Lewis to give reading, tour of Lives of the Hudson

Tom Lewis, professor of English at Skidmore, will present a curator?s tour of Lives of the Hudson, the new exhibition at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 14.  Admission is free and open to the public.

His tour will be from a ?North Country? perspective, featuring logging tales and history of the acclaimed photographer Seneca Ray Stoddard, followed by excerpts from Lewis?s book The Hudson: A History, that evening.  The event, part of the Adirondack Center for Writing?s (ACW) Summer Program Series, is free and open to the public.

Lives of the Hudson, which opened in July at the Tang, is an interdisciplinary exhibition celebrating the river?s influence on art and history, and its impact on environment and society. The exhibition features a rich array of artworks and objects dating from the 19th century to the present organized to describe themes such as natural river, imagined river, human river, and working river. These 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) are 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.

Lewis co-organized the exhibition with Ian Berry, Malloy Curator of the museum. The book by Lewis, originally published in 2005 by Yale University Press, inspired the exhibition.

The ACW?s Summer Program Series features readings, lectures, and performances at various locations throughout the North Country during the month of August.