggestion of a fellow art student who believed he resembled an ex-con and fight fixer who’d been gaining notoriety in New York at the time. (Both of them were studying with the artist Joseph Beuys, who, by some accounts, is credited with giving Schwarze his name.) For young Europeans like Schwarze/Palermo, rakish New York epitomized the “confident flash of things American,” as the critic Peter Schjeldahl notes.
“Artists take us out of our conventional thinking, almost in an outlaw way.They move us to places where we’re not always comfortable or willing or to go,” says Manda Weintraub, an art dealer and lawyer who accompanied me on a recent trip to Dia-Beacon. Despite the Palermo exhibition’s extraordinary scale and polish (photo, left, by Bill Jacobson), there is a feeling of cosmic playfulness, if not mischief, that comes across, not only when looking at Palermo’s work, but from just 
being at Dia:Beacon. Art there is narrowed into components, small and large: thin strings creating almost invisible walls by Fred Sanback; wood boxes configured into repetitive series by Donald Judd; massive wall murals drawn in barely legible pencil by assistants following the instructions of Sol Lewitt, or primal, monolithic stone or steel sculptures, multi-ton objects by 
Michael Heiser and Richard Serra, left. In addition to works that are fun to look at, such as the the warren of rooms devoted to Agnes Martin paintings, these architecturally contextual creations expand the definition of enjoyment by simultaneously toying with, defining and expanding our understanding of what art can be. Set in Dia-Beacon’s massive, pure white galleries in a former Nabisco box factory, the artworks are ocular exercises and spatial games that bolt deep down into our retinas. The message seems to be both manifold and simple: Keep your eyes open to the whole, move beyond your minds’ narrative expectations, look up, down and all around you—all perhaps in the end for no purpose other than to be able to confirm that, to paraphrase Duke Ellington’s remark about music, “If it looks good, it is good.”
The Palermo retrospective has been divided between Dia-Beacon and Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies Hessel Museum, a newer, more traditionally elegant space that, like a doting younger sibling looking up to an older, more raffish family member, tries even harder to épater la bourgeoisie with a companion exhibition, If You 
Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now. As if the wonderful Palermos here were not enough. Curated by Lynne Cooke it is, “an exhibition about the life of the art object in domestic spaces.” Combining neo-geo paintings from the decoratively inclined 1980s (Valerie Jaudon), amusingly cranky Cindy Sherman photos, furniture by Paul Evans, Frederich Kiesler, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouve with sometimes 2.5 -3.0 dimensional work by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, and others, its challenge to easy viewing is perhaps best expressed by a large black-and-white text painting by Christopher Wool that spells out, “AND IF YOU DON”T LIKE IT, YOU CAN GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.” Despite the violent temperament the Wool work expresses, it, too, looks good, so it must be.
Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977
Now - October 31
Dia-Beacon
Beacon
Thursday-Monday, 11 a,m. - 6 p.m.
Admission/$10; students & seniors/$7
Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977
Now - October 31
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now
Now - December 16
Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson
Wednesday - Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m.
Admission/free
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/06/11 at 04:09 AM • Permalink
Cutting Edge Exhibit Down by the Riverside
by Betsy Miller
Picture Shirley Bassey singing her hit song This is My Life in one of her dramatic costumes. Now imagine her singing the same song at different points in her career, all captured on video that has been fragmented by an artist, who further fractures the images with disco ball mirrors and projections on uneven brick walls. This is a rough description of a kaleidoscopic piece by Conrad Ventur, one of 51 artists who will be participating in NADA Hudson, an art exhibition taking place at the Basilica on July 30 and 31.
Heather Hubbs, Director of NADA, the New Art Dealers Alliance, says of the membership, “They are art professionals who share resources, networking, and education opportunities.” The exhibition in Hudson will include sculpture, installations, videos and performance pieces and will occupy nearly 8,000 square feet of indoor space, the theater and over 10,000 square feet of outdoor space as well. Artists from the U.S., Canada and Europe will be showing, several having developed site-specific works for this show.
The site was suggested by NADA Vice President James Fuentes, who heard about it from one of the artists he represents, sculptor Bill Stone, a co-owner of the Basilica. Other principals in the Basilica are Stone’s son, the filmmaker Tony Stone, Tony’s partner, the musician and performance artist Melissa Auf Der Maur, and Bill’s wife, Nancy Stone, a ceramicist.
“It made a lot of sense,” says Hubbs. “The Basilica is across from the Hudson train station. The town is close by, walkable, and has a large number of art galleries. We think it’s an easy way for folks to get out of New York City for a couple days and see some great art.”
