From Mark Hogancamp's return to Marwencol at One Mile Gallery to Tatana Kellner's introspective journey in "Sideways Glances" at Garrison Art Center, these 10 exhibits offer deep dives into a diverse set of artists producing top-notch work. Explore Caitlin MacBride's fusion of Shaker aesthetics and modern surrealism at Kinderhook Knitting Mill, or delve into Bobby Grossman's captivating lens on the downtown NYC scene in "Low Fidelity" at Time and Space Limited. With diverse themes like ecological traumas in "Burgers for Breakfast" at Turley Gallery and the post-industrial visions of "Even in Arcadia..." at Art Omi, the Hudson Valley's art scene is blooming this spring.
"Mark Hogancamp: Resilience" at One Mile Gallery
Mark Hogancamp and the miniature World War II-era Belgian village he built and photographed on the grounds next to his trailer on the Rondout Creek outside Kingston became something of a sensation after the release in 2010 of Marwencol, the award-winning documentary film titled after the name of Hogancamp’s fictional town. After a long hiatus caused by the pandemic, One Mile is hosting a show of his new photographs, “Mark Hogancamp: Resilience,” enabling fans to catch up on the latest going-ons at the one-sixth-scale town, from Nazi ambushes to seductive, all-female encounters. March 23-April 9.
Tatana Kellner's “Sideways Glances” at Garrison Art Center
Tatana Kellner, one of the cofounders of the Women’s Studio Workshop, retired six years ago and has since devoted herself full-time to painting. She prefers the texture of paper to stretched canvas. Though the pieces in “Sideways Glances” are pictorial, they begin abstractly. I ask Kellner what the first shapes are like. “Usually it’s a charcoal mark or a brushstroke, sometimes an irregular shape, or a found fragment from another piece that didn’t pan out,” she says.
Kellner has often made art in response to political issues, but such work “has an expiration date,” as she puts it. Though the pieces in “Sideway Glances” aren’t explicit polemics, they reflect social issues of the last several years—particularly the Black Lives Matter protests and the global pandemic. