Not to be missed

Penny Dreadful by Nina Chanel Abney is among works by 59 artists at The School

Longtime Times Union art critic (and fellow fine art photographer) William Jaeger has written a powerful review of the exhibition This Tender, Fragile Thing at The School in Kinderhook.

I won't have time myself to review the show, which will end on April 30, but I wanted to pass along Bill's endorsement before its too late.

The show is a re-examination of a prior exhibition mounted by The School in 2005 that highlighted Black Power-related materials from the gallery's collection, and features the work of 59 significant artists, including photographs by prominent journalists. The School is a vast, pristine space, and admission is free - but it is only open one day a week, Saturday, from 11 to 6, so plan accordingly.

Short Take: refract at Albany Center Gallery

Works by, from left, Royal Brown, Naomi Lewis, and Benjamin Jose
are part of refract at Albany Center Gallery.

photos provided

The five artists in Albany Center Gallery's current show, refract, don't appear at first glance to belong together. Their media vary from video to watercolor to cast iron; their imagery from space-age to delicacy on the page. But a theme does emerge from the selection, which was organized by the gallery's associate curator, Jennie Tang. It has to do with the approach these artists take to their subjects.

Owen Barensfeld's Is It big Enough?
combines images to make a statement

This concept is best explained by the gallery's written material, which states that the five artists employ "different methods of repetitions, patterns, juxtapositions and distortions" to broaden our understanding and experience of everyday visuals. Here, those visuals have become abstracted and transformed, built of mere suggestions, or created directly out of the simplicity of a grid.

The show, like many at this venue, is spare, featuring just 29 works in all. Nine of those works are by Naomi  Lewis, whose whisper-soft graphite drawings pull you in close, and whose patterned images of bees fill their surfaces expansively, often emphasizing negative space to great effect. Equally wed to overall pattern, Trevor Wilson painstakingly builds large images out of tiny squares in grids of graphite or colored pencil, the results feeling almost equal parts human and machine.

Owen Barensfeld and Royal Brown come from opposite positions to meet in a middle zone of spaceships and technology. While Brown creates colorful models of imaginary craft out of the most mundane of found objects (empty spray cans and such), Barensfeld transforms mass-media images of bomb blasts and moonshots into objects of contemplation. Both have something to say: In Brown's case, it's a literal message of love amid fantasy; Barensfeld's seems to be more about the mesmerizing terror of industrial power.

From left, works by Trevor Wilson, Owen Barensfeld,
Benjamin Jose, and Royal Brown are part of refract

Benjamin Jose seems to be the odd man out in this group. His constructions of mismatched materials struck me as being more in the realm of formalism and surrealism than anything else here, and his messages less clearly stated than the others'. That said, his highly refined use of such disparate substances as wood, steel, and leather holds its own kind of fascination.

refract will remain on view through Friday, March 4, so it's now or never if you want to catch a look. I'm glad I did.

Gina Occhiogrosso: Surfacing at the ACCR

The New Natural, oil and acrylic ink on pieced and sewn muslin, 2021

During a recent talk at her exhibition in the main gallery of The Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, the painter Gina Occhiogrosso discussed the dichotomy of pessimism and optimism. “Most of my friends would say I’m pretty negative,” she said, while surrounded by a room full of her buoyantly colorful abstract works, effectively silencing that notion.

We are living in a time when it seems impossible to be hopeful – yet that is in a sense our only hope. Occhiogrosso understands this, and while her artistic practice remains primarily a rigorous pursuit of the purely visual, with regular forays into the topical (examples include feminism, global warming, and the pandemic), the results are clearly meant to uplift.

Migration, acrylic paint and ink
on sewn cotton, 2017

This exhibition, entitled Surfacing, is her first solo in the region in about 15 years, and it represents a sort of homecoming – for five years in the early 2000s, Occhiogrosso was the director of this gallery, and she spoke of having dreamed of one day showing there herself. Dream fulfilled, the nearly three-dozen works in this display are a comfortable fit, with a few very large colorful installations on the biggest walls in the back, a couple of much more intimate pieces set up on pedestals in the middle of the space, and paintings ranging from modest to grand in scale arrayed on the walls and columns.

Not a retrospective, Surfacing is comprised mainly of recent works, and seems to want to be about re-emerging from the isolation of the pandemic. If so, then it reveals a rather glorious private world of shimmering shapes and radiant colors – hardly the doom and gloom one might expect from an artist stuck inside for a couple of years.

Cascade, oil and acrylic
on pieced and sewn polyester, 2019 

A few earlier works show how Occhiogrosso moved into her current style, and a few works - such as the two pedestal-mounted accordion sketchbooks - range well outside of that style, providing enough context for the artist's thoughts and process to allow us to more fully understand and appreciate her primary body of work. Those pieces are consistently created by making a painting on white fabric, then slicing it into geometric pieces, rearranging and sewing those pieces back together into a square or rectangular working surface, and then painting over it again to create the final image.

