Like Sugar at Tang Teaching Museum

Installation shot of Like Sugar at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum

photograph by Arthur Evans

The exhibition Like Sugar, on view through June 23 at Skidmore College's Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, is an unusually thought-provoking show that, like its namesake, still somehow comes off seeming insubstantial.

Organized by the Tang's Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman and Skidmore English professor Sarah Goodwin, with input from three other Skidmore faculty members, Like Sugar may suffer from the too-many-cooks syndrome, as it attempts many diverse things. Is it about art? Of course. Food? Check. History? Global economics? Advertising? Health? All of the above.

Julia Jacquette, Two Tiered Cookie Platter, 1997
enamel on wood panel

As an art exhibition, Like Sugar is a bit sparse for my taste, but it features some very good work. Unfortunately, several of the best artists in the show are represented by only one piece each, which can be frustrating. On the plus side, while the show has very much to say, it doesn't overwhelm the viewer with didactic panels or unbearable preachiness - it manages to maintain a light playful tone despite the deadly seriousness of its content.

I think the show makes plain just how conflicted we are as a society - and individually - about sugar. It's killing us, but we love it. Historically, the sugar trade drove the creation and growth of the horror of the slave trade. This is delved into through visceral works by Kara Walker and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and alluded to in historical and contemporary documentary photographs also in the exhibition. Even honey bees get some of the blame - or credit - from both the scientific perspective and the creative one, as a video piece in the show records an experiment demonstrating their preference for sugar, and three fascinating sculptures in the show are a collaboration between a human artist, Garnett Puett, and comb-making bee colonies.

Advertisement by Sugar Information Inc.

Among the most shocking materials in Like Sugar are the many mid-twentieth-century magazine ads collected and presented in a grand collage and also individually, where we can see the audacity of Madison Avenue's efforts to sell a nutrition-free, highly caloric product to an unsuspecting and exuberant post-war consumer. As a child of the '60s, I was the direct recipient of the concepts these ads promoted, and it particularly struck me that the majority of the artists in this show were too - born between 1959 and 1965, a rather narrow demographic band to see in a large group show.

Clearly, we were all affected, and the impacts are still seen in the obesity and diabetes epidemics that plague the United States today. These diseases are explored in a display of public service graphics that attempt to scare people straight off the sugar track, and in photographs and paintings that simultaneously seduce and disgust.

Emily Eveleth, Big Pink, 2016, oil on canvas

One of the strongest pieces in the show, which is used prominently in publicity for it, is a six-and-a-half-foot painting by Emily Eveleth entitled Big Pink, which employs scale, gorgeous painterly flourishes, pastry worship, and frankly pornographic effects to drive home several points at once. Like the ad pictured above, which advises eating cookies rather than a healthy lunch as a weight-loss strategy, it's creepy - and irresistible.

All in all, Like Sugar may be overly ambitious, but it got that way for important reasons. More art exhibitions should make such efforts, even if falling short is almost inevitable.

And, while you're in the neighborhood, check out a first-rate three-person show at the Saratoga Arts Center. Passing Time, on view through June 15, features paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Paul Chapman, Harry Wirtz, and Rebecca Flis (respectively). In a happy coincidence, some of Flis's ingenious cast works are made of - you guessed it - sugar. I promise you will like.

Rebecca Flis Ironscapes, cast iron, crushed red stone, steel perimeter

Pulled, Pressed and Screened: Important American Prints at The Hyde Collection

Robert Cottingham - Orph, 1972 color lithograph on wove paper

Perhaps my biggest regret from my college experience is that I never studied printmaking. Aside from the fact that, outside of art school, it's hard to get access to a fully equipped print shop (and, so, it was an opportunity lost) I think I would have enjoyed the processes. And I'm sure I would be a smarter person now if I had learned some of those complex techniques then.

Jim Dine - Self Portrait Zinc + Acid, 1964
etching on wove paper

That's one reason I wholeheartedly urge you to see Pulled, Pressed and Screened: Important American Prints at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, on view through Jan. 10. Organized by the Syracuse University Art Collection, Pulled, Pressed and Screened features 51 prints by as many artists and spans the decades from 1930 to 1980.

This gorgeous selection makes clear how important printmaking is to 20th-century American art and provides a wonderful window onto our history. It's also easy to love, as many of the artists are familiar names, including Grant Wood, Robert Blackburn, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, and Dorothy Dehner.

