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.

Go Home: Paul Akira Miyamoto at LGAP

Plank - oil on canvas 2021

A fine solo exhibition by the painter Paul Akira Miyamoto is on view through June 5 at the Lake George Arts Project's Courthouse Gallery.

Go Home presents a rare opportunity to immerse oneself in a world both real and imagined, within which Miyamoto has crafted a deeply personal tribute to his Japanese-American ancestors, while simultaneously presenting a critically important history lesson to those of us who would forget the unjust internment of generations of Americans during World War II by their own government.

Miyamoto is Sansei - third-generation Japanese-American - and his Issei grandparents, Nisei parents and older siblings lived for more than three years in the remote Poston concentration camp in Arizona, where they used their farming experience to domesticate infertile land, just as they had been forced to do when living free in California before the war.

Promise - oil on canvas 2021

Miyamoto's paintings reimagine these two scenarios as one serialized fever dream, sketching the sun-baked, clear-skied, surveilled family existence of a stoic, racially profiled people who did the best they could in nearly impossible conditions. The body of work gives voice to those people, but it is more celebration than lament. There's a quiet dignity in Miyamoto's figures, a subtle joy in his colors, and a simmering triumph in this gathering of paintings.

Miyamoto's project actually began long ago, but the majority of works in this show were made in the past year - a time in our nation's history that, unfortunately, could hold a mirror up to those terrible times and see itself fairly clearly. In addition to exploring his personal history, the artist seeks to remind us that we are in danger, even now, of such injustice being perpetrated again on American citizens if we aren't vigilant.

Shoulder - oil on canvas 2021

Along with the 14 paintings on view (ranging in size from 24"x30" to 48"x60"), there is a small selection of framed ink drawings on paper, displayed in a newly dedicated side gallery that the Arts Project has made nice use of for this show. These pieces are both more spontaneous and more specifically detailed than the paintings, featuring delicate monochrome washes of ink and tight pen renderings of camp buildings (one is shown at the bottom of this post). Made in 2018, the drawings seem like a prelude to the paintings, but stand alone as well.

Additionally, Miyamoto has created a site-specific installation in the main gallery, which is a minimalist reconstruction in tar paper and wood of a camp-type building. Stark, black, geometric, it balances the colorful paintings rather than dominating them.

Though I'm emphasizing content here, I want to point out that some of the formal and technical qualities of Miyamoto's painting are quite outstanding, with strict control of form, color, composition and, in particular, soft brushwork that makes them perhaps surprisingly sensual and seductive. His human forms are generalized, suggestive rather than specific, but crafted in such a way that their gestures speak clearly.

At a recent viewing, I noticed that several of the paintings had been sold to private collectors. This is wonderful, of course, but I hope that perhaps some of them will also end up in a museum somewhere. They're that good, and that important. Try to see the show in person if you can.

Camp #8 - ink on paper 2018

In Memoriam: Joel Chadabe

Joel Chadabe performs in the 1970s, using a very early PC as part of his equipment

On May 2, my dear friend Joel Chadabe died at home in Albany at the age of 82. Joel was a groundbreaking electronic musician and composer who taught for many years at the University at Albany, Bennington College and, more recently, New York University.

I first met Joel in 1987, when we each were renting studio space in a renovated factory in Albany's West Hill neighborhood, and we soon embarked on a friendship that featured many facets: Technical support, creative discussions and collaborations, countless homecooked meals, and an extended series of annual New Year's Eve and Fourth of July parties at the home he shared with Françoise and Benjamin (wife and son - for more detail, see the Times Union obituary from May 9, and the New York Times obituary, which came out on May 26).

Those parties always featured a core group of the Chadabes' friends, many of them associated with UAlbany, but also often included visitors from afar. It wasn't unusual for several languages to be spoken in those evenings, and for subjects from dance choreography to theoretical physics espoused upon by actual experts. The evenings inevitably concluded with Joel at the piano and those bold enough singing songs both familiar and exotic. It was an experience of a time nearly lost to my generation, when friendship, creativity, and love of life seemed enough to conquer the world.

Throughout, Joel worked, shuttling back and forth from college to college and from Albany to New York City, where he always had some big project going on, whether a concert series, publishing venture, or recording studio. In 1997, he published an unassuming but seminal paperback book on the history of electronic music, Electric Sound, which I enjoyed immensely, despite my nearly nonexistent musical education. Joel loved sharing his knowledge and, especially, his enthusiasm for everything creative, and that attitude shone throughout the book.

In later years, Joel and I saw less of each other. He was often in New York, the old New Year's crowd was diminishing, so the parties ended, and I got busy with my own working life away from the arts. But the connection remained, and the sadness I feel from his premature departure is acute.