In this way, Occhiogrosso allows randomness and intuition into the mix, forming a means of abstraction that doesn't depend entirely on self-expression. It's a process that works perfectly for an artist who, on one hand, entertains doubts (don't we all?) and, on the other hand, has clear ideas about what she wants to make, and a fierce commitment to working toward those goals.

Inside Out, oil and acrylic
on pieced and sewn muslin, 2020

In a review I wrote last year about an exhibition at The Hyde Collection, I commented that I was very pleasantly surprised to see how many top-flight contemporary artists are still working in the abstract mode (you can see it here). This show by Occhiogrosso is a perfect example of that phenomenon, and I am no less delighted by it here. Her command of shape and color is second to none, and she revivifies the form by means of her process of cutting and sewing back together, which evokes the early Modernism of the Dadaists (who loved a good collage as much as anything) as well as today's feminist embrace of traditional women's work.

Additionally, Occhiogrosso addresses universal and personal concerns in her two accordion books, one of which elegantly depicts a flooded urban world with parallel colored-pencil lines, while the other represents the details of a domestic interior in sketchy black ink (both very skillfully drawn, I might add).

Altogether, the show is a must-see for fans of local art - Occhiogrosso is a native of Niskayuna, currently living in Troy - and just a real treat for anyone who may feel a bit deprived of color and joy in the midst of winter, or in the grip of a (let's hope) post-pandemic haze. 

Surfacing will remain on view at the ACCR through March 11; the gallery is open every day but Sunday, including Tuesday through Thursday evenings till 7.

Morgan Avenue, pen on accordion sketchbook, 2020

Pieced Together at APL

Henry Klimowicz - Large Collections of Like a Lichen #2
cardboard and glue 2021

Perhaps one of the best-kept secrets on the local gallery scene is the Pine Hills Branch of the Albany Public Library, where expertly curated exhibitions of regional artists have been mounted about twice a year for quite some time.* And the current show, Pieced Together, is one of the best yet.

Organized by staff at Russell Sage College's Opalka Gallery, Pieced Together features 11 artists united by the theme of assemblage, an often overlooked art form that came into its own during the height of Modernism, in particular among Dadaists, often in the unassuming clothing of paper collage. Most of the work in this show follows fairly closely in that tradition, while some of it feels more connected to later periods of contemporary art that grew out of Modernism.

Altogether, this is a particularly lively collection of very accomplished work by well-established local favorites and a few relative newcomers, including one recent Sage graduate, Chloe Harrison, whose delicate matboard constructions show promise, while confirming her self-described fledgling status.

Beth Humphrey - Mutual Aid, 2020
spray paint, gouache, crayon, film on paper

Highlights from the show are many, even if one must perform something of a treasure hunt to find them all in the two-level space which, though not designed for art exhibitions, still serves well to showcase the work. Installations here always exploit the big central staircase, this time featuring two of my personal favorite artists of recent times: Beth Humphrey, who presents a constellation of small framed works on a mid-level wall that delight with their shapes, colors, and layerings; and Kenneth Ragsdale, who offers a suspended wire laden with playful, oversized folded-paper objects from his own quirky personal vocabulary of memories and imaginings.

Paula Drysdale Frazell - Nap Time, 2015
acrylic paint and fabric on canvas

Another recent favorite artist, and one who I think deserves - and will get - more attention as time goes by, is Paula Drysdale Frazell. Her mixed-media works are less related to cut-paper collage than they are to painting and, in a sense, quilting, as they combine paint, fabric, and printed paper (such as maps) in colorful and playful compositions that draw from childhood memories and other family stories. Her works are both charming and thought provoking, making for a tricky balancing act that she handles comfortably.

Three of the artists in this show are strictly collagists of the cut-and-paste variety, forming a core for this selection, and being easily appreciated by any of us who have ever tried that medium (myself included); they are Niki Haynes, Juan Hinojosa, and Michael Oatman, all of whom have appeared in other local shows recently, and whose work remains fresh and fun.

Juan Hinojosa - Lava, 2020
mixed media on panel with plastic,
soda can, wall paper, jewelry, ribbon

Hinojosa is easily the flashiest of this group, delving into consumer culture with abandon, embracing the brightest of colors and materials and, in the case of two works in this exhibition, utilizing metallic surfaces as a background. Eye-catching, to be sure, but for my taste a bit superficial.

Haynes, in contrast, hews to the mystical. Here, she presents a group of six small collages that coolly spook you with eyes that are watching from on high. Her technique is almost alarmingly simple, but it takes a lot of experience to get to simplicity and have it work so well, and Haynes has it.