Auf Der Maur is hoping to build this event into a destination “like Art Basil Miami.”—a lofty ambition considering that NADA Miami, in its 8th year, attracts 20,000 people annually whereas Art Basel Miami draws 46,000.
Though they’ve already held several events at the Basilica, the co-owners consider the NADA art fair to be their official “soft opening.” They’ve done a lot of prep—installing a crowd-sized restroom, to name just one upgrade. But there is still plenty to be done, including a planned exterior landscaping that promises to link the picturesque 19th-century industrial site to its view, a glorious sweep of the Hudson River and the Catskills. “Nancy [Stone] has an incredible garden in Germantown,” says Auf Der Maur. “She’s planning on making the surroundings here just as spectacular.”
The Basilica has a number of events scheduled for the remainder of this year, including the Hudson MusicFest in August, film nights with Director Q & As, and fundraisers for the Opera House and Walking the Dog Theatre. At the moment, however, the owners are focusing on NADA Hudson, which is expected to draw thousands of people to their doors.
“I read a statistic that 70% of the artists in the New York Art Biennial were from New York State and of those, 50% were based upstate,” Auf Der Maur says. “That says a lot about the New York art scene. We think the art world is gravitating towards Hudson.” Using the Basilica as a hub for this creative community is exactly what the owners have in mind. “We have an incredible investment in this waterfront property. With our blood, sweat and tears, we are hoping to build a beautiful creative community down here.”
NADA Hudson
The Basilica
110 S. Front Street, Hudson
Saturday & Sunday, July 30 & 31; 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Admission/free
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/18/11 at 07:54 AM • Permalink
Impressions of a Revolutionary: Pissarro’s People
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by Robyn Perry
A kind-looking man with a long flowing beard and piercing eyes, Camille Pissarro, father of French Impressionism, was not French at all. He was born into a Sephardic Jewish family on the then-Danish colony of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, and remained a Danish citizen all his life. He was also a radical anarchist.
“Pissarro’s People,” showing June 12 – October 2 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute of Art in Williamstown, explores how Pissarro’s outsider status and revolutionary philosophy was a driving force behind the Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth century. Curator Richard Brettell, an international Pissarro expert and, for many years, a grateful summer visitor to the Berkshires from Dallas, paints a new portrait of the Master that, for the first time, reveals his muse.
In 1863, a group of painters who would become the Impressionists (including Monet, Renoir and Pissarro) broke away from the strict rules of the French Academy of Fine Arts, the star-maker machine of the time, and filled their own salon exhibition with “refused” paintings. Their show was better attended than the academic salon, if only because people came to mock the work on display. “Impressionist” was an epithet, a curse. Over the next twelve years, the initial independent salon was followed by a series of eight more Impressionist exhibitions (Pissarro was the only artist to exhibit in all nine), and dealer Paul Durand-Ruel exported the work to London and New York, because, as he said, “The American public does not laugh. It buys!”
Impressionism is characterized by visible brush strokes, emphasis on the qualities of light rather than form, a concern with daily life, ordinary surroundings, color and movement. Part of the advance was technical: by the late 19th century, paint came in a tube, enabling artists to take their easels outside, into glittering sunlight. Reacting to the advent of photography, the Impressionists also intuited that their strength was in more, not less, subjectivity. The show at the Clark gives back to the work something of its original shock value by coloring content with intent.
Pissarro, primarily known as a landscape painter, did, in fact, paint portraits; he just didn’t paint portraits that lionized his subjects, including his famous friends. He painted the local washerwoman, workers in the fields and at open-air markets, his family: these were the people he most admired. With his profound dedication to portraying the world around him, now we might call him a realist. “Pissarro’s People” links Pissarro’s figurative work with his social and economic ideals. Not only was he from the New World, he was on a mission to create a new world order, based on individuality, equality, and work, rather than capital or class. “Pissarro’s People” also makes evident his wide influence among his peers, both Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. His revolutionary way of looking at the world shaped protégés such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Seurat.
Lional and Joachim Pissarro with Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts
During the course of the show previews, Camille Pissarro’s great grandsons, brothers Lionel and Joachim Pissarro (the latter an art history professor at Hunter College) came to see the exhibition, along with Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, great great-granddaughter of Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Touring the galleries, Snollaerts pulled out a tiny flashlight from her purse. “Ouvres la bouche!” she laughed, then handed it to Joachim, who inspected the surface of “The Harvest” (1882), below. He talked of his ancestor’s “technical anarchy,” pointing out that Pissarro was a revolutionary experimenter and innovator in a whole range of media, not just oil on canvas, which only his wealthiest patrons could afford. He also made lithographs, etchings, drawings, gouache and tempera (all included in the current exhibition), to reach a wider, more economically diverse audience.