Anne Ryan - Three Figures, 1948
color woodcut on black wove paper

From those names alone you begin to get the picture - high quality, diversity, and commitment to the medium are hallmarks of the work gathered here. There are also many lesser-known but marvelous artists in the group, such as Boris Margo, who invented the "cellocut," a precursor to the collagraph that uses colorless plastic to create embossed relief. His example, titled Comet, is elegant and quietly beautiful and was one of my favorites in the show. Another discovery was a 1948 color woodcut on black paper by Anne Ryan. Titled Three Figures, it could almost have been a Klee or Miro print.

Jasper Johns - Periscope, 1981
color intaglio on wove paper

Like Ryan, many of the artists in this collection are primarily printmakers, especially several from the middle period of the show when graphic art retained a special place in a nation still establishing its values. The show is organized somewhat chronologically and somewhat by theme (hung on walls painted a perfect shade of ochre), so these more socially conscious artists, such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Ben Shahn, and Antonio Frasconi, are grouped nicely together, giving us food for thought along the way. We also get a good variety of techniques to study here, such as wood engraving, linocut, and lithography.

Alex Katz - White Petunia, 1969
lithograph on wove paper

There's always the question of whether an established painter who makes prints is really a printmaker at all, but the artists included here generally delved into the medium - they didn't just use it to reproduce their paintings, but explored it as a realm unto itself. Roy Lichtenstein is a strong illustration of this idea. In his embossed 1976 screenprint Entablature VII (reproduced at the bottom of this post) you see how the print itself is his goal - with lush exploitation of the milky white paper, metal foil additions, and unusual pebbly embossing, he has created something special that is not much like a painting at all.

Among the earlier examples in the show are many immigrants, often using the graphic medium as a people's art form and as a platform to communicate ideas about social progress. This includes Harry Gottlieb, a Romanian native whose The Strike is Won is vintage WPA propaganda; Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Aerialist, which portrays a high-wire artist as a real person; and Minna Wright Cintron's acerbic Men Seldom Make Passes, which simultaneously amuses and flirts with early abstraction. Also in this group are icons of the Depression era: Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, and Wood.

After a period that emphasized abstraction, it's interesting to note that some of the later work in the show returns to social issues, with examples by Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol leading the way, capped off by a Vito Acconci six-part acquatint from 1979-81 that combines the flags of the U.S, the Soviet Union, and China. A lot has happened since, in politics and art, but Pulled, Pressed and Screened still packs a nice punch. Try to see it if you can.

Also, please note the Hyde is "pay as you wish" for the month of December.

Roy Lichtenstein - Entablature VII, 1976, screenprint embossing on wove paper

Many Rivers at Saratoga Arts

Frank Wimberley - Blue Wave, 1982 acrylic on canvas 

If you don't want to miss the Saratoga Arts exhibition Many Rivers, which celebrates the 40-year history of Black Dimensions in Art, Inc., go now, because it ends on Nov. 7.

I'm glad I caught it, even if toward the last minute, because it is a rich compendium of outstanding artists in many media, and because it is a thoughtfully curated show with a compelling theme. Organized by Stephen J. Tyson and Stanwyck E. Cromwell (who also both have work in the show), Many Rivers includes more than 40 works by 21 artists from a broad geography - mostly local, but with roots from many distant lands and islands.

Daesha Devon Harris - My Soul has Grown
Deep Like the Rivers, 2012 mixed media 

The title theme was presented to each artist (or artist's estate) with a request to provide work in response to it  - so, not unexpectedly, water does predominate, However, the show is grouped into sub-themes that suggest other topics, such as abstraction, light, cultural history, storytelling, travel, and more. The purpose of the BDA is to give support to artists of the African diaspora, so one finds works here that express this reality - for example, a brightly colored, thickly painted oil by Cromwell titled Allusions of Home, which conjures up his memories and (possibly) dreams of a Guyana he hasn't seen in decades, or Robert Charles Hudson's 2015 Shoofly, a painting the colors and patterns of which evoke centuries of folk art, underscored by his incorporation of a quilted square in its center.

Hudson's combination of disparate media is right in the mainstream of this show - I was struck by the preponderance of collage elements through about half of the work, including Hollis King's wry and lovely graphic Beehive Lady, Elizabeth Zunon's charming children's book illustration I can hear that whistle blow ... and Femi Johnson's Black Betty the Mermaid, which is simultaneously seductive and threatening. Perhaps the best of these mixed-media creations is Daesha Devon Harris' trio of manipulated and embellished photographs, which are placed behind glass that's etched with compelling snippets of folk writing.