Oatman throws us a curveball by installing a body of 26 comic-book collages he made in 1983, during the summer after his first year in college. I'd glimpsed these somewhere before, and was delighted to see them again, as they are witty, well crafted, and totally consistent with the work he is making today, nearly 40 years later. It takes courage to reveal early work, and in this instance I think it pays off.

The other artists in the show, which opened on Oct. 1 and will run through April 17, are Fern Apfel, Danny Goodwin, Henry Klimowicz, and Melinda McDaniel.

*Full disclosure: I recently joined the board of directors of the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library, which has some input into programming at the branches, including arts programming.

Michael Oatman - three examples from the collage series A Boy's History of the World in 26 Volumes (+1), 1983

photo by Michael Oatman

Short Take: Fence Select 21 at ACCR

A New Blank Tablet: January 20, 2021 12:00 PM EST, oil on cradled hardwood by Susan Hoffer, is the juror's top choice in Fence Select 21

I’ve been remiss in taking so long to get to this year’s Fence Select show at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, because it always features a wide swath of the region’s best and upcoming artists, and it ends this Saturday. But, as I am often forced to say, better late than never.

This year’s edition of the show was juried by Dan Cameron, a noted critic whose local presence seems to be increasing lately, and the 51 artists included are overall quite worthy. I regularly refer to this annual exhibition as “the other Regional,” and this year’s edition pretty much lives up to the title; seven of the included artists were also in the 2021 Mohawk-Hudson Regional, and several others have been in previous editions of that show.

William Fillmore's Red Warning #2;
in the background is a painting
by D. Colin

photo provided

My biggest quibble with the current edition of Fence is that only a few of the selected artists have more than one work in it (specifically, six artists have two each) and those works aren’t presented together in any case. But the gallery looks good with the show as installed, and there are very few clunkers in it (I’ll leave it for you to decide which they are).

Among the outstanding pieces to my eye and mind were the following:

• First-prize winner Susan Hoffer’s impressively self-actualizing studio view titled A New Blank Tablet: January 20, 2021 12:00 PM EST
• ORT Project Rockwell-Nelson’s Anthropocene Epoch: Eat the Rich, a super-sharp photograph that features a live baboon in an oval-framed still life arrangement
• Chris DeMarco’s lush, yet delicately colored photographs of a trailer park
• Karen Gerstenberger’s two coastal monotypes
• Jaime Courcelle’s oil on canvas It’s Not Goodbye
• Take Out, a timely and wry nod to Edward Hopper by Marion Reynolds, and
• Michael Oatman’s elegiac stack of unwatched 9/11 videotapes (shown below)

The exhibition’s other prize-winners are Royal Brown, for a futurist reinvention of found objects; Jeff Wigman, for a Bosch-like painting on wood panel, and William Fillmore, for a strikingly geometric steel sculpture.

The ACCR is open every day but Sunday; Fence Select 21 ends Saturday, Dec. 11.

A parallel play of Parallel Plays

Sculptures and drawings by Chris Duncan are part of a four-person show at the Schick
Art Gallery on the campus of Skidmore College

all photos provided

In an odd coincidence, two shows that are separated (joined?) by about 30 miles of Northway and overlapping in schedule have the same title: Parallel Play. The term refers to a behavior that young children at an early stage of development will engage in, where they do not interact, but play at the same activity side by side.

In the case of the first of these shows, which ends on Thursday (Dec. 2), Skidmore College’s Schick Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs has gathered four sculptors and is exhibiting works by each in both two and three dimensions – the parallel between those dimensions is what’s referenced here.

The other show, which continues through Dec. 18 at the Lake George Arts Project’s Courthouse Gallery in Lake George Village, is a solo by the Troy-based fiber artist Barbara Todd, who has mounted a multilayered installation of related works, exploring a parallel within her meticulous working process.

Wind, by Mary Neubauer
(DeWitt Godfrey's Ander in background)

Both shows are excellent examples of making the most of a small but high-quality exhibition space, and well worth a drive to see. We took that drive on Saturday, and it lifted our spirits amid sunny skies and frigid temperatures. I’ll discuss the Schick show first, as it ends so soon.

Co-curated by Schick staff and Skidmore sculpture professor John Galt, this Parallel Play features the work of Chris Duncan, DeWitt Godfrey, Coral Penelope Lambert, and Mary Neubauer in a slightly crowded installation of approximately 35 works covering a healthy variety of media. A few additional works are exhibited in a display case near the entrance to the Saisselin Art Center, where the gallery is housed, and another is on an outdoor patio, underscoring the sense of a space nearly bursting its seams.

As with our exemplary toddlers, these four artists play nicely together, each pursuing strong directions while balancing into a whole that, for me, elevates an awareness of materials and processes. It’s not so common around here to see a showcase for sculpture and, though this work is mostly smaller in scale, the effect of three-dimensional objects, with their strong physical and tactile presence, is fully felt in this selection.