For the first time ever, Turpitudes Sociales (Social Disgraces, 1890), a series of pen-and-ink drawings Pissarro created as a book for the civic education of his nieces, hangs alongside his other art, revealing the political zeal that drove him to a new way of seeing. The revolution to which Pissarro devoted his life and work occurs before the viewer’s eyes. In addition to images that convey “gaiety, clarity, spring festivals, golden evenings, or apple trees in blossom,” as the contemporary reviewer Armand Silvestre characterized the first Impressionist exhibition, the Clark’s show enables the viewer to see the artist himself.
Pissarro’s People
The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute of Art
Williamstown
Now - October 2
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/20/11 at 01:33 PM • Permalink
Carolyn Blackwood, the Accidental Artist
It’s not her fault that she trips into careers. She hadn’t intended to become a lead singer for jazz bands, she just fell into it while in graduate school. Same with the years she spent as a tv producer in France. And now photography: It’s not her fault that the skies over the Hudson River, the view from her office/pied de terre/home-away-from-home in Rhinecliff, are, as she puts it, “biblical.”
“I had been taking pictures for years,” says Carolyn Marks Blackwood, whose real career, Magnolia Mae Films, which she co-owns with Gaby Tana, produced 2008’s The Duchess, and, coming out next fall, Corialanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes with Vanessa Redgrave. “A few years ago, the Morton Library in Rhinebeck asked me to put 10 pieces in a group show.” It was there that Blackwood’s images of the Hudson River caught the attention of the esteemed critic and curator Barbara Rose, who asked if she could include some of Blackwood’s work in a show on modern luminism, The Magic Hour, that she was curating at a New York gallery. “It’s as if I’d been playing softball in a field in Rhinebeck, and somebody said, ‘Would you like to play for the Yankees?’ ”
The Alan Klotz Gallery in Chelsea is now Blackwood’s gallery, where her first solo show in New York opens this week. It is also where an art director from Knopf happened upon an image of Blackwood’s, which is now on the cover of New Yorker poet Deborah Digges’ posthumously-published book, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart. Blackwood has used a shortened version of that title for her show.
“Have you seen the documentary, Bill Cunningham New York?,” Blackwood asks. “As he’s accepting the order of arts and letters from the French Ministry of Culture, he says, ‘He who seeks beauty will find it.’ ” Blackwood’s beauty, like Cunningham’s, is all about knowing where and how to look. Everyone knows that birds are beautiful. But in Blackwood’s photographs, taken in fields immediately following the harvest, when the flocks descend en masse to feast on seeds, the birds create patterns against the sky that are at once exquisite and menacing. Similar patterning marks her luridly colorful images of fish in overcrowded tanks at the Dutchess County Fair, and her overhead close-ups of the ice on the Hudson as it breaks up around the Rhinecliff dock. Through Blackwood’s lens, the ice looks, as one critic infamously said of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, like an explosion in a shingle factory. Only here, the shingles are made of glass.
All of these—fish, ice, birds—are in the new show, but the centerpiece is that biblical sky. There is no context to those images, no down here is the ground, up there is the sky. She presents the sky one little painterly chunk at a time. The way Blackwood sees it, those heavens are no placid paradise.
The Wind Blows Through My Heart, Carolyn Marks Blackwood Photographs
Alan Klotz Gallery
511 W. 25th Street, Suite 701, New York
May 12 - June 25; opening reception, Thursday, May 12, 6 - 8 p.m.
Related posts:
A New View of the Hudson
Carolyn Marks Blackwood Talks About Her Film
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/07/11 at 08:05 AM • Permalink
New Galleries Open in the Berkshires
Debut receptions at The White Gallery in Great Barrington and Sohn Fine Art in Stockbridge on Saturday, April 30
Over the past eight years, Tino & Susan Galuzzo have made The White Gallery in Lakeville, CT, a cultural hub in northwestern Connecticut. Now, they are expanding into Great Barrington with a second location in a restored 19th century farmhouse on South Main Street (above). “Our Lakeville space is very intimate, very homey, and this new space is much more open,” says Tino, who is especially excited about being able to show large paintings and sculptures. “We’ve always show outdoor sculpture, and we have a lawn to show it here, too, but now we have space for it inside as well.”
The White Gallery’s opening exhibit features contemporary glass art by Adam Waimon and paintings (right) by David Dunlop, who is one of the stars of the the Lakeville gallery. “David has such a huge following from his PBS series, Landscapes Through Time with David Dunlop ,” says Tino. “His work has evolved from the landscapes he’s famous for. Now, he’s making what I call cityscapes. They’re more abstract, but they are incredibly beautiful really appeal to a broad range of collectors.