Betty Blayton - Ancestor Bearing Light, 2007
acrylic and mixed media on canvas

I was also struck by the deep streak of abstract expressionism in the show, best exemplified by three exquisite paintings from the great Frank Wimberley, but also strongly represented in works by Betty Blayton, who includes three sweet tondo paintings partially inspired by jazz, and Tyson's snappy black-white-and-red acrylic inspired by the decorated dwellings of his forebears in Burkina Faso and Ghana. Also particularly worthy of note are three paintings on paper by Herbert Gentry, who died in 2003, and had a long career in France (like many African-American jazz musicians) - one immediately picks up on the mid-century Frenchness of these remarkably fresh works.

Though the show is a retrospective of sorts, a healthy chunk of the work is dated 2015, so it lives more in the present of these artists - and the broad movement they represent - than it does in the past, which suggests a potent future for the BDA organization as it enters its fifth decade. Kudos to the organizers and to Saratoga Arts for presenting this fine collection.

Elizabeth Zunon - I can hear that whistle blow ... , 2009 oil paint and collage

Click! and Making Their Mark at The Hyde Collection

Jeannette Klute American (1918-2009) Trillium, ca. 1950
Dye transfer print, 14 1/4 x 18 3/8 in.
All photos shown with this post: The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY
Gift of George Stephanopoulos and Family, 2013

In a time of transition for The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, two small shows drawn from the museum's permanent collection are on display. The more significant of the two was curated by outgoing Director Charles Allan Guerin, who will be replaced in July by former Hyde curator Erin Coe. Titled Click!: Selections from the George Stephanopoulos Collection, the Hoopes Gallery display features 31 photographs chosen from among more than 120 that were recently donated to the Hyde by the political and media pundit. It hangs through May 31.

Having heard the news about this important addition to the collection, I was eager to have a look - and I'll admit I was a bit disappointed not to be seeing the whole trove. Guerin culled the larger group down to the work of 12 artists (pointedly describing them as such in the show's written material), with a nice range of styles, methods and time frame, creating a mini-lesson in the history of the medium of photography. A few of those included are widely regarded as significant, and none of the work is second rate, but some is rather little known, a treat for a crusty old curmudgeon like me who thinks he has already seen all the worthwhile pictures of the 20th century.

Mario Finocchiaro - Man Standing beside His Fiat 1000,
ca. 1970s, gelatin silver print, 11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.

Among the household names are Larry Fink, represented here by four prints from his 1980s series on working-class people at home in Pennsylvania; Joel Meyerowitz, with four small color gems from his Bay and Sky series of Cape Cod pictures; and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose two prints from the 1960s are more like news photographs than most of his best art. Surprises include an Italian photo-club member from Milan named Mario Finocchiaro (example shown at right); Jeannette Klute (the only woman in the show), who had a career at Eastman Kodak developing the dye-transfer printing process (image shown at the top of this post); and William E. Dassonville, a recently rediscovered practitioner from the early days of West Coast photography.

The majority of the pictures have social or political overtones, not surprising considering their source. Some of these are wonderfully witty, incisive, or even mysterious, such as Leon Levenstein's two undated pictures of people seen from behind, and Leonard Freed's four documents from diverse locales, including Sicily (the shot features a large tuna) and London (depicting British women of Indian descent). There are two images of Dwight D. Eisenhower, one by Cartier-Bresson (who was French), the other by the Canadian portraitist Yousuf Karsh.

Karl Struss American (1886-1981)
Bridge and Train Signal, Pittsburgh, ca. 1912
Gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1980, 3 3/4 x 4 3/4 in.

One of my favorites in this selection is a small, very Modernist print made from a 1912 Karl Struss negative (shown at left), which stands in stark contrast to a 1910 Struss image that is pure Pictorialism - what a difference a couple of years made! Also outstanding are two 8-inch-by-20-inch black-and-white contact prints by Michael A. Smith; one is of a lifeless corporate building in Princeton, N.J., the other of a sunny vineyard in Tuscany.

