Lives of the Hudson celebrates river's many roles

July 10, 2009

This summer, as the nation celebrates the quadricentennial anniversary of Henry Hudson?s 1609 voyage up the river that bears his name, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore will present Lives of the Hudson, an interdisciplinary exhibition celebrating the river?s influence on art and history, and its impact on environment and society.

Lives of the Hudson will be on view at the Tang from July 18, 2009, to March 14, 2010. A rich array of artworks and objects dating from the 19th century to the present will be organized to describe themes such as natural river, imagined river, human river, and working river. These will include major works by Hudson River School painters and other 19th-century artists, shown alongside historical artifacts and objects of science and tourism. Thomas Cole?s Storm King of the Hudson (c. 1825) and Thomas Doughty?s View on the Hudson in Autumn (1850) will be on view with other important artworks loaned by institutions such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Everson Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the New-York Historical Society. Also included in the project are contemporary artworks by Bob Braine and Leslie Reed, Matthew Buckingham, Bradley Castellanos, Margaret Cogswell, Maxine Henryson, Peter Hutton, Yvonne Jacquette, Kysa Johnson, An-My Le, Michael Light, Annea Lockwood, Alan Michelson, and Jason Middlebrook.

?Lives of the Hudson is about the river itself,? said Ian Berry, Malloy Curator of the Tang. Berry co-organized the exhibition with Thomas S.W. Lewis, the Skidmore English professor whose 2005 book, The Hudson: A History, inspired Lives of the Hudson. Added Berry, ?This exhibition offers a great amount of information about the river but also asks many questions. We hope that viewers, after leaving the exhibition, will want to visit the river and think about its impact in the future.?

Stories tracing the river?s many ?lives? can be found throughout the exhibition in works by artists such as Margaret Cogswell and Annea Lockwood. Both use field recordings and interviews with people living along the river. Other artists, like Alan Michelson and Matthew Buckingham, tell alternative histories of the river through film. Stories will also be present in texts excerpted from the forthcoming exhibition catalogue and displayed on the walls and in cases throughout the gallery. Among the storytellers are critic and essayist Phillip Lopate; award-winning Harvard landscape historian John Stilgoe; art historian and 19th-century scholar Paul Hayes Tucker; and Skidmore faculty members Terence Diggory (English), Gregory Pfitzer (American Studies), Karen Kellogg (Environmental Studies), Mimi Hellman (Art History), and Rik Scarce (Sociology), among others.

Among the wealth of cultural artifacts and objects on view will be the eight-foot-wide wooden wheel from the great river-steamboat Mary Powell; a transferware platter commemorating General Lafayette?s triumphant 1824 visit to New York City; early 20th-century picture postcards; rarely seen watercolors by John Marin offering near-abstract views of the Hudson River; and dozens more.

For co-curator Lewis, Lives of the Hudson was a natural outgrowth not only of his cross-disciplinary history of the river but also of the scholarly instinct to ?always figure out who we are, and how we can shape the things that are part of our daily life and work. The Hudson is part of all of us, in a way,? Lewis adds. ?It is more than a river or a maritime highway. Its history changed the way we live and act. We don?t always know why, but in an exhibition like this one, we can peel back the layers of Hudson history and begin to figure out how.? Lives of the Hudson offers visitors the opportunity to discover the deeper dimensions of the river Lewis has described as ?a thread that runs through the fabric of four centuries of American civilization?its culture, its community, and its consciousness.? (Click here to listen to Lewis being interviewed by Vermont Public Radio.)

Public events accompanying the exhibition include the following:
5-6 p.m. Saturday, July 18??Writing the River: Readings and conversations featuring artists, writers, and poets who contributed to the exhibition?s catalogue. Moderated by Lewis, the event will take place in the museum?s Payne Presentation Room.

6-7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 18?The opening reception will celebrate all the Tang Museum?s summer shows: Lives of the Hudson and the related sound-art exhibition, Annea Lockwood: A Sound Map of the Hudson River. This latest in the Tang?s ?Elevator Music? series, Lockwood?s work will be audible in the Tang Museum elevator through March 14, 2010. Also on view this summer at the Tang: Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History (through Aug. 23); Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N. (through Aug. 30); and Amazement Park: Stan, Sara, and Johannes VanDerBeek (through April 25, 2010).

Noon?1 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 18?A curator?s tour of Lives of the Hudson
All events are free and open to the public; for more information, call the Tang Museum at 518-580-8080 or click here.

Lives of the Hudson is presented with major exhibition support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Tadahisa Kuroda Exhibition Fund, the Virginia Gooch Puzak ?44 Faculty Curatorship Endowment, and Friends of the Tang, with additional support from the Henry R. Luce Foundation and the Creative Thought Fund at Skidmore.

During the summer, the Tang Museum is open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.; and is closed Mondays and major holidays. For information about exhibitions and events, call the Tang Museum at 518-580-8080 or click here.