The Galuzzos are very civic-minded dealers (they annually host “Blue & Gold at the White,” an exhibit of work by students at the public Housatonic Valley Regional High School), and they are joining forces with Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation for their Great Barrington debut. “We will donate a portion of all sales in the month of May to Berkshire Taconic’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor Fund,” he says. “Susan believes strongly in this program because it provides direct assistance to people in crisis when they need it most. She likes the simplicity and effectiveness of it. We want everyone in the Berkshires to know that we are committed to being part of the community.”
Cassandra Sohn (left) is reaching out to the community at Sohn Fine Art at 6 Elm Street in Stockbridge. While the inaugural exhibit features her large, abstract seascapes—un-manipulated and poetic images (below) taken in Ko Chang, Thailand—she is asking regional artists to submit work for a summer show called ‘A Summer Ramble”, which will honor the 19th century Berkshires poet William Cullen Bryant. In fact, Sohn will be holding a workshop and organizing an exhibit this summer at the William Cullen Bryant Homestead.
Sohn Fine Art will do double duty as Sohn’s studio and as a printing center for other artists. “We can do iris and giclée prints 44 inches wide and as long as you want,” says Sohn, who teaches photography at IS 183 Art School of the Berkshires and Berkshire Community College. “We can do prints on anything—watercolor paper, metallic paper, fabric. Our goal is to help artists bring their vision to life.”
The White Gallery
924 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA; 413.528.3631
Opening reception Saturday, April 30, 5 - 7 p.m.
Sohn Fine Art
6 Elm Street, Stockbridge, MA; 413.298.1025
Opening reception Saturday, April 30, 5 - 9 p.m.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/26/11 at 10:29 AM • Permalink
The Alchemy of Art and Commerce
Last Blues of Dusk by Susanna Heller at the John Davis Gallery
There is a hardly-secret, yet too-seldom-applied formula for enlivening Main Streets at night. Rather than play favorites, let us offer one example of a town from outside our region that applies it brilliantly: East Hampton, on eastern Long Island. There is a movie theater right in the thick of things, always an excellent traffic generator. But a movie theater alone is insufficient. Restaurants, a book store, an ice cream parlor, a candy store, galleries, shops, must all conspire to capture the attention of movie-goers before and after the show. Eventually, traffic builds, and people just out for a stroll, not necessarily movie-theater bound, join the parade. That’s how a noon-to-six town transforms itself into a hive of evening activity that serves 24/7, 21st-century sensibilities.
Now, the Hudson merchants group, BeLo3rd, in its on-going effort to draw traffic down to the lower end of Warren Street, have taken one simple step toward realizing that Avenue of Dreams’ full potential: coordinated gallery openings. This Saturday, seven galleries will hold openings on the same night (most, but not all, are below 3rd). As Ellen Thurston, Hudson’s semi-official Appointments Secretary, asks in her .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), “What to call this explosion of activity? A Crawl? A Stroll? A walk on the wild side, perhaps?”
Let’s just call it smart.
The galleries that will be holding openings this Saturday afternoon into evening are the Davis Orton Gallery, Gallery at Tommy’s, Gallery 135, Hudson Opera House, J. Damiani Gallery, John Davis Gallery, and the Limner Gallery. For details see Art Intelligence, above.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/27/11 at 08:37 AM • Permalink
Art Plucked from the Leftover Pile
Mona Mark, Untitled diptych #2, oil paint on floorboard
Passed through the right hands, one man’s trash can be transformed into another’s treasure. That’s the premise. Some weeks ago, thirty artists with ties to the region were each given a $50 voucher to spend at the Columbia County Habitat for Humanity ReStore just outside of Hudson. The materials they purchased there, all leftovers donated by builders and renovators, were to be used to make or inspire a work of art in each artist’s medium of choice—collage, sculpture, photography, painting.
The resulting works that comprise ReCycle, ReCreate, ReImagine, an exhibition and auction, are as disparate as the participants— Michel Arnaud, Arthur Baker, Rica Bando, Keith Batten, Isabel Bigelow, Dina Bursztyn and Julie Chase, Daniel Carello, Luis Castro, Renee Iacone Clearman, Jed Cleary, Dan Devine, Chip Fasciana, Mimi Graminski, Rodney Alan Greenblat, Hilary Harris, Matthew Hart, Linda Horn, Holly Hughes, Lonny Kalfus, Maj Kalfus, Nancy Kohler, Mona Mark, Monica Miller, Peter Moore, Frank and Carolyn Mouris, Cynthia Mulvaney, Melissa Sarris, Carol Shadford, Diego Sharon, Michael Tong, William Wester and Jacqueline Wilder.