Only 13 works of art are included in the Rotunda exhibition titled Making Their Mark, but as the title suggest, they have an impact. Again drawn from the museum's permanent collection, these works on paper are by names major, minor, and in-between. Examples of the known include Wassily Kandinsky, Dorothy Dehner, and Robert Motherwell. Also included are two fine drawings by local artists Sandra Miller and Dorothy Englander, which were purchased by the Hyde back in the days of the Adirondack Regional exhibitions (full disclosure: Englander and I share a studio).

All the work in this show is abstract or nearly so. One curiosity is a very graphic representation of figures (so stylized they look more like mechanical drawing tools than people) titled "The Specious Solemnity of Gossip," made by Attilio Salemme in 1943. There's also a vibrantly colorful composition made by Ludwig Stein in 1985 titled "Time Trap" - somewhat ominous if you note his death date is 2015.

Perhaps the strongest piece in the show is a drawing by Gregory Amenoff (pictured below) - I would say that work alone is worth the trip. Making Their Mark will hang through June 21. The Hyde is also hosting the 24th Annual Regional Juried High School Exhibition through May 31 in the Wood Gallery.

Gregory Amenoff - Pink Sweet (Suite) #1, 1979 Gouache and pastel, 13 x 15 inches
Gift to The Murray Collection in memory of Terry A. Murray

Holiday time at the Albany Institute

Young Washington - lithograph by Alex Katz

The holidays are a great time to visit the Albany Institute of History & Art, both because the museum shop there overflows with fabulous options for cards and gifts at Christmas, and because the museum's educational/artistic vacation offerings for kids are always first-rate. But I'm here to talk about the exhibitions - and in that department this season has something for everyone.

For the history buff, there's First in the Hearts of his Countrymen: George Washington, which is described as "a visual exploration of America's fascination with Washington's image, ... and how Americans have used it to convey a sense of patriotism and shape a national identity." For the kid in all of us (especially we Boomers), there's Kid Stuff: Great Toys from our Childhood, which features all the toys you'd expect and ample room to try them in. And for the lover of all things shiny, there is A Gather of Glass, filling four freestanding cases with a few centuries' worth of glittering objects from the museum's collection.

George Washington was at the top of my list on a recent visit but, on my way up to the third floor galleries to see it, I could barely resist the siren call of all those nostalgic toys in the main second-floor space. I stopped, took a few hungry glances around and then, with my editor's voice ringing in my ears, got back on the assignment. Though the Washington show is long on historical context and a little thin in the serious art category, it held my interest with a densely packed tour of all kinds of artifacts, including statues, plates and pitchers, printed fabrics, postage stamps, medallions, engravings and more, all bearing the image of that towering figure.

Among the real curiosities are a cast metal savings bank representing the father of our country, an 1812 broadside printed in Albany that proudly proclaims having been "executed with American materials," and a walking stick fashioned out of a branch cut from a tree that grew near GW's grave. There are also several serious works of art, including a decent oil portrait based on Gilbert Stuart's famous one; two large, color lithographs commissioned by the Lorillard Tobacco Co. in 1975 in anticipation of the nation's Bicentennial and then donated to museums across the  land; and a very fine framed bronze bas relief profile of Washington by Charles Calverley.

items in A Gather of Glass

Naturally I was most drawn to the contemporary artworks in this show. The two big lithos, by Alex Katz and Audrey Flack, speak to history in at least two ways, by their own purposely representational content, and by their recognizably 1970s stylistic approach, now more than a generation in the past. A more recent work of art by Michael Vinson Clark, in which he paints whimsical background patterns on three color postcard reproductions of his own interpretation of the Stuart portrait, fits right in with them due to its overt Pop references. The show runs through May 20.

Back to Kids Stuff, there was enough personal history there to render me wholly unobjective about the experience. I think my sisters and I must have had at least 80% of the toys on display, from Hot Wheels to Barbie to Spirograph. My friends with children tell me things haven't changed much: their kids have Lincoln Logs, Slinky, Silly Putty and the rest as well. Go and enjoy, whatever your age (it runs through March 4).

A Gather of Glass is a delight. From functional bottles to Tiffany art pieces, its objects tell their stories, and ours, and sharply underline what a rich trove the Institute's collection is. The show continues through June.

Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks at Esther Massry Gallery

By Sara Tack

It’s not often that a graphic design show appears in a gallery or a museum and even less often that one shows up in the Capital Region. That’s why it is pretty exciting to see a show of the magnitude of Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks get curated specifically for The College of Saint Rose’s Esther Massry Gallery in Albany.

