Tag: Hudson River School

Solo Shows

Lisa Sanditz’s provocative omissions

Contributed by Lawre Stone / Lisa Sanditz paints landscapes that explore collisions between industry and the natural world. She has also addressed manufacturing hubs, industrial farms, and junk-food factories. In her solo show “Missing Mountain” at Alexandre, Sanditz turns to the impact of climate change on the Catskill Mountains, and with good reason. In the summer of 2023, the jet stream carried smoke from fossil-fuel-driven Canadian wildfires into the Hudson River Valley, turning the sky a dusty gray, dimming the sun to a hazy orange disk, and impeding views with airborne particles. Sanditz’s consternation inspired the three paintings that anchor this exhibition.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Jim Sullivan’s slender epics

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / As the British Museum celebrates the 230-foot-long by 20-inch Bayeux Tapestry, Ki Smith Gallery features “Places That Never Were,” Jim Sullivan’s extremely narrow imaginary landscapes. Displayed as a continuous frieze separated by small breaks, Sullivan’s paintings resemble Chinese handscrolls: long, portable paintings produced since the Jin Dynasty in the fourth century. Though these were generally viewed one section at a time and accompanied by commentary and poetry, the antique Asian format resonates in Sullivan’s compositions, which join vignettes of air, land, and sea by avoiding linear seams. Trimmed down to dimensions such as 3 x 36 and 6 x 96 inches, the paintings heighten an emotional connection to nature by suggesting the slimmest glimpse through a crack beneath a door.

Continue Reading →
Gallery shows Upstate Art Weekend

Idyll and crisis at The Re Institute

Contributed by Lawre Stone / The Re Institute – a dairy barn built in the 1960s that Henry Klimowicz has repurposed as rustic art gallery – seems to arise sublimely out of nowhere, exuding the freedom and wonder of the open road. Presently installed on the ground floor is “Seven Women Chase Icebergs” – paintings, drawings, and works on paper by seven women convened by Brenda Zlamany for a residency at Pouch Cove in northern Newfoundland in spring 2025 to respond to the remote landscape. The thrill of yielding to an unknown environment permeates the exhibition.

Continue Reading →
Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist: Alice Pixley Young, October 12–17

Contributed by Sharon Butler / On October 12, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Alice Pixley Young. She hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Rust Belt and ancient fossil beds meet nuclear contamination sites. She creates installations that tease out ideas about the complex archaeology of the industrial landscape, uncovering stories of displacement, exploitation, and environmental degradation that have come to characterize twenty-first-century America.

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Amy Sherald’s American dreams

Contributed by Margaret McCann /Amy Sherald’s paintings of mostly ordinary and upright African Americans, in “American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum, transcend portraiture, vaulting to socio-political metaphor. Their evocative titles – drawn from Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and other cultural figures – suggest an array of personalities or experiences. But the exhibition title, from Elizabeth Alexander’s poem of the same title, unsettles our understanding of what both figures and viewers behold.

Continue Reading →