“This project has inspired a new direction for me,” says the painter Mona Mark, whose work for the auction appears above. “The change in materials from canvas to floor board actually gives the viewer a very different experience. The fact that they are recycled materials is visible and becomes a part of the meaning of the work.”
The auction will be conducted by Colin Stair, president and founder of Stair Gallery and Antique Auctioneers and Appraisers of Hudson, all proceeds to help support CCHfH’s 2011 building projects. In addition to the work of established artists, the show will include 25 one-of-a-kind, high-fired tiles designed by Columbia County children. Each tile depicts one child’s vision of “home” and is available for a $10 donation.
Art Show and Auction Benefit for Columbia County Habitat for Humanity
Omi International Art Center
Co. Route 21 near Letter S Road, Ghent
Saturday, March 5; 5 - 8 p.m. Donation/$15 includes drinks and hors d’oeuvres
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/25/11 at 11:05 AM • Permalink
Bart Gulley: The Making of a Painter
Photographs taken at the home and studio of Bart Gulley and Sally Helgesen.
“Artists can’t help but be influenced by where they work,” says the abstract painter Bart Gulley. “Particularly if they feel wedded to the place.” Gulley is wedded to both Chatham, NY, where he has lived full-time with his wife, the writer Sally Helgesen, since 2002, and to the beautiful 19th-century barn on their property that he converted into a spacious studio.
Untitled Red I, 2001, oil on canvas
The third of four boys born to a sometime painter mother and an architect father, Gulley’s childhood was divided between a New York City apartment and a modern, weekend-and-summer house in Garrison, NY. He loved both and, to this day, one sees evidence of a struggle between the rural and the urban in his work—suggestions of landscape painting, graphic design, and architectural drawing within the collages and the abstract brushwork. Gulley calls his style “rational expressionism,” because “it’s cooler, slower, more analytical—less about sensation more about intention.”
Equivalent, 2010, collage on board
“I think most artists are artists from the age of about 3 or 4,” he says. “Somebody throws you a box of crayons, and your fate is sealed.”
Fortunately, Gulley’s efforts were taken seriously at home. “My father would bring me magic markers by the fistful from his office at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,” he says. In public elementary school, he fell in with a couple of talented classmates. They competed every day in “draw-offs—wars drawings, battle scenes, boy stuff. We worked like demons.” Each appeared to be sincerely convinced that the other two were much better artists—and said so often—a mutual encouragement society that broke up only when Gulley transferred to Collegiate, a private boys day school that, in those days, groomed its students for the Ivys followed by clean-hands careers in law or on Wall Street. “There was no art education to speak of,” Gulley says. Nor were there fellow student artists to compete with. Gulley’s father once took him to the office of Ivan Chermayeff, the eminent graphic designer, who “looked at my juvenalia and talked very seriously to me about it.” Still, momentum might have been lost had an English teacher, sensing an awkward fit, not encouraged Gulley to make posters for the film club (“elaborate psychedelic things”) and had a classmate’s mother who painted not taken an interest in the boy.
Shot Red, 2001, oil on canvas
“That was Felicia Bernstein,” Gulley says. The wife of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was “quite a painter.” Gulley remained close to her for the remainder of her life. “She had learned all her tricks from Jane Wilson, then a Columbia professor, who is a terrific artist and a wonderful person who really encouraged me.”
2011, XIV, collage on board
On Thursday, February 17, a solo show of Gulley’s recent paintings and collages debuts at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. “It was not my intention to do 35 collages,” he says. “But I was cleaning my barn last fall to begin anew, and I had these piles of cast-off materials.” Gulley, intrigued by the possibilities, began cutting shapes, which found their way onto board, almost as if pulled there and arranged by magnetic force. “Collage is done just as landscapes are, from back to front. I wanted to continue the process so I could see what would happen next.”
Screen, 2001, oil on canvas
Bart Gulley From Image to Object: Painting to Collage
Hartwick College
Anderson Center for the Arts
Oneonta, NY
February 17 - March 19; opening reception February 17, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/15/11 at 07:36 PM • Permalink
Cynthia Wick: Inspired by the Berkshires
When Cynthia Wick moved from Los Angeles to Lenox, MA, she was not so much trying to reinvent her life but rejuvenate it. A one-time movie marketing executive who’d been painting full-time for a decade while raising two sons, she and her writer-husband, Chan Gibson, felt suffocated by a California culture dominated by show business and shopping. “We wanted to live somewhere where we could breathe,” she says. “We wanted to live in a blue state. We wanted good public schools. We wanted to be able to get to a big city for the day.”
