Go out and see a movie - Please!

Constant companion and I caught a 4 p.m. matinee of the latest Pedro Almodóvar film yesterday at Spectrum 8 Theatres in Albany - and got a private showing, as no one else was there. Admittedly, when the mercury hits single digits, it takes fortitude to leave the house, but we love movies and enjoy seeing them the old-fashioned way, so we bundled up and headed out.

Parallel Mothers is a great movie, by the way, with plot twists, first-rate acting, a deeply felt perspective on the legacy of conflict, and the wonderful, colorful Spanish settings that Almodóvar always delivers. But we left the theater feeling a bit depressed by the experience. And it didn't help to see from the street that the drinks establishment next door was chock full of patrons.

With everyone streaming at home from a hundred platforms, spooked by the Omicron variant, and just plain self-absorbed, it's hard to have much hope for the future of the small movie theaters that dependably screen the sort of movies we love: independent, foreign, plot-driven, devoid of car chases and explosions.

I've chosen to have none of the home-based means by which the majority of us now enjoy films. No cable, no Netflix, no Amazon Prime - just antenna-fed TV and DVDs from the library, augmented by online rentals from Kino Lorber, a foreign-film distributor that fills the gaps left by the Spectrum. That leaves plenty of money in the budget to pay for tickets.

Currently, the Spectrum (an eight-screener on a main thoroughfare in the city) is showing several new releases that will contend for Oscars, including Licorice Pizza, Drive My Car, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Nightmare Alley. I hope to see all of those before they leave the big screen, and will make an extra effort to do so. 

Going out to a movie still fills me with anticipation, freshens my step, and then fulfils that latent desire to be enveloped in the dark, alone or with friends, wrapped up in a story, with brilliant images, resonant sounds, and anonymous fellow theatergoers who sometimes have a word or two of comment during the credits.

I used to regularly run into friends at the Spectrum, and even made a new friend on occasion as we paused in the lobby to share our responses to a good film. Now, it's usually just the staff, who somehow still have jobs, but these days clearly seem to have not enough to do.

The Spectrum is part of a national chain (Landmark), which has theaters all over the United States, most of them in far larger markets than ours. I suppose those venues are making enough money to help keep this one open. But it's not something I would want to count on for long. 

So, please, if you value the presence of a great independent movie theater in your region, and wouldn't want to see it close, get up off the couch, grab a coat and the keys, and go support it. You'll be glad you did.

Note: I'm in Albany, so the Spectrum on Delaware Avenue is my go-to cinema - but there are several other small, independent movie theaters in the Capital Region that equally deserve your support, including the Criterion in Saratoga Springs and the Movieland 6 in Schenectady, both of which are owned by Bow Tie Cinemas, a national chain with 38 venues - coincidentally, the same number as Landmark.

Catch these while you can ...

What better way to start the new year than to catch up with an art show or two that you meant to see but got too busy to get to during the holidays.

There are a few good choices in the region that will end soon, including a great opportunity to take advantage of free admission at a world-renowned museum.

Return 2 Earth 2017, mixed media
by Alisa Sikellianos-Carter

First up, in order of ending date, would be the Annual Members Show at Saratoga Arts in Saratoga Springs, set to close on Jan. 8, closely followed by the annual Upstate Artists show at The Laffer Gallery in Schuylerville, which ends on Jan. 9. Both include a large cross-section of regional artists and are located not too far apart, providing a good opportunity to double up.

Two shows that will end on Jan. 14 also feature a great many regional artists: Gallery Mixtape, Vol. 1 at Collectiveffort in Troy, where a selection of BIPOC artists are showcased, and the Annual Members' Show at Albany Center Gallery. Well over 100 artists (myself among them) present one piece each at ACG, making for a super-eclectic viewing experience that is always popular with viewers.

An example of 20th-century Japanese
printmaking at The Clark

A solo show by one of the region's outstanding mid-career artists, Alisa Sikellianos-Carter, will re-open on Jan. 9 and run through Jan. 16 at Union College's Mandeville Gallery in Schenectady. Sikellianos-Carter, who was one of the three jurors of the 2021 Mohawk-Hudson Regional, works in large-scale mixed media with a healthy and entertaining nod toward Afrofuturism.

Perhaps most intriguing, an exhibition of 20th-century Japanese prints from the museum's collection will remain on view at The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., through Jan. 30 - and admission to the museum will be free for the entire month. Competing Currents promises to be a highly pleasurable lesson on a unique corner of recent art history.

So, go forth and see some art! It will make a great beginning to your 2022.

Add note: This just in from the Albany Institute of History & Art - Fashionable Frocks of the 1920s, a fancy and fun romp among the clothing styles of the flapper era, has been extended through Jan. 9.