Joel Chadabe was truly one of a kind, a generous soul full of childlike joy, and he will be greatly missed. May he rest in peace.

Some things never change: A recent photo of Chadabe at work with a MacBook.

The Best Films of 2020

Luca Marinelli portrays the title character in Pietro Marcello's brilliant Martin Eden.

There are a lot of ways to be confused about the past year in movies. First, just seeing a film in a theater was impossible for much of the year. Then, with massively delayed releases, there's the question of whether a given movie counts as being from 2020 or not. Finally, there's the whole streaming thing - not that I really care what the source of a great film is, or what the Academy has to say about it, but there is still that old divide between cinema and TV ... never to be the same after Netflix, Amazon, et al.

So I will construct the following list with the knowledge that a few of the films are considered to be 2019 releases, but never made it to a local theater, and seem to have been left stranded in terms of Oscar consideration, whether last year or this year.

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins star in The Father

As for me, despite the extraordinary challenges of 2020, and my own stubborn resistance to cable TV and all other subscription services, I managed to see a lot of great movies in the last year (five of the eight Best Picture nominees among them). This included actually going to the theater (an excellent option as venues have adopted safety guidelines and more people are vaccinated every day); paying for the occasional one-time stream at home; watching with trusted friends who have those monthly subscriptions; and borrowing DVDs from the library (due to the pandemic, some films that would otherwise have been screened at local theaters ended up being available on DVD first).

The following list is mostly non-hierarchical, and will include movies everyone has heard of as well as some more obscure titles. In the end, it turns out there were a lot of really good movies made or released in the last year or so, from all over the world. It will be interesting to see if that trend can continue, as I think it's safe to assume production schedules were completely whacked out for most of 2020 - and that the movie fare of 2021 may suffer for it. Let's hope not, but let's also celebrate the great ones we've got now.

• Martin Eden - One of those 2019/2020 crossovers, this Italian-language film became my top pick early on, and stayed there with little serious competition for a long time. Adapted from a 1909 Jack London novel to a non-specific time in 20th-century Naples, Martin Eden tells a story of the class struggle from a very personal perspective, with superb acting by the very charismatic Luca Marinelli. It garnered a lot of praise at Cannes and elsewhere, but nothing from Oscar. Paying $12 to view it at home seemed like a great bargain.
  
• Beanpole - The other nearly perfect film I saw last year that crossed over from 2019 and also was ignored by Oscar, Beanpole ("Dylda" in Russian) reveals the history of post-WWII Russia that we never learned in school, seen from the viewpoint of a shell-shocked young woman and her beloved, a traumatized female soldier. Every actor in this film is outstanding - but, even more impressive, the flawless direction and gorgeous cinematography are the product of a team of twenty-somethings. Amazing!
• Judas and the Black Messiah - One of my two top picks among the Best Picture nominees, this is a beautifully crafted history lesson that resonates with our current turbulent times. Ensemble acting so good, they couldn't find a lead actor to nominate, though Daniel Kaluuya could have been it.
• The Father - My other favorite among the Bests, powered by a masterful performance on the part of Anthony Hopkins, and equally great support from Olivia Colman. The film puts you inside the mind of a man with dementia, while painting a touchingly deep portrait of the life he lived before his decline. Both actors would be well served if they were to win a statuette tonight. [Note: Hopkins won.]
• Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always - A perfect example of why I love indie films: Character-driven, non-name actors who bring the goods, original story, loose ends. It's a lot harder than you may think to make a movie about an economically and socially challenged teen seeking an abortion without sliding into melodrama or sentimentality, but Never, Sometimes makes it look like a breeze. Writer-director Eliza Hittman is worthy of Oscar attention, but hasn't gotten it - yet.

• 

  Orion Lee and John Magaro star in First Cow

  First Cow - An elegiac step back in time, this is the kind of film you need to allow to take its time, and then it will work its magic on you. Set in the early boom Northwest, it provides a most unusual take on the buddy movie, slowly, quietly, sadly, and beautifully. Underappreciated director Kelly Reichart deserves more notice than she's getting for this one.
• Nomadland - Yes, it's a very good movie, and Frances McDormand is superb as always, as are the rest of the people who essentially play themselves throughout her character's odyssey. But it's also the most overrated film of the year. Try checking out the template (I've no doubt Chloe Zhao has done so multiple times), which I did by sheer coincidence on DVD the same week I caught Nomadland in the theater. That would be Agnes Varda's 1985 film Vagabond. So similar, but much better.
• Minari - The second-most overrated film of the year. Yes, it's still very good, with excellent acting ... but it's also marred by a grotesque, unnecessary, stereotyped magical Christian character, as well as just being kinda small. Films like this can - and in the right hands do - tell the intimate story while evoking the grand; but Minari never transcends its subjects' limited lives.

• 

  Sasha Baron Cohen leads the ensemble in Chicago 7

  The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Brilliant ensemble acting takes this history lesson to another level. It's a perfect companion piece to Judas (and possibly to One Night in Miami as well), but stands on its own as it evokes eerie parallels to our current times. Though I lived through the Viet Nam era, I was too young to know many of the details of these events in which our justice system was manipulated by the government to demonize black people and anyone who would challenge the status quo. Sound familiar? 
• My Octopus Teacher - Nominated Winner for Best Documentary Feature, this is so much more than a nature film, as it shares a deeply personal human story enrobed in an octopus's brief, luminous lifespan. Indeed, it is a relationship movie. You'll never see seafood the same way again.
• The Life Ahead ("La vita davanti a se" in Italian) - Sophia Loren directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. Need I say more? Actually received an Oscar nomination for best original song (which I don't recall) but had a lot more going for it than that. Loren pulls off a great performance in a difficult role.

As in prior years, there are films that I haven't seen yet, but intend to, that possibly would have made this list. They include Sound of Metal, One Night in Miami, and Mank (and, perhaps, Promising Young Woman). But, first, I've got to catch up with tonight's film - a retro-futuristic Brazilian Western called Bacurau. Oscar will have to wait.

Ibrahima Gueye and Sophia Loren star in The Life Ahead

The 43rd Annual Photo Regional: Youth Spotlight

Ally DeRusso - father daughter dance

Publisher’s note: Get Visual has a longstanding policy of not reviewing student work; however, the annual Photography Regional is too important to leave out. My solution for covering this year’s youth-oriented Regional was to invite a highly qualified third party to take up the challenge. I am grateful that Timothy Cahill agreed to provide the following review. –D.B.

By Timothy Cahill

The Opalka Gallery has always been slightly restless around the Photography Regional. The annual gathering of the photographic tribe has become something of a stepchild exhibition, hosted by a number of venues, each of which gives the show its own spin. In 2003, then-Opalka director Jim Richard Wilson organized the Photo Regional as an invitational, transforming what had been an open-call, juried exhibition into a curated one for the first time.

Natalia Gillespie - Abundance

For this year’s iteration of the show, on view at Russell Sage Albany’s Opalka Gallery through April 24, current director Judie Gilmore announced a new innovation: an age restriction. The 43rd Photo Regional:  Showcase on Youth would be limited to artists between the ages of 16 and 26. This ran the risk of producing an exhibition that had the qualities of an end-of-semester display: studious and well-intentioned, derivative and artistically immature. It also offered an opportunity, in the words of the Opalka’s press release, “to celebrate our region’s young photographers and offer them an opportunity to show their work alongside their peers.”

For sure, there are aspects of the exhibition that are earnest and derivative. But, as juried by Khidr Joseph, Jayana LaFountaine, and Anna Schupak, the show does not feel at all unseasoned. In its freshness, intelligence, and diversity, this year’s Photo Regional is hugely satisfying.

I’ve taught photography to undergraduates, and most were, as young people must be, possessed by themselves and their familiar surroundings. This is death to a photographer. Writers are taught to write what they know, but photographers cannot be nearly so interior. They must immerse themselves in what they don’t know - the unknowable realm of otherness that is the visible world. What they discover there becomes the foundation of their art. 

Julia Larberg - Rainbow Self with One Leg Raised

This is an issue in the age of the curated self, social media and the ego-spectacle of the selfie. But, in the hands of a good explorer, even the self can be an undiscovered country, as it is in Julia Larberg’s sunny nude, Rainbow Self with One Leg Raised, or Maggie Lang’s COVID-laden Life Under Quarantine series. I don’t know if the person in Natalia Gillespie’s black-and-white Abundance is the photographer or not, but the field of daisies used as a backdrop wraps the figure in a glorious reverie halo. Jesse Asher Alsdorf, using still life in lieu of portraiture, offers a “discovery in self worth” in his text-and-photo triptych, Bruised Flowers.    

Often, though, when these young artists turn the camera on themselves, their interest is more persona than personal. Ally DeRusso enlists the 20th-century technology of the Polaroid instant camera for her set of five diptychs, casting herself in mini psychodramas narrated by enigmatic titles: smack you in the teeth, father daughter dance, and so on. This is the case too with Madison Scisci’s black-and-white video drama, The Release, in which she films herself in a dual role that leads either to reconciliation or liberation.

Mateo Guevara Lemeland - Neon Boneyard

The woman who Sebenele Ndlangamandla depicts in Float may or may not be the artist herself, but she is clearly playing the part of the goddess. Ndlangamandla’s portrait of a woman embraced by sky and water, gazing pensively out of the frame, is placed between nearly identical images of ripples on a lake or pool, as if she rose from the water there and disappeared again. Like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, this startling woman obviously hails from another realm.