A DeWitt Godfrey drawing

The show’s premise, which places each artist’s two-dimensional works in juxtaposition with the 3-D ones is also effective. Three of the four include drawings (almost always the first building block of a sculptor’s ideas), while one features photographs. This last, Neubauer, derives her forms from massive weather-related databases, which could have been translated as well into graphic representations that may have felt like sketches, but as color photographs they come across more like finished works in their own right. Her sculptures firmly occupy the space around them, bulky, beautifully patinated, and displayed on custom pedestals.

Duncan, a sculpture professor at Union College, presents a total of 13 works here, revealing an artist in full command of his medium, whether paint on paper or anything you can crush or fold into a form and then embellish with color and texture. While Neubauer’s work clearly aims to discuss our changing climate, Duncan is content to express himself more obtusely, delivering emotional jabs with gloomy, calligraphic gestures and bright, shiny splashes of color.

Insipid Sun, by Coral Penelope Lambert

Godfrey is represented here by just two drawings and one steel sculpture, but they dominate one wall of the gallery and provide perhaps the strongest pairing of those two media in this show. His on-site installation entitled Ander evokes the natural growth pattern of a many-celled organism, while putting the viewer in touch with the straightforward process of cutting sheet steel into loops and then letting it rust. I always like an artist who can produce work that is both relatable and innovative, and Godfrey handily delivers on that promise.

I found Lambert’s work the most challenging in the show. She combines cast iron and welded steel with felt flocking, creating a contrast of the stereotypical masculine and feminine traits of hardness and softness. Her drawings are playful, even childlike, while her three sculptures shown here are as serious as military hardware. That said, rarely have I been so unable to resist touching a work of art in a gallery (generally a harsh no-no), in this case seduced by both color and texture.

A segment of Barbara Todd's installation at Lake George Arts Project

Barbara Todd has become a friend, but before I ever knew her, I was struck by her big, abstract quilts as seen in the Mohawk-Hudson Regional. Over the years, Todd has participated in other local group shows, but the current one at Lake George Arts Project is her first solo in recent memory, and it is a smash.

Combining miniature fabric-swatch sketches, medium-sized finished works of the same materials, and five larger quilts, her Parallel Play has been installed in three overlaying matrices of theme and variation that sing in vibrations of pure color.

Dragon Fried Fish, Albany, NY, January 12, 2014

At first glance, the casual viewer may not understand what Todd has going on here, and that's understandable - in all but a few of the pieces, there's nothing more to meet the eye than two juxtaposed rectangles of colored fabric, forming a perfect square on a background field of white. But Todd's persistence in this pursuit has a cumulative effect, as her tendency toward reds and yellows, greys and blues, builds into a secret but knowable language, like semaphore.

It could help to understand that every work (and there are several dozen, at least, shown here) is based on an actual experience, a sighting captured in a photograph that forms the starting point for the work. So what may appear to be simply a soft purple over a cool grey is also a specific time and place: Morning mist, Highway I 90 near Utica, October 8, 2016. And so on, and on.

In addition to the layers of private meaning in each linen piece, there are varying textures, weaves, and mixtures of thread that make up the colors, providing a lot more to reward close inspection than one might expect. Beyond that, Todd has developed some of the selected moments into larger quilts, made of luxurious wool fabric, which are warm and inviting, even while still having been built upon cool, color-theory bones. These five works are the stars of the show, but the overall installation glows brightest. See it if you can.

All Together Now at The Hyde, the Tang, etc.

Installation view of Summer Bomb Pop at The Hyde Collection; from top, left are

works by Myron Stout, Sarah Braman, Mindy Shapero, Robert Reed, and Steve Roden

Though summer is on the wane, a constellation of shows that began to emit from Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum in the spring will continue well into the fall, and so could nicely serve as a buffer to the inevitable end of our warmest season.

All Together Now is a wonderfully conceived project in which Tang curators, other art venues' curators, and Skidmore students collaborated to bring elements from the Tang's collection into other spaces, where they interact with related works from those museums' collections. It's my impression that this concept was birthed by the COVID-caused closure of the Tang to non-Skidmore viewers for more than a year (it reopened to the public on July 10th), and a desire to bring some of its holdings into the community during this shutdown. It also fostered some cool collaborations, and fed fuel to the fire of those students' educations, which is a core mission of the Tang.

The resulting eight exhibitions, six of which are still on view, cover a lot of ground, from sculptural wooden hat forms, to 19th-century photographs, to contemporary abstract paintings. Among the collaborating institutions are The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, Yaddo and The National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs, and the former Brookside Museum (now the Saratoga County History Center) in Ballston Spa. Two of the shows have closed - one at Saratoga Arts and one at the Tang; and two are not easily accessible - at Yaddo and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center; so I recently visited the four that remain, including one at the Tang that opened on July 10 (the prior one closed in June).