Bierut, a partner in the renowned design consultancy Pentagram, has had a brilliant career, designing for a host of national and international clients. He is the author of 79 Short Essays on Design and founder of the popular online journal Design Observer. He’s a senior critic at Yale School of Art and frequent guest speaker at design conferences and organizations across the country. His work has won every design award there is to win, including the prestigious American Institute of Graphic Arts medal.

What distinguishes Bierut’s work from much of the design we see on a daily basis is that his pieces use clever, conceptual twists that create messages we have to think twice about. His ability to do this so poignantly is grounded in his knowledge of the subject at hand, his understanding of how to use modernist form to imply meaning, and a natural gift: intuitive wit.

Most of the pieces in the show are posters and most are in black and white. Sometimes the work has (what appears to be) such a simple concept you wonder why you hadn’t thought of it yourself. Yet the beauty comes from just how profound he makes “the simple.”

In one of the few multi-colored works - Obama Fifty State Strategy, 2008, a campaign poster for Barack Obama - every U.S. state’s name is re-presented and strung literally together without word spacing. Separated only by color, we read the play on words starting with Alobama and proceeding alphabetically through Wyobaming.

In the 7th Annual Book Fair to Help the Homeless, Bierut turns a black-and-white image of an open book upside down to create the roof of a house. At the bottom of the poster is a small, out-of-scale, solitary wooden chair. In a poster advertising the play The Well of Water, at the Parallax Theatre (one of many posters for the theatre in the show) we see a stark charcoal line drawing of a woman’s hair and upper torso. The rest of her face is created from stylized photographs. The eyes are hot and cold faucet knobs, her mouth the spout of the faucet where the water emerges. What is he saying about The Well of Water using a faucet metaphor to represent a woman's face? One would have to see the advertised play to find out.

There are quite a few stunning pieces in the show designed for the Architectural League of New York. Usually their purpose is to announce a lecture, or an event series. My favorite is Scale. This 36-by-48-inch horizontal has a solid black circle just under 36 inches in diameter anchored to the left edge of the poster. On the far lower right end of the circle is one word reversed out to white. The typography - all caps, san serif bold letters, not more than 1/4” in height - reads “SCALE.” The sheer literal contrast of scale focuses us on one of the most defining principles in art and architecture. This is extremely powerful.

Light Years, also for the Archi- tectural League, overlaps the letters of these two words laid directly over the other in varying translucencies. Without any literal illustration or photography, the layering of the letters on a solid black background visually suggests distance over time as we read the words “light years.”

Another set of posters for the Yale School of Architecture runs the gamut of Bierut’s thinking. Architecture and Psychoanalysis Symposium is both clever and funny. A modernist, 1960s-style psychiatrist’s couch is turned 90 degrees running vertically up the side of the poster. At a moment’s glance our minds transfer the image of the couch into an architectural structure/building.

Then we realize what we are looking at and can’t help but laugh at being let in on the visual and verbal play. Furthermore, we realize that, although the poster was installed vertically, it could also be presented horizontally (as shown above). It is more difficult to read the detailed text in this orientation, but that text now takes on the role of the architectural reference, suggesting a city skyline.

So what does the title 30 Years/90 Notebooks have to do with the show? There are two cabinets displaying many of Bierut’s black-and-white composition notebooks that he started using in 1982. He has accumulated 92 books in his 30-year career and can’t go anywhere without his most current notebook. They are used for everything from client meeting notes to thoughts on design, miscellaneous ideas, doodles, conceptual sketches, and working out his design process on any given commission. Many of the displayed pages allow viewers to make connections and see the thinking behind the work on the walls of the gallery.

Two-page spread from a Michael Bierut notebook

A commemorative poster was designed for the exhibit by Bierut himself and is available for sale at the gallery, signed or unsigned. Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks is on view through January 22, 2012.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Guest reviewer Sara Tack is principal artist at Smith and Jones and adjunct professor of visual communication & design in the Electronic Media Arts and Communication department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Myth in Metaphor: The Etchings of Steven Hazard at Clement Art Gallery

I don’t know Steven Hazard personally, but his show at Clement Art Gallery in Troy says a lot about what sort of person he must be. Like many artists, he is obsessed – but unlike most people, artists included, he appears to be singularly devoted to his obsession, giving his entire existence over to creating a very particular world in carefully rendered and heavily layered imagery.