The Annual Members' Show at Albany Center Gallery is always a crowd-pleaser

photo by Daniel Joyce

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

Group shows galore

Installation view of Upstate Artists at The Laffer Gallery (photo provided)

It's the time of the year when galleries, both commercial and public, put on those crowd-pleasing shows with lots of artists and, often, smaller/more affordable work for gifting opportunities.

I'm aware of four such exhibitions currently on view at quality venues, as follows:

• Thompson Giroux Gallery, Chatham - The appropriately named En Masse 2019 includes small works by more than 80 artists, and will be up through Jan. 12. This intimate gallery shows a lot of top-notch work, and the list of artists included here reflects that. 
• Albany Center Gallery, Albany - Featuring one piece each by more than 140 artists, this annual members show was judged for prizes by Union College curator Julie Lohnes, and will be on view through Jan. 10. Full disclosure: I am one of the included members.
• Saratoga Arts, Saratoga Springs - The arts council's annual members show is up through Jan. 4, with an online descriptions that cites "close to 230 pieces of artwork ranging from painting, drawing, printmaking, functional art and sculpture displayed chromatically in salon style," which sounds to me like an overwhelming feast for the eyes.
• The Laffer Gallery, Schuylerville - Upstate Artists is an annual juried group show, this year selected by Jon Gernon, and on view through Jan. 12. With only 30 artists, it will be the least cluttered of this set, but still abundant enough.

Combined, these shows include more than 500 works by nearly as many artists (no doubt with some overlap), much of it at the highest level you'll find anywhere.

So, if you need a little break from the holiday rush and, especially, if you can use a gift of a work of art, check them out. Remember, supporting local artists and local art venues is a gift that truly keeps on giving.

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

Shows seen, not seen, and to be seen

Catskill Ledge - oil on panel by Tom Nelson

Is mid-March too late to be looking back at 2018? Well, probably, but I'm going to do it anyway.

I'm plagued by the many missed opportunities of the past year, which featured a vast array of worthy, challenging, and screwed-up art exhibitions in our region, and which I wish I had been able to see more of and write more about. So here's a bit of a recap; maybe it'll make up just a little for what didn't happen quite enough here on Get Visual during 2018.

Shows seen

Toward the end of 2018, I caught a few really strong shows in venues that don't necessarily get a lot of publicity around here. One of those was a rare treat in the form of a large collection of paintings by Tom Nelson at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, entitled From NY to LA: Landscapes of the Hudson Valley and California Desert. Nelson, who has worked full-time as an exhibit designer at the Albany Institute of History & Art for decades, has quietly maintained a strong art practice but hardly ever shows his work. This compendium of around 60 paintings and oil sketches delighted his many fans and reminded us that he is still one of the best landscape painters anywhere.

Ascent - digital photograph by George J Nicholson

Also in Troy, a fine exhibition of color photographs by George J Nicholson was hosted by the PhotoCenter, marking an impressive debut by a late-blooming artist making up for lost time. The 30-plus images in Taos Journey were all made in what Nicholson describes as "a seven-day reverie" in the high desert of New Mexico, in which he was inspired to abandon his original plan to shoot panoramic landscapes in favor of much more intimate images, all of them square. It worked. He will be one to watch.

I made an excursion to Saratoga Springs, where I checked out another intriguing photo project, this one by Jessica Mansmith, who received a Community Arts Grant to produce a body of work within the confines of a mysterious former military base called Norad Z-50. The resulting pictures, which were shown in the Saratoga Springs Train Station, are both haunting and colorfully lyrical.

Saratoga is also the home of Harrison Lobdell Gallery, which is co-owned and filled with paintings by Zack Lobdell, so I stopped there as well (for my first time) and took in the display of Lobdell's powerful abstract expressions, along with the super-high-tech furniture designs of his partner, Peter Harrison. It's a great space and Zack was a good host, making it well worth the visit.

Shows not seen

92,955,807.273mi. - lithograph by Kathryn Polk 

You know the song about regrets, and I definitely have a few about shows I missed in 2018. Top of the list is a six-person exhibition of contemporary printmakers at Skidmore College's Schick Art Gallery entitled Pressed. We have too few opportunities to see fine etchings, lithographs, etc., by current artists and I was really sad to miss this one. Speaking of printmaking, I was also dismayed to have missed the 2018 edition of the Screen Print Biennial at Sage College's Opalka Gallery - but at least there will be another one in two years - maybe I'll be less busy then.