All the photographers in this year’s Regional came of age during the dystopian regime of Donald Trump. In those years, either the past was being rewritten 1984-style by the president’s henchmen, or rendered devoid of any coherent narrative or meaning. Constant exposure to historical gaslighting might have turned these young artists ahistorical, but it hasn’t. If anything, they are the captives of history, of political divisiveness, systemic discrimination, environmental degradation. In response, documentary photography provides some of the show’s most compelling moments.

Catherine Rafferty - A Nation that Forgets

Some of the work is unsettlingly detached. Walker Bankson’s documentary portraits, like his Untitled (Miles Fighting), explore an unsettling banality in contemporary masculinity. The mordant anti-landscapes of John Bonetti (Fountain at the End of the Dam) and Anna Nuler (Ice Cream Castle) reveal the barrenness of the modern built environment. And Mateo Guevara Lemeland’s garishly surreal Relic and Neon Boneyard suggest that the world itself has somehow curdled in place.

Other documents are more visceral. Anna Schupak takes us into the middle of a protest in her Troy series. In a pair of images, Catherine Rafferty juxtaposes the overheated red-white-blue of a Trump rally with the same palette in more somber tones. Her A Nation that Forgets places the blue dress and sandal of a black woman against red paint thrown like blood on the base of a public monument, where the inscription warns, “A Nation That Forgets Its Past Has No Future.” The “white” of the image is represented visually by the paleness of the cement plinth, and conceptually in the photo’s implication of racism.

Rainer Turim - Tompkins Square Park

Inevitably, the artists engage with the natural world. In Rainer Turim’s Tompkins Square Park, a tree growing through a chain-link fence becomes a parable of humanity buckling under nature’s force. Conversely, Gennaro Vargas’ splendid Peruvian Mountains preserves a paradise of human labor in harmony with the earth.

I admit I can make no sense of the arbitrary nature of the exhibition’s 16-26 age range, except to muse, somewhat cynically, that the aim was to attract high schoolers to Sage’s art programs. As it turned out, there is no one under college age in the show, the average age being about 22. (The  only teenager is Xiaoxuan Lisa Li, whose tense, formal manipulations more than hold their own with the older exhibitors’ work.) 

Rather than the weird high-school-to-post-MFA age swing, why not a more traditional “under 30” show, a range that allows for a greater number of mature emerging artists? The three jurors, all of whom are under 26, have given a hybrid feel to the exhibition they organized. While a call for entries opened the show to all, one suspects some of the artists were hand-picked by the jurors from among their friends and colleagues. The final selection feels more curated than the typical juried exhibit. 

Xiaoxuan Lisa Li - Bat I

This hybrid quality is heightened by the inclusion of the jurors’ own work in the exhibit. This is a major departure from prior Regionals, in which the jurors functioned entirely as disinterested umpires, not player-coaches. The show is organized to mitigate the confusion this might cause, with the jurors’ work sequestered in the atrium of the Opalka Gallery, separate from the main body of the show. But it’s unclear how exactly to read this separation: is the juror’s showcase part of the Regional, or an adjunct exhibition?

These are serious questions but, ultimately, they should not detract from the Regional’s comprehensive virtues: its quality, its presentation, and above all its exhilarating diversity. In what has too often been an exhibit of aging white dudes, this year’s 37 artists and 76 artworks provide, in both surname and subject matter, a purposeful look across racial, gender, and geographic boundaries. Yet the jurors’ obvious attention to identity never overwhelms the individual artists’ voices.

Jahniah Kum - Resilience

It is especially thrilling to see the work of so many young black artists on view here: Tyler Ki-Re’s lushly extroverted Unchained; Jahniah Kum’s intimate domestic documents Marz and Resilience; the tender maternal portraits of Jayana LaFountaine’s Postpartum series.

Singularly impressive are the “portraits” of six black sitters in Khidr Joseph’s Make Afros Great Again series.

Joseph gives us the backs of their heads, emphasizing their hair styles, and it’s enough. From this, we get a smart and sensuous alt-MAGA manifesto about black people’s hair and its fraught history of political and social meaning. The centuries of this struggle cannot be separated from the work’s visual beauty. Nevertheless, at a certain point, I surrendered entirely to the artist’s retinal stimulations - the pleasure of the textures revealed by his studio lights, and their kinship to the eros of color, of hair, flesh, fabric, even the chromatic seamless backgrounds. The “anonymity” of the sitters yielded to their uniqueness. The last and highest diversity is the inviolable individual.

Timothy Cahill has reviewed art in the Capital Region since 1995. He has exhibited his photography in the Photo Regional and other group and solo exhibitions. His work is in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art.

Khidr Joseph - Make Afros Great Again