She intially came back east two years ago on a fact-finding mission to see if the Berkshires might be a place she could call home. “We weren’t in any rush to move, but both my parents had recently died and there was a sense of carpe diem,” she says. “I spent three days looking at houses with Tim Lovett of Berkshire Property Agents, and right before I was about to leave he showed me the house on Cliffwood Street. Even before we walked in the door, I knew I was home.”
There were many things she loved about the rambling turn-of-the-century shingle-style cottage—high-ceilings, big paned windows, stone fireplaces—but it was the third floor that was the tipping point. “There was this wonderful space that I could make into my painting studio,” she says. “It was the maids’ quarters which I think is so appropriate. It was the workers’ space, and I am a worker.”
Wick is zealous about her art, and she paints every day. Always someone who carried a sketchbook and pencils or pastels with her, she’s become enamored of finger-painting with the Brushes app for the iPad. “It’s like an electronic sketchbook,” she says. It’s allowed her to make paintings almost anywhere—while waiting to pick up her son in the parking lot at Monument Mountain Regional High School and while having breakfast at Haven, the cafe that is the social hub of Lenox. “There is something tactile and spontaneous about painting with my finger on an iPad.,” she says. “The process is freeing and has helped me paint in a more intuitive way. “
Now, Wick will be showing both her iPad paintings and her oil paintings in a one-woman show at Art 101, a gallery in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. “We figured out a way to display the iPad paintings on lightboxes and a TV monitor,” she says. Some of her favorite works in the show are oil paintings of scenes from her new life such as a friend’s daughter picking green beans at Farm Girl Farm, the ice on the Stockbridge Bowl, and a barn on a hillside by Tanglewood. “The beauty of nature informs my day. My LA friends don’t understand how I can live in New England but it is an amazing tonic,” says Wick. “I am almost ashamed to tell them how happy I am.”
Cynthia Wick Paintings at Art 101 (February 11 - March 6)
101 Grand Street, Brooklyn; 718.302.2242
Opening Reception February 11, 6 - 9 p.m.
One of Wick’s iPad paintings that will be shown on a lightbox at Art 101.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 02/09/11 at 06:20 PM • Permalink
Rock ‘n’ Roll Photographer Patrick Harbron
February 19 @ 7 p.m.
Blondie, August 1978
From 1976 through the mid-1990s, Patrick Harbron photographed many of the major names in rock music—Stevie Ray Vaughn, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Chrissie Hynde, Prince, Bon Jovi, Kiss, Queen, The Police— for magazines, album covers, publicity and for the groups themselves. In a digital presentation, drawn from his archive, Harbron will give his back-stage perspective on an amazing time in music history. Harbron, who divides his time between Manhattan, the Hudson Valley, and Snowmass, Colorado, is a faculty member of the International Center of Photography in New York City and at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. He has produced three books of photography published internationally by the Bantam Dell Publishing Group.
Columbia-Greene Community College
4400 Route 23, Greenport (1 mile east of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge)
Snow date: February 27 @ 2 p.m.
Admission, $5. Advanced tickets recommended 518.828.4181 x 3342
Also available at C-GCC, the Chatham Bookstore and the Greene County Council on the Arts, Catskill, or cal
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 01/31/11 at 02:00 PM • Permalink
Henry Klimowicz at Berkshire Museum
Opening January 15 - 5 - 7 p.m.
When you walk into the soaring Art Deco Crane Room at the Berkshire Museum, you’ll do a double take because the new exhibition, Henry Klimowicz: Constructs, looks like it belongs at MASS MoCA. The centerpiece of the exhibit is Disc II: Bright Star, a dramatic, 20-foot-diameter site-specific sculpture made of cardboard, hot glue and wire that hangs from the ceiling. “I was scared of showing in the Crane Room,” admits Klimowicz. “It’s hard to know how to be an equal to the grandeur of that room.” But clearly, Klimowicz figured it out magnificently. When the museum’s director of interpretation Maria Mingalone invited him to show, she simply envisioned hanging eight of his lacy-but-dense circular cardboard sculptures on the walls. But Klimowicz quickly realized that they would be dwarfed by the space and proposed creating the hanging sculpture. “Maria and director Stuart Chase were very trusting, encouraging and willing to do something that had never been done here before,” he says. They had gotten to know him well last summer when he created Paper and Light, a site specific work for the museum’s Wider Window Gallery. “That was the warm up,” he says.
Once he got comfortable with the Crane Room, he was inspired to create two unplanned wall installations—the Milky Way Constellations—made of hundreds of individual cardboard sculptures. “They’re a breakthrough for me, a collection of singular creative acts that come together as a piece that complements the very large object in the room that is really a singular creative act.” After Mingalone and Chase saw how well his mostly abstract work complemented the museum’s permanent collection of scientific and natural history artifacts, they decided to dedicate an additional gallery (above) for the exhibition.