Another deep regret is having failed to visit a two-exhibition display of work by Rockwell Kent at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls - one of paintings and one of prints (yet more prints!). Kent is a longtime favorite of mine, and shows like this don't come along every year. Among other great museum shows, I also wish I hadn't missed Women Artists in Paris 1850-1900 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown - but I hear there's a Berthe Morisot show on tour, currently at the Dallas Museum of Art, so there's always a chance to see the best artist from the Clark show there (or later this year in Paris - now, there's an idea!).

Rush - acrylic on linen on panel by Jenny Kemp

I was also sorry not to see what must have been a beautiful exhibition at Union College's Mandeville Gallery entitled Slow Grow of 18 recent paintings by Jenny Kemp, as she has been one of my favorite regional artists over the last several years. Meanwhile, at another first-rate college gallery, I missed three sculptors making a re-appearance at The College of Saint Rose to celebrate 10 years of the school's Esther Massry Gallery. And, at yet another outstanding academic venue, I managed to lose track of the UAlbany Art Museum's show entitled Younger Than Today: Photographs of Children (and sometimes their mothers) by Andy Warhol. The title alone recommended that one. Alas!

Shows to be seen

But all is not lost! There are some great shows out there that I (and you!) can still catch before they end. Here are a few examples:

Landmark at Albany International Airport Gallery through March 25. A ten-person show created in partnership with the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, this features contest-winning essays and poems along with the visual art.

Brian Cirmo: paintings at the Lake George Arts Project's Courthouse Gallery in Lake George Village through April 13. Another favorite local painter, at a favorite venue (and it's warm enough now to go up there without fear).

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City through April 23. Some critics are saying that this middle-aged Swedish woman invented abstract painting before all the famous boys, beginning in 1906 out of spiritualistic inspiration, and now rescued from obscurity to be called "beyond great" on ArtNet.com. I'm going to New York to see this unique show. Really!

The Sisters - oil on canvas by Berthe Morisot

Borrowed Light at the Tang Museum

Installation view of Borrowed Light: Selections from the Jack Shear Collection

photograph by Arthur Evans

The future looks pretty frightening at the moment, and personal legacies may seem like a shallow concern - but Jack Shear's personal collection of photographs, a huge selection of which is on view at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs through Aug. 14, is an absolutely dazzling legacy.

Edward Weston - Point Lobos, Calif. 1939

Shear, who is the executive director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, is also a photographer in his own right and has experience as a curator (this selection was co-curated by Shear and Tang Director Ian Berry). But this more-than-500-piece collection, donated in its entirety to the Tang last year, is what he will be remembered for, and with good reason.

Beginning in the 1840s with a vitrine full of Daguerreotypes, and continuing through the early 2000s, this compendium of the history of Western photography is a treasure trove that belongs at a teaching museum, where Berry and Shear contrived to place it at the fingertips of students, curators and scholars for the years to come. For now, we get to be those scholars, exploring about half the collection where it is gorgeously arrayed through the Tang's entire second floor galleries, in pristine rows and heady constellations of cleanly framed prints.

Andre Kertesz - Satiric Dancer 1926

An 18-page printed guide provides essential information, including a concise introduction, a glossary of technical terms (around a dozen different photographic processes are represented), and diagrams to help the visitor sort out what they are looking at. The gallery-hung pictures are numbered to correspond with lists in the guide, while those presented salon-style must be identified via the guide's charts; the decision to forgo wall labels was the right one, as they would have been too distracting among the more than 200 objects on display.

Aaron Siskind - Chicago 42 1952

This absence of text provided me with the opportunity to have a little adventure on my first walk through the show, as I tried to name as many of the photographers as I could from memory or guesswork, and I recommend that approach to anyone familiar enough with the medium to give it a go. My score wasn't spectacular - I got a few wrong and missed a few easy ones, not to mention simply not knowing a whole bunch - but it was a lot of fun. Shear has assembled a somewhat thematic tour of the greats, including many singular images we all know (e.g. Andre Kertesz's Satiric Dancer and Roger Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death), but the lesser known artists and images are almost equally fascinating and they add a welcome freshness to the selection.

Lewis Hine -  A Young German
Just Arrived at Ellis Island 1910

The show introduces itself, appropriately enough, with a large portrait of Shear by Robert Mapplethorpe, who is also represented here by a very early Polaroid self-portrait that could serve as a chapter header for the large portion of the exhibition dealing with sensuality and the human body. Other artists who have worked this turf and are presented here include George Platt Lynes, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Frank Eugene, Duane Michals, Peter Hujar and many more.

While the sexy stuff is the heart of the show, its soul is deeper - war, child labor, and other social issues are present, as are conceptual art and abstraction. Portraiture is also a theme here (not a huge interest for me personally, but of great significance in the medium of photography) and the landscape, both urban and natural, is another theme (and of greater personal import to me).