At his home studio in Albany, Hazard makes etchings, which he frames himself and takes on the road to sell at craft fairs and such; these travels have allowed Hazard to make a living, but have largely prevented him from pursuing traditional gallery shows. Myth in Metaphor is the first local show I can recall that features more than just a few of his works.

So this is a welcome opportunity to take in the scope of Hazard’s output – especially because, despite the small scale of the gallery, it’s a comprehensive collection that spans from the 1970s to the present. Then again, for me the show is perhaps too complete – Hazard’s images are so dense that it is a challenge to take in very many of them at once, and the result is that the experience is somewhat overwhelming.

The show includes a great deal of text, most of it written by Hazard to explain the complexities of his ideas and images, some of it taken from other sources. One such quote says his prints “often represent the sensory overload ... of the modern world,” which mirrors my own reaction; I would add that they also draw from the ancient and medieval worlds to further populate this Bosch-like, crammed universe that Hazard so relentlessly depicts.

Apart from the many etchings on view (both framed on the walls and stacked unframed in bins), the show features several pencil drawings, which provide a bit of respite from the dark, layered prints. One of the drawings, titled Four Elements and dated 1999, provides the template for a same-size print also on view. At about 20x34 inches, it is large for Hazard and, being in graphite rather than ink, it is both lighter in tone and more richly detailed. One could spend hours just exploring this single piece in all its intricacy.

Another drawing, Article of Faith, is dated 2011 and features softer marks in a couple of colors on textured, grey paper. While its content is similar to the other work on view, it has a lighter touch, and its use of a rabbit as the main subject makes it more approachable than many of the more forbidding subjects presented here.

Those consist of the human figure, animals, mythological characters, machinery, architecture and landscape – sometimes all in one picture – and all of it elaborately staged to tell a story in actions and symbols.  The many black or brown single-plate etchings shown here are augmented by quite a few colorful multiple-plate etchings, as well as some lovely hand-colored etchings.

Hazard displays great skill with drawing, spatial perspective, and visual invention, and his well of creative ideas seems bottomless – but I find the technical quality of his prints to be wildly inconsistent: some are crisp and clear, others very muddy, and many are too heavily inked, which causes a lot of blocking up in the finer details. In work such as this, where it’s not just about the lights and darks, or the shapes and lines, but where every bit of information carries intent and meaning, that matters.

Note: Myth in Metaphor: The Etchings of Steven Hazard closes on Weds., Oct. 26, so you must hurry if you’re planning to see it; also, the gallery will publish a catalog of Hazard’s work by December, adding to the lineup of quality publications it has brought out for its artists over the past few years.

Rating: Recommended

Are We Having Art Yet? Bill Griffith at BCB Art

Irreverent, absurd, existentialist - Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead embodies these traits as only a character born out of the San Francisco underground comics scene of the 1970s could. Yet in 2011 he is going stronger than ever, in syndication to about 200 daily newspapers, out in a new book, and now appearing in an inspired exhibition at BCB Art in Hudson.

Titled Are We Having Art Yet? Selected Drawings 1978-2011, the show presents numerous original inked versions of daily strips, several inked originals of a 1990 Zippy calendar, a few pencil renderings of early Zippy covers, and signed inkjet prints of other Zippy material. All the work on the walls is in ink or pencil – i.e. no color – and was, of course, created for reproduction, so it has that special quality of blacks and whites, of hatching and cross-hatching, that gives all graphic art a certain eye-appeal.

But, rather than let the monotony of monochrome get overwhelming, Bruce Bergmann, the gallery’s owner, has placed most of the work along a bright yellow rail, backed by a garish band of the same yellow with a pattern of big, red polka dots. The design scheme is taken from Zip’s costume, but it also imparts a properly carnivalesque atmosphere to the exhibition. Yes, it says, you may be in an art gallery, but you don’t need to take anything too seriously here.

An art calendar drawing by Bill Griffith

As these are comic strips, naturally the show is a hoot; but what makes it really special is that all the strips are specifically art-related. It is certainly a comic fan’s delight – but it is also an art critic’s paradise. Griffith went to art school and attempted a career as a painter before stumbling into comics in 1969, and he loves to send up the posturing of serious artists and pundits. Jokes about Picasso, Giacometti, Pollock and Magritte here coexist with jokes about Ingres, DaVinci, ancient Greece and cave art.

