"Blind Faith" by Andrew Cooper

It's another odd-numbered year. So as summer begins to heat up, it must be time for another edition of the Biennial. The Kingston Sculpture Biennial, that is, not the bigger, flashier one you may have heard of that's taking place in Venice

Two years ago, I traveled to the press previews of the Venice Bienale first, and then several weeks later I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Kingston show, organized by guest curator Judy Pfaff.  It made for an interesting contrast, to say the least. Pfaff, herself an internationally acclaimed sculptor, included work by a number of her famous friends (Mark di Suvero and Sol LeWitt, to name two) alongside a strong field of work by more regionally based artists. The sculptures were displayed throughout the city, although mostly in or near the Broadway corridor.

It's hard to believe, but the Kingston Sculpture Biennial is celebrating its first decade this year, having started in 1995 as the brainchild of Hendrik Dijk and Dennis Connors, when the whole thing was installed in Block Park on the Rondout. Over the years, it has prospered as an institution, growing to include more and more work by an ever-widening circle of artists and physically reaching out into the city, becoming a significant public presence in various locations every other summer.

This growth has paralleled the phenomenal expansion of the Biennial's founding organization, the Art Society of Kingston (ASK). ASK has served as a major catalyst for the regional art scene, pioneering the coordination of First Saturday gallery openings (a model that has been replicated throughout the Hudson Valley), and even organizing an international exchange of exhibitions with a group of German artists, the Künstlerinnenverband Erftkreis/Köln (KEK), several of whose members are contributing works to this year's Biennial.

Sculptor Chrissy Glenn turning copper weaving

Each edition of the Biennial has had its own flavor, a product of interests of the curator in charge of organizing the show combined with a pool of work that's sent in by artists receiving the call for submissions. The cocurators this year are artists Steve Ladin and Judy Sigunick, and they've elected to bring the focus back to one of the trickier aspects of staging such an exhibition—art and its engagement with the public.

Toward this end, they've tried to work more closely with the Kingston city government, placing the art in clusters of two or three (or more) pieces in a number of public parks. While much of the art in the 2003 edition could be called avant-garde (or "advanced," or just plain abstract), Ladin tried to balance this year's program with work that was representational or figurative as well. "I've spoken with a number of people in the various neighborhoods," he told me, "to try to match the work with its ultimate location, in terms of what people might be open to having next door." A good example of this is Scott Makemson's fantasy animals, fabricated from welded-together metal machine parts and scrap that will take up residence outside the children's zoo in Forsyth Park.

Detail from an untitled proposal by Noah Raphael Grussgott

Sigunick is an experienced public sculptor in her own right (her works include the rhinoceros in Rosendale, and the enormous, tile-covered whale swimming through Waryas Park in Poughkeepsie), and she wanted to expand the circle of artists involved. Last year, she organized a sculpture exhibition in Newburgh, and invited a number of those artists to participate in Kingston this year as well. She worked on another project with a design class she teaches at SUNY New Paltz, producing a "door" decorated with storytelling relief panels, based on the example of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Gates of Paradise in Florence. The end product will be displayed in the Cornell Shops building on the riverfront, which this year provides the hub of the show. It provides an interior exhibition space suited for fragile or nonweatherproof work, and a map of the other Biennial sites throughout the city so that visitors can plan their next stop.

Given the curatorial premise that the art should be accessible to the public, and that, generally speaking, representational work is easier for people to relate to, an interesting snag came up midway through the process—at least one artist's submission was considered inappropriate by the city authorities, largely because of its human figurative content.

This brings full circle an issue that erupted over 25 years ago, when Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was unveiled. Conservatives declaimed its abstract, black granite V as some sort of dubious commentary on the war, and in the end, a traditional group of figures was added a few yards away from Lin's powerful monument.

At that time, Lin's abstract sculptural language was considered powerful, if in the wrong way, and challenging to the viewer. In 1989, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc was ripped out of the ground in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, after a politically charged fight that claimed the sculpture—a 110-foot-long, 12-foot-high wall of Cor-Ten steel—was a visual blight, a safety hazard, and destroyed the public's use of the plaza.

"Praying House" by Robert Hite

Fast-forward to 2005, with abstract works seeming quite comfortable in institutional contexts. Seeking to offend no one, much public art has adopted a benign air of safe disconnection from the people and from the environment in which it is located. Solid and confident, abstract forms easily win corporate and governmental contracts for public art, because it can express authority while remaining noncommittal about subject matter, a can of worms that "old-fashioned" representational work suddenly seems  positioned to open up again.

This is not so much an indictment of artists working in an abstract mode as it is of the play-it-safe officials and corporations that have found an ingenious way to evacuate real meaning from public art through mindless abstract repetition, leaving us all impoverished in the process.

Steve Ladin is acutely aware of the impossibility of pleasing everyone. "No matter what you put up, at some point there will be somebody who decides they don't like a particular piece," he told me. "All that I'm hoping to do is invite people to open up a little bit, to think about the art and the city a little bit differently, to be more broad-minded and tolerant of things that they maybe don't understand immediately."

Amen, brother. I hope the 2005 Biennial will stimulate some thought and meaningful discussion, but most of all, I hope it will help the cause of real artists making real work in the Hudson Valley an ongoing part of the public consciousness here.