From left, works by Augustus Thompson, Bridget Riley,
Richmond Burton, and Man Ray are grouped in
Summer Bomb Pop

all Hyde photos by Arthur Evans

The grand tour, taken up with a culture-vulture friend riding shotgun, proved to be exhausting but awesome. We started at the northernmost point, where recent works of art from the Tang's holdings are blended with selections from the Hyde's Feibes & Schmitt collection of 20th-century abstraction in the museum's main gallery. (The Hyde has several other worthy shows also currently on view, but we'll focus on just this one for now.)

Summer Bomb Pop: Collections in Dialogue is rich in significant stand-alone works, or in tasty juxtapositions if you choose to view it that way, with a smattering of explanatory labels that delve into the history of some of the works and artists on view. Most of the labels are student efforts, but several are by prominent art critic Dan Cameron, and add worthwhile insights.

The show's title (taken from a 2008 painting by Chuck Webster that leads the installation) is a clear message that this should be fun - and it delivers. I was surprised after immersing myself in what seemed to be a great big show, that there are only 26 works in it, but many are both large and complex, and they powerfully command the spacious gallery with scarcely a false note.

Sarah Braman - Fall Friend

Introductory wall text states that Summer Bomb Pop intends to "stimulate compelling new conversations in American abstraction," which it has achieved by careful selection from both collections, resulting in a satisfying representation of well-known names (Man Ray, for example) and fresh discoveries (at least to me). Some of my favorites included Augustus Thompson's 2014 acrylic painting Untitled (Like a Kingsnake), Ellsworth Kelly's 1980 shaped oil painting Diagonal with Curve XII, Blue #611, and Sarah Braman's 2012 sculpture Fall Friend, which Cameron describes as "motivated by an urge to spruce up the visually drab ... Minimalist Art movement of the 1960s."

What struck me most about this show is that so many young artists today are continuing and expanding on the Modernist traditions of abstraction, even as postmodern art has long since dived into a maelstrom of other modes of expression, including video, performance, environmental art, and all manner of identity politics, along with anything else you can imagine. I had no idea minimalism and abstraction were still so alive and well, and I am delighted to find that they are, and playing so nicely at the Hyde with their estimable forebears.

Four Greens, Upper Manhattan Bay, 1957

Our next stop was the Tang itself, where we were greeted by a mind-boggling collection of well over 100 postcard collages by Ellsworth Kelly, all lovingly matted and framed in soft white. Grouped more or less chronologically (or thematically), and covering nearly 50 years of playful exploration by the artist, they are drawn from a total of 400 such works still held by Kelly's surviving spouse, Jack Shear, who has generously loaned them to the Tang.

Front Street, 1978

Simply entitled Ellsworth Kelly Postcards, this is one of the most exciting art shows I've seen in years. Not only are the images almost universally witty, visually sharp, accessible, and clearly related to Kelly's more "serious" art, they provide a window into the artist's process that few exhibitions do, which is quite a gift to contemplate.

All but a handful of the works on display retain the diminutive scale of a standard postcard (typically 3 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches), and most combine very few elements to create a powerful transformation of the mundane into the - dare I say? - transcendent. One is particularly struck by how precisely Kelly has again and again fitted two disparate elements into a cohesive whole. Simple? You try it!

Images des Antilles (Stephanie de Monaco) 1984

It may seem easy to play around with paper every day for fifty years or so but, I promise you, it's very hard work and, in my opinion, represents a triumph by the artist over the vexing problem of life itself. 

Walking through the Postcards show, I tried to imagine old Ellsworth toiling away at a little desk upstairs while everyone else was at the beach or drinking by the pool. He was a very soft-spoken guy (we met once, briefly), and modest, despite his wealth and success; these tiny creations mirror that personality.

I went away elated, and deeply impressed at Kelly's persistence. I will be going back to this one.

Working our way south, we next stopped in Saratoga Springs at the National Museum of Racing, a very expensively built and beautifully managed operation I'd never before visited (sorry, but my interest in horse racing is basically zero). We were there to view a small but significant installation of Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of animals in motion, part of the Jack Shear collection at the Tang, which were paired with three of the  Museum of Racing's horse paintings by Henry Stull.

Four photo sequences by Eadweard Muybridge are shown
with a painting by Henry Stull at the Museum of Racing

When Muybridge was commissioned by Leland Stanford in 1870 to use stop-action photography to prove that a galloping horse will have all four of its hooves off the ground at once, the expectation was that this would happen when the animal's legs were all extended in a great leap forward. Instead, the proof was achieved - but with the surprise result that the four hooves would only be off the ground while gathered under the horse's belly.

The concise installation at the Museum of Racing, entitled Muybridge and Motion, perfectly illustrates the impact of this revelation by showing a Stull painting from before 1870, in which a race horse is depicted with its four hooves extended, and two Stull paintings from after 1870, where the horses are depicted correctly with their hooves gathered underneath. All three paintings are prime examples of such art, and enjoyable to examine. While the Muybridge photographs on view do not include his original experiment, they do include a similar sequence, a nice smattering of other horse studies, a nifty sequence of fallow deer on the run, and a couple of grids that show the motion of common birds in flight (a pigeon and a red-tailed hawk).