With the irrepressibly idiotic Zippy as his guide, Griffith has no fear, and the results are hilarious.

For most, including myself, Zippy is an acquired taste. His bizarre appearance, politically incorrect moniker and – above all – chronically off-the-wall pronouncements are not going to be for everybody, even those of us who are used to edgy stuff. But he grows on you – his sweetness, his persistence, his inability to grasp basic reality – it all adds up to irresistible charm.

Whether you like the humor or not (and in the case of these strips, it helps to be conflicted about modern art), seen up close in the original, the drawings show that Griffith is no pretender – he’s got the chops to draw anything well, and he’s got the graphic sense to know what to draw and what to leave out. It’s clear, crisp communication.

While much of the work is simplified, and much of the content goes in the direction of one-liners, some of these drawings also have a great deal of complexity built in, and with lengthy perusal will yield new secrets. Mostly, though, it’s about the humor of absurdity and, in this particular selection, the absurdity of the art world. Which works real well for me.

Rating: Highly Recommended

The Landscape of Memory: Prints by Frank C. Eckmair at NYSM

One response to the hard times plaguing most arts organizations these days is the current tendency of museums to produce new exhibitions from their own collections. It's an effective strategy that has the combined benefits of saving money and reinforcing the institution's prestige, the type of win-win situation creative organizations are always conjuring up when under financial pressure.

The Landscape of Memory: Prints by Frank C. Eckmair at the New York State Museum in Albany is just such an exhibition - a wonderful surprise that shows off the richness of this public collection and the mastery of a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker (now in his ninth decade) who has established himself as a pre-eminent graphic artist.

Eckmair, who hails from the central New York town of Gilbertsville, and who had a long and influential teaching career at Buffalo State College, celebrates the upstate agricultural legacy in print after print, his efficient swaths of ink on paper speaking volumes in form and feeling. The show is nicely spread out in the museum's sprawling Crossroads Gallery (right next to the bird collection), and includes Eckmair's tools of the trade, such as a letter press, engraving gouges, and quite a few finished blocks, along with more than 80 framed prints.

The range of scale in this cache is pretty impressive, from tiny, detailed pieces that exemplify the familiar book-plate application of wood engravings to pieces around three feet long or larger, which push the boundary of what can be printed from a wooden plate (the differences between the smaller wood engraving and larger woodcut are subtle, but involve the hardness of the wood, the tools employed, and the resulting precision of the lines).

Eckmair's command of both media is always present, but he doesn't make a fetish of it - on the contrary, he tends to use only just as much technique as is necessary to get his point across; the rest of his attention goes to making the design just right. This is accomplished through a deceptive ease with the language of shape, color and contrast, and is especially effective in his use of white space.

A very watchable interview video of Eckmair, made in 2010, allows him to tell us in his own words why he prefers a white background, and to express the pride he takes in integrating that white into the subject matter (one striking example, an untitled print about 4 feet long, is shown at the top of this post; another, titled Monday Evening, is shown above, at left). Other insights from the video include Eckmair's preference for old things - indeed the show is steeped in nostalgia, especially as 50-year-old prints depict houses and farm machinery abandoned decades before that - and he explains the reasons he rarely includes people in his images.

The graphic power with which Eckmair creates his rural landscapes and interiors makes the show an uplifting experience, despite the sometimes gloomy cast of these images. There is also a playfulness in much of the work, notably in instances where the wood grain, knots and all, is prominently displayed as a graphic element.

Eckmair spent some of his formative years stationed in Korea and Japan in the Air Force, and the Oriental influence on his work is obvious. What's beautiful is how he has taken that stylistic aspect and made it his own, while simultaneously applying it to the subject of his ancestral and lifelong home. So a horizontal slice of the woods in snow becomes minimalistically calligraphic - yet still feels like central New York - and the many vertical scenes of house and hill and machinery that tumble toward you off the museum's walls retain a hint of Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Unlike these Japanese wood-block printers, who reveled in many-colored prints, when Eckmair strays from black ink, he does it exceedingly sparingly, often as a quiet note of gray or blue or ochre (as in Under the Hill, shown above, at right). Still, even these bits of color can seem expressive among the many monochrome blacks on view here.

But those blacks have a range, too - from the pure silhouette of a house against the sky to highly textured areas that detail every leaf on a tree or every blade of grass. In most cases, the work has a rare quality of efficiency, thought there are a number of rather elaborate examples in the show as well.