Klimowicz has been making cardboard sculptures since he moved to New York City from Wisconsin 25 years ago. “I’m still working with a utility knife and glue gun,” he says. Ten years ago, when he and his wife, Dr. Kristie Schmidt, a family physician, moved to Millerton full-time, Klimowicz devoted himself to setting up the computer systems for his wife’s solo practice and caring for their young daughter, Ella. (Patients get to admire his sculpture in his wife’s waiting room.) “For five years, I didn’t really make art and then in 2007 I cleaned out our barn and got back to work,” he says. For the past two summers, he has created new work for The Wassaic Project that helped lay the groundwork for the show at the Berkshire Museum. “The piece I made last summer changed from opaque to transparent with the light as you walked around it,” he says. “I thought I had hit on something.” He also turned his barn into a gallery called the Re-Institute and invited the public to tour his studio.
Putting together the exhibition has been a labor of love. Mingalone is an old friend from New York, who was once married to one of Klimowicz’s best friends, Chris Regan of Millerton’s Sky Farm, who spent two days helping Klimowicz install Disc 2 (see video above.) “It was great to work with people I have known so well for so long,” he says. He also fell head over heels for the Berkshire Museum. “I always loved natural history museums and the Berkshire Museum’s collections relate to themes in my work.”
Why cardboard? “Cardboard is simple and straightforward. It has an ever-present cultural bias related to its past uses as a container or its present use as waste,” says Klimowicz, who gets his from Herrington’s in Lakeville and Millerton, where they save cardboard packing materials for him. “I love it when the material transcends its cultural confines. If I can make something beautiful from cardboard, I have then said that anything can be made valuable, fruitful, or hopeful. “
How does he feel about seeing his work in such formal surroundings? “I am shocked by how accessible it is,” he says. “It’s conceptual and abstract, which can be difficult. But it does not push you away. It’s not pretentious. You don’t have to be smart about art to understand it.”
Henry Klimowicz: Constructs (January 15 - March 27)
Berkshire Museum
39 South Street, Pittsfield, MA; 413.443.7171
Klimowicz will conduct hands-on workshops for all ages at the museum on February 12, 19 and 26 at 2 p.m.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 01/12/11 at 10:43 AM • Permalink
Nick Patten at The Harrison Gallery
Now - December 31
If you find the winter landscape just a bit too harsh, you may find relief in this show of warm, luminescent interiors by Troy-born, Hudson Valley resident Nick Patten, who works from photographs to capture light at its most dramatic in everyday settings and tableaux. The resulting paintings manage to achieve a feeling balanced somewhere between comforting and haunting.
The Harrison Gallery
Williamstown, MA
Opening reception: Saturday, December 4 @ 5 - 7 p.m.
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 12/02/10 at 12:19 PM • Permalink
Jeanet Ingalls and Anki King at the Lichtenstein
Now - January 8, 2011
The two-person show Naked: Contemporary Female Figurative Work features powerful new paintings that explore the female figure by Philipppino artist Jeanett Ingalls, who was rescued from a life of poverty when missionaries brought her to Lenox at the age of seven, and Norwegian artist Anki King, who now resides in Brooklyn. Both artists explore their own psyches and personal histories by creating raw paintings that convey strong emotions through striking moments of stillness.
The Lichtenstein Center for the Arts
Pittsfield, MA
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 12/01/10 at 09:29 AM • Permalink
Lisa Elmaleh’s “Everglades” Photographs
Now - December 18
Paurotis Palms by Lisa Elmaleh
Lisa Elmaleh has been known to travel the back roads of America with her 8x10 camera in search of arresting natural settings, but for the work in this one-woman show, the Florida native stuck close to home. The silver gelatin prints in “Everglades, ” which she developed in her portable dark room using a labor-intensive and antiquated wet collodion process, capture, she says, “an ecosystem that has shaped my own history.”
KMR Arts
Washington Depot
Artist’s reception, Saturday, September 25, 3 to 6 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 12/01/10 at 08:40 AM • Permalink
Dreams and Vessels at NAACO Gallery
Now - January 24, 2010
Lori St. Pierre, ceramic vessel
This group show at the North Adams Artist’s Co-Op Gallery explores the concept that dreams and vessels are inherently similar in that both are containers, either literally or metaphorically. Dreams may carry clues to life and become vessels for inspiration and contemplation, while vessels may hold remembrances of things past, or dreams of the future. The gallery is another outlet for affordable, locally made gifts just in case you still have some holiday shopping to do.