Emmett Gowin - Edith, Newtown, Pennsylvania 1974

Within each subgroup, there are stellar examples to enjoy, by everyone from Abbott, Arbus and Avedon to Warhol, Weems and Weston (both Edward and Brett). Overall, there is a dominance of black-and-white above color and an emphasis on certain periods (the '20s and '30s, the '60s and '70s - both very rich times for innovative photography), but that makes total sense for a personal collection. What is truly remarkable is that Shear was able to maintain strong, consistent interest in so many aspects of 165 years of the medium that, even staying within his personal range of tastes, this is still a very wide view of its history.

Nan Goldin - Pawel's Back, East Hampton 1996

One must take the show as a whole, both because of its survey approach and because of its five big floor-to-ceiling groupings (one of which contains 37 individual works); but it is easy to home in on individual favorites in the gallery-hung areas, and these contain a fabulous selection to choose from. For me, who grew up as a photographer in the '70s, it was candy-shop time - all my idols are on view, and I could never choose among them. All the more impressive, when I think that Shear not only had to choose, he had to pay for each choice with actual dollars, and decide each time just how to distribute those (presumably) limited funds.

Nice job, Jack. And, one more thing: Thanks for sharing.

Installation view of Borrowed Light  Note: the middle section has now been rehung with a different selection by Skidmore art history students researching the collection.

Photograph by Arthur Evans

Alma Thomas at Tang Teaching Museum

Installation view of Alma Thomas at the Tang Teaching Museum.

Photo by Arthur Evans

I wonder what Alma Thomas's public school art students thought when, in 1972, their teacher - retired and elderly - became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The idea of an artist being that important and, yet, having had to teach school all her life is far from unique, but this extreme case is certainly food for thought. Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs has, in a sense, rescued this delightful painter from obscurity a second time with a sharp, spacious presentation of about two decades' worth of her work (on view through June 5) in a show simply titled Alma Thomas.

Alma Thomas - Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses
acrylic on canvas 1969

The exhibition is certainly a revelation for me - I was only a schoolkid myself when her big show happened at the Whitney and, though I am a fan of the Washington Color School that Thomas was associated with (including such notables as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and Sam Gilliam) I had never heard of her. Featuring a few choice examples of full-on abstract expressionism at the start (and they are very beautiful), the show quickly moves from Thomas's earlier efforts to the late phase, when her talent found its full strength in a signature style of patchy vertical or horizontal stripes.

Along the way, she tried social commentary blended with abstraction, but made a decision that perfectly sums up the nature of this exhibition, described here in a quote:
Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man's inhumanity to man.

Alma Thomas - Apollo 12 "Splash Down"
acrylic and graphite on canvas 1970

No wonder she faded into obscurity! For what seems like half a century, the art world writ large has grimaced at the idea that a serious painter would give any thought at all to either beauty or happiness. But maybe the tables are turning at last. If so, and if this show is some evidence of a shift in that attitude, then I am relieved and grateful.

Like many abstract artists, Thomas was not avoiding subject matter per se - in fact, she still used representation in some of her work, as in her "Space" series celebrating the Apollo missions - rather, she was transforming her direct experiences into their essences via color and brushwork.

Alma Thomas - Cherry Blossom Symphony
acrylic on canvas 1973

This was most true in certain paintings about flowers or flowering trees. A later section of the show features two such paintings, each about 4½ feet by 6 feet, that shimmer with the vibrant sensation of taking a tree-ful of blossoms square in the face (as in the painting shown at left). Another, slightly earlier piece celebrates four distinct types of garden flower, not by representing their forms, but by dissecting their colors and organizing them into marching ranks (example near top of post at left).

At first, these dabbed stripe paintings were fairly flat but, as time went on, Thomas mastered a layering technique that led to far greater depth and complexity, even as her palette narrowed. By the end, she was making monochrome images, often with a great deal of white, frequently mosaic-like rather than structured into rows, and the freedom did her good.

Alma Thomas - Deep Red Roses Chant
acrylic on canvas 1972

While the show is sparse, there is a denser section that groups 25 smaller works on paper into a lovely constellation of framed pieces hung above two glass-topped cases holding a group of matted or unmatted sketches. These are all on loan from the collection of The Columbia Museum in Columbia, Georgia, which was Thomas's home town, and to which her family donated the sketchbooks. It is a treat to peer into such personal studies, and the opportunity should not be missed by artists who love to sketch - it will inspire them.

Kudos to the co-curators of Alma Thomas: Ian Berry, director of the Tang, and Lauren Haynes of The Studio Museum in Harlem. Though Thomas died in 1978, here she has been brought vividly back to life at a time when we sorely need as much beauty and happiness as we can find.

Installation view of Alma Thomas at the Tang Teaching Museum.

Photo by Arthur Evans