In addition to the scenes, the show features several examples of politically charged images from the early '60s, including humorous broadsides that use old-fashioned wooden type, and a couple of prints that relate to socially conscious work of the time, such as that by Ben Shahn.

Altogether, The Landscape of Memory is a sumptuous immersion into a rich life expressed in "a poor man's" art. It runs through September 17.

Rating: Highly Recommended

M.C. Escher: Seeing the Unseen at Berkshire Museum

It had been several years since I'd gone to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, and I am so glad I got back there this week for the current exhibition M.C. Escher: Seeing the Unseen. Founded in 1903 with a dual mission to present material on natural science and fine art, the museum completed a major renovation three years ago, adding climate control, a modern entryway, and fresh galleries, and updating its approach to the same worthy mission.

The result is special - and the Escher show perfectly fits the museum's family-centric and dual goals by offering an experience that can be taken in by all ages and on many different levels.

For those of us who grew up in the '60s and '70s, Maurits Cornelis Escher's work was ubiquitous and highly influential. No doubt, visitors of baby-boomer vintage to Seeing the Unseen are finding it more than a little nostalgic and will recognize many of the images presented (as I did). Equally likely, their kids or grandkids will delight in this accessible yet intensely fascinating imagery as a new discovery. Either way, it was a smart choice by the folks at the Berkshire to organize this exhibition, and I expect it will draw crowds everywhere if it gets the road tour they are seeking for it.

While some would be inclined to dismiss Escher's art as mere illustration, or to take it less seriously because it was (and still is) so popular, this collection of 120 works representing about 45 years of the Dutch native's output should put such thoughts to rest. On the basis of technique alone (in painstakingly rendered woodcuts, lithographs, mezzotints and drawings), it's clear Escher was as good as it gets.

Though he was, apparently by nature, a bit dry compared to many of his more histrionic contemporaries, nearly every item presented transcends the realm of pedestrian graphics to stand up as Escher's personal expression of awestruck wonderment at the way things appear and the way things maybe really are. In fact, he was ahead of his time, not behind it, in his integration of mathematical and scientific knowledge into the creation of a personal vision.

The show (which relies on loans from the Boston Public Library and a couple of commercial art sources) begins in a smallish gallery where both the earliest and some of the latest works can be seen and compared. Here, numerous examples of drawings and prints from Escher's formative 10 years spent in Italy show not only how he honed his vision and technique, but how those agrarian Italian vistas and geometric towns remained a key influence on that vision for the rest of his life (such as the 1930 lithograph Castrovalva shown at the bottom of this post).

The early drawings and prints also demonstrate how deeply Escher studied nature, setting the stage for him to later become enthralled with math and physics. And they provide a fresh perspective on an artist perhaps too well known for certain eye-tricking visual puzzles that became icons for the psychedelic generation (such as Up and Down, shown below at left).

That Escher's sometimes fantastical vision was deeply rooted in nature is key to understanding his work, and the range of images in this first gallery of the show makes that clear by linking the early and later works (such as a 1933 lithograph titled Phosphorescent Sea, and the 1955 litho Three Worlds, which is shown at right).

The first gallery also establishes the show's own graphic style and informative intentions with hanging and wall-mounted panels of text and photographs that illustrate the man and his influences. Here I found two Escher quotes that function almost as bookends to his aspirations. The first, "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible," is apt but a bit arrogant, while the second, from very late in his life, shows humility: "I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems."

Throughout the rest of the exhibition, the thoughtful inclusion of rare artifacts and related materials provides context for the marvelous images, most of which are masterfully hand-printed and so detailed that the many magnifying glasses placed in racks here and there are sure to be put to good use.

Among the extras are several short videos that animate and further transform some of Escher's most illusory designs; '60s-era clothing with Escher patterns; vintage black-light posters, properly illuminated and accompanied by beanbag chairs for comfortable contemplation; videos of people with elaborate Escher tattoos; and reproductions of Escher imagery on book covers, in puzzles and plastic toys, and in one recent case as a New Yorker cover featuring an oil-dripping pelican.

But, for me, nothing beyond the still mind-blowing original art was needed to create a deep impression and be uplifted by the outpouring of work from one artist's lifetime. The show ends on May 22 - try not to miss it.

Rating: Highly Recommended