A wooden hat form
made in New York City

Our final visit was to the Saratoga County History Center in Ballston Spa, where a very engaging display of hats and hat forms is spread onto shelves and in vitrines. The five wooden forms (also known as blocks) are from the Tang collection, while the 25 hats, covering an impressive range of styles from the newsboy cap to ladies' elegant bonnets, are from the History Center's collection.

A nice printed booklet accompanies the show, which is entitled The Social Lives of Hats, providing solid descriptions and well-founded historical notes, all of them researched and written by Skidmore students. I must comment on the hat forms as really cool objects, works of art in themselves, even if by accident. But I may be biased, as I happen to possess a couple of similar wooden forms my uncle rescued from the streets of Manhattan decades ago.

The shows I've reviewed remain open through the following dates (more details are here):

• Summer Bomb Pop at The Hyde, through Oct. 31
• The Social Lives of Hats at the SCHC, through Oct. 31
• Ellsworth Kelly Postcards at the Tang, through Nov. 28
• Muybridge & Motion at the Museum of Racing, through Jan. 2

An installer poses hats and hat forms at the Saratoga County History Center

Keith Haring at Fenimore Art Museum

Installation view of Keith Haring: Radiant Vision at the Fenimore Art Museum

photo provided

Keith Haring was born in 1958 (one month before me) and became a defining artist of his generation before he died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31. Keith Haring: Radiant Vision, on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown through Sept. 6 Oct. 11, tells the story of how that remarkable career happened, and explores what it meant. The exhibition uses a clever graphic timeline, wall text, and ample quotes from the artist to recount Haring's history, and features a broad and deep sampling of the artist's work (including more than 100 works from a private collection, and a very impressive gigantic etching from the Fenimore's collection).

A news release about the show states that Haring "was arguably the most accomplished and prominent American artist of the 1980s," a claim I can neither fully agree with nor effectively refute. As an exact contemporary of Haring's, I can only say that he never held a lot of interest for me, partly because of the very commercial nature of his work, and partly because, though incredibly successful, he didn't have the chance to reach his full potential as an artist.

Radiant Vision offers an excellent opportunity to see for yourself what you think about a young man whose contributions included helping to bring graffiti art and hip hop into the mainstream, extending the art-for-all populism of his good friend Andy Warhol, and combining art with activism, perhaps more successfully than anyone else, before or since. The latter two achievements are, to me, the more valuable, but all of it is astonishingly impressive for a person whose career lasted just 10 years.

Keith Haring is seen at an early exhibition
of his work at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York

photo by Allen Tannenbaum 1982

Haring was essentially a graphic designer whose pictures relied on super-simplified line drawings of iconic symbols to communicate primal messages, just as corporate logo designers strive to do. And he was incredibly good at it. He used pure primary and secondary colors, vivid unmixed paints and inks, big shapes, and empty backgrounds, along with words and symbols, to make exuberant, bold statements about life as he saw it.

As seen in this exhibition, Haring invented his own visual vocabulary - a crawling baby, angular barking dogs, leaping stick figures, etc. - and rode it to vast global dissemination. He also used these skills in eminently worthy campaigns against AIDS, apartheid, and drug abuse, work that is well documented here, and which shows how effective simple graphic art and youthful sincerity can be. 

However, there are a few outliers scattered here and there throughout the exhibition that hint at a much more subtle artist who may have been trying to emerge from behind the public Keith Haring. That artist worked looser, with less clearly defined boundaries, used thinner lines and more shading, and employed a less bright palette to evoke deeper meanings and messier emotions. Some of those works reminded me of Miro' and Picasso and, as I walked around the exhibition, I found that I liked that version of Keith Haring a lot better than the one we all already knew.

One of the best aspects of Radiant Vision is the way it demonstrates Haring's humility and humanity, through quotes on the wall, in which he repeatedly explains how much he wants art to be accessible to all, and through a charming TV show interview in which he asserts an almost selfless modesty, alongside a crystal clear vision. These were the things in the show that did the most to convince me of Haring's significance. Though it goes without saying, it's a terrible shame that he died so young. Despite his own almost superhuman optimism, I simply couldn't shake the sadness.

Checkerboard, polychrome assemblage 2020
by Laurene Krasny Brown

Also currently on view at the Fenimore are a pair of shows that opened a couple of weeks ago and will remain there through Dec 31. Toying with the World: Works by Laurene Krasny Brown and 

Believe In Yourself: What We Learned From Arthur, which features the work of illustrator Marc Brown, stand alone in separate galleries but are closely linked, in that the two artists are a married couple.

Marc Brown is known to anybody with kids through the Arthur books and TV series, and the exhibition does a fine job of sharing the process involved in creating those products. Brown is an absolutely first-rate illustrator and, like any successful commercial artist, he clearly works his tail off. It was great fun to see the thumbnail sketches and story boards that lead to a finished book, but even better to see the exquisitely detailed paintings that are so easily taken for granted once they're on the printed page.

Laurene Krasny Brown is a much more interior artist, working with modest materials to pursue an almost mystical personal vision built around the concept of games. Where I was expecting stuff more childlike, instead I found a persistent exploration of geometric and architectural themes, characterized by a soft palette of early-American colors in paper and gouache. Brown's playfulness was apparent, but tempered by the same seriousness that I've observed in certain active toddlers.

Both shows are well worth spending some time with. By the way, admission to the Fenimore is free for those 19 and under for the duration of these exhibitions - so feel free to bring the kids.

A painting by Marc Brown from Wild About Books

Spiritual Roots: Wendy Ide Williams at Laffer Gallery

Night Blooming Riot - mixed media on paper 2019

It's been quite a while since the painter Wendy Ide Williams has been the subject of a solo exhibition, and her current tour de force at The Laffer Gallery in Schuylerville, entitled Spiritual Roots, shows just how overdue this event is.

I've been following Williams' career since the late 1970s, when we were both art students in Providence, R.I., and she was already pretty good back then - but I can easily say that she just keeps getting better. The selection of 48 paintings on paper or canvas currently at Laffer presents an artist absolutely on fire.

Bathed in Deep Water, mixed media on paper 2019

More than half the show consists of a grid of same-sized small works on paper, all of which are quickly made drawings in ink and watercolor from the last couple of years. This display alone would be worthy of a show, as it eloquently delineates the complex and heartfelt process of daily exploration that is the backbone of Williams' process. In contrast to the larger works on paper and the much more layered acrylic paintings on canvas that make up the rest of the show, these pieces have a lightness and a more visibly direct connection to nature that reveals an essential quality of Williams' otherwise persistently abstract imagery.

Flowers, mixed media on paper 2018

That tension between the abstract and the representational is at the core of Williams' painting, such that the generally non-narrative canvases read as pure shape and color, yet within them there is always a recognizable presence of natural forms, ranging from plants and paramecia to birds and (if you let your imagination go with hers) even humans. These subjects, however, are hidden in a network of patterns, chains, cells, stripes, and dots, often distributed almost evenly over the picture plane and, always, in a riot of vivid colors.

One of Williams' tricks is to cast the majority of her compositions in a vertical format, adding some square canvases to a mix that includes very few horizontals. This is one way of avoiding the confines of landscape while, in fact, often depicting natural subjects. Williams also increasingly employs intense color combinations, sometimes so busily covering the painting surface that there's no relief, but also regularly providing restful zones of white or black.

Unburdening, acrylic on canvas 2021

Some of the most recent pieces in this show veer toward a darkness that I found myself very drawn to, and in them the black areas serve to make the other colors look even richer to the eye (a technique I first observed in paintings by Matisse and Picasso). These more heavily worked paintings are among the best in the show, and the best I've seen Williams make. They show not only skill and vision, but aggressive and persistent technique that dares to take chances by going beyond the first or second solution to a problem. It's harder work - and more dangerous - than most non-painters would ever know.

In the Jewelry Box, mixed media on paper 2019

Perhaps best of all, in a certain sense, is that these paintings are selling like crazy. Gallery director Erik Laffer told me on a recent visit that it may be the most successful show commercially that he's ever had, something really striking to consider given the fact that the paintings are non-representational and not at all purely decorative. Maybe that's a sign - could it be that well over a year of living with a terrifying pandemic has caused art buyers to dig deeper? One can hope.

In any case, it's a very healthy sign for both Laffer and Williams that art lovers are lining up for challenging work from a regional favorite. Without a doubt, she has earned it.

Spiritual Roots will remain on view through Aug. 22; The Laffer Gallery's hours are from noon to 5 p.m., Thursday to Sunday, or by appointment.

Covid Gift (Previous a Caterpillar), acrylic on canvas 2021

Nikolai Astrup at The Clark

Nikolai Astrup, A Clear Night in June, 1905–07, oil on canvas: That Nordic glow

This year, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., has taken a different tack with its big summer show. Rather than feature a blockbuster on the level of Renoir (2019), Van Gogh (2015) or Turner (2003), the region’s most venerable museum has mounted the first North American show ever of a little-known early-20th-century Norwegian painter named Nikolai Astrup.

Organized in collaboration with Norway’s KODE Art Museums, and curated by British art historian MaryAnne Stevens, Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway aims to convince its audience that Edvard Munch had an unjustly overlooked contemporary who – perhaps - should be regarded as his equal. It’s an intriguing and challenging argument to engage, and one that, in all honesty, can’t be concluded – but, in the process, we are given a strong show that is without a doubt well worth seeing.