NAACO Gallery
North Adams, MA
Opening reception: Thursday, December 2 @ 5 - 8 p.m.
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 11/28/10 at 03:52 PM • Permalink
99¢ & Up: Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction at MCLA Gallery 51
Now - January 2, 2011
‘Tis the season to make affordable artwork available to shoppers seeking artful alternatives to the mall or internet experience. This group show of art multiples is easy on the wallet, with price tags beginning at 99¢ and topping out at $99.99. The show is curated by multimedia artist Ven Voisey, and will include his own work, above, some of which was inspried by his fall residency at Berkshire Museum.
MCLA Gallery 51
North Adams, MA
Opening reception: Thursday, December 2 @ 6 - 8 p.m.
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 11/19/10 at 05:16 PM • Permalink
Small Works & Print Fair North/West at Ferrin Gallery
Now - January 1, 2011
We Are Pilgrims: Ten Little Nine Little Indians by Annie Bisset
The annual Small Works show of diminutive, affordable art presents an easy way for art lovers to share the love with their friends and families. This year’s group show features scaled-down work by local artists Maggie Mailer, Ven Voisey, Greg Schekler, Joe Wheaton, and more, all of which sells out very quickly. The companion show, Print Fair North/West, is a new iteration of Print Fair North, the annual fall print sale at Zea Mays Printmaking, featuring prints by Lillianna Periera, Liz Chalfin, and Annie Bissett, plus racks of original, hand-pulled etchings, woodcuts, monoprints, and other works of art.
Ferrin Gallery
Pittsfield, MA
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 11/16/10 at 06:57 PM • Permalink
Inge Morath Portfolio in Salisbury
Now - January 15, 2011
Austrian-born Magnum photographer Inge Morath spent the last decades of her life in northwest Connecticut as a consequence of her marriage to the American playwright Arthur Miller. Morath shot what she valued most: civilization, artistic achievement, the splendor of women, and the significance of place.
Joie de Livres Gallery at Salisbury Wines
Salisbury, CT
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 11/15/10 at 07:23 PM • Permalink
Dürer Show Opens at the Clark
Now - March 13, 2011
Albrecht Dürer, The Beast with Two Horns Like a Lamb from The Apocalypse, c. 1496-97.
Once again, the Clark in Williamstown injects “world class” into the local arts bloodstream with its new exhibition, The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer. Considered by many to be the greatest German artist of all time, Dürer (1471 – 1528) was celebrated during his lifetime as a painter, printmaker, and writer. His innovative techniques revolutionized printmaking, and his theoretical writings transformed the study of human proportion. Deeply embedded in a tumultuous era of religious reformation and scientific inquiry, Dürer used his art to reflect the spiritual and social preoccupations of his time. This exhition, which is comprised of seventy-five powerful prints, all from The Clark collection, is the first comprehensive display of these works in more than thirty-five years. It explores Dürer’s literally fantastic and fertile imagination, and sheds light on why his visionary exploration of enduring themes—The Apocalypse, Symbolic Space, Battle and Anguish, Gender Anxiety, and Enigma—remains relevant to this day. Originally published as a book in 1498, this series of woodcuts echoed the anxieties of a generation during which prophesies of impending doom circulated widely and were encouraged by the sixteenth-century European Christian Church. An original bound copy of the series on loan from the Chapin Library at Williams College is included in the exhibition. Today, these prints maintain their dramatic impact, tapping into our fascination with religious tension and our fear of the beasts that dwell between the realm of the real and unreal.
The Clark’s collection of more than 300 Dürer prints is among the finest in North America. The bulk of the collection was acquired in 1968 from the collection of Tomás Joseph Harris, a scholar, artist, and art dealer who had served in the British Intelligence during the Second World War. The seventy-five prints included in the exhibition represent the best of the Clark’s Dürer’s holdings: Hercules (1496), the Apocalypse series (1496–1498), Nemesis (c. 1502), Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Melencolia I (1514), and others.
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
225 South Street
Williamstown, MA
Admission: free/November -May.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 11/07/10 at 06:47 PM • Permalink
Lynn Karlin’s Pedestal Series at Hammertown
Now – January 31, 2011
Masterpieces from the garden are the subjects of Maine photographer Lynn Karlin’s current work, now exhibiting in simultaneous shows at Hammertown Barn in Pine Plains and the Hammertown Store in Rhinebeck. “The Pedestal Series” features exquisitely lit photographs of fruits and vegetables, sometimes grouped, more often solo, that are “placed on a pedestal,” as the saying goes, the better to scrutinize and adore each one’s astonishing color and form.
Hammertown
Pine Plains & Rhinebeck
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 11/05/10 at 08:29 AM • Permalink