The Parsonage, n.d, oil on canvas

I am delighted by the irony that, in this era of unrelenting wokeness in the arts, a leading museum is willing to stake its reputation on a dead, white, heterosexual, male painter. What nerve! What verve! What fun. Well, it could be fun, if Astrup weren’t so generally gloomy. But how can you blame him? After all, he lived in rural Norway, the son of a parson, sickly from an impoverished childhood, underappreciated.

Gloomy – yet glowing. Despite his isolated circumstances and shortened lifespan (he died in 1928 at the age of 47), Astrup burned with a passion for his chosen subjects, the Norwegian landscape primary among them - its particular light, its plants, its folk traditions, its rustic buildings, and its people. This passion led Astrup to work feverishly, not just in paint, but also extensively in Japanese-style woodblock printing (ukiyo-e), which he executed extremely well, whether in multiple colors or in monochrome.

Bird on a Stone, woodblock print
with hand coloring c. 1905–14

Fortunately, a significant portion of the expertly laid-out exhibition is devoted to the prints, including several examples of the original blocks, themselves alone worth the price of admission. But it is the paintings that dominate and best tell the story of a man in love with his rural existence and an ancient culture. This is expressed above all in the night paintings, which capture the peculiar half-light of the extreme North in summer and the opportunistic plants that explode in its short growing season.

We learn from the concise wall text that Astrup was an enthusiastic horticulturalist, and we see evidence of that in the lovingly rendered trees, bushes, and flowers that pervade his works. No shade of green escaped his searching eye, but he also exercised plenty of artistic license in his renderings, in one case featuring identical rhubarb plants in two entirely different landscape views.

Rhubarb, 1911–21, oil on canvas

We also learn that, mid-career, Astrup weathered a crisis in the form of negative criticism of his work in a Berlin exhibition, which caused him to rethink his approach and strive to modernize it. I can imagine that the comments attacked two weaknesses in his work, one of which would be equally derided today, and that is sentimentality. The other (and I’m just guessing) could have been his awkward handling of human subjects – if he’d given them half the life force he gave his plants, many of these paintings would be far better.

In any case, the later work is indeed stronger overall, as is particularly evidenced in repeated depictions of a Midsummer Eve bonfire ritual that Astrup recalls from his youth, when his strict parents forbid him to participate, as they considered it pagan. Several of these paintings and prints are presented in the final gallery of the exhibition, making a clear concluding statement about Astrup’s life, values, and skills as an artist.

Midsummer Eve Bonfire, before 1916, oil on canvas

While I’m not a huge fan of folklore, I enjoyed immersing myself in Astrup’s personal celebration of it, especially as he worked and reworked themes in paint and prints over many iterations. But I responded more viscerally, and with great pleasure, to his formal concerns, especially where color takes on its own life in certain paintings, and where otherworldly light emanates from his subjects.

This is most apparent in some of the landscapes painted at night, and in a couple of still lives made late in Astrup’s career in the interior of his home. For me, though the subject is quotidian, private, and momentary, the painter’s approach to it has taken it beyond those limits to the universal and the eternal. Perhaps, had he lived longer, Astrup would have followed this path to a place where the question of a revival would be moot.

But, whether he was truly a great modern painter, or merely a talented also-ran, Astrup’s contribution is significant enough to be worthy of the showcase he’s now receiving at the Clark and beyond.

Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway will remain on view in the special exhibition galleries of the Clark Center through Sept. 19; from October to May, it will travel to museums in Norway and Sweden.

Nikolai Astrup, Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand, 1926–27
oil on canvas

Two additional exhibitions currently on view at The Clark are also of great interest. Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne: Nature Transformed is an intriguing collection of Surrealist sculptural works by a non-collaborating French couple who each innovated with materials to create striking visions inspired by nature. It will remain on view through Oct. 31 in a glass-enclosed gallery on the ground floor of the Clark Center that also affords views of several pieces by the Lalannes that are installed outdoors.

Erin Shirreff, Four-Color Café Terrace (Caro, –––––,
Moorhouse, Matisse) 2019, dye sublimation prints
on aluminum and archival pigment print

In the café area downstairs in the Clark Center, and in the nearby Manton Research Center, are several large works by Erin Shirreff, a Canadian multimedia artist who combines sculpture and photography in unique ways. While her single long video stream and simplified photographic constructions are built with layers of references from other sources, they remain fresh, not derivative. Indeed, Shirreff's elegant abstractions are successful postmodern transformations and well worth spending some time with. The yearlong installation, entitled Erin Shirreff: Remainders, runs through Jan. 2.

Finally, Dürer & After, a new exhibition drawn from the Clark’s extensive holdings, is slated to open tomorrow (July 17) and remain on view through Oct. 3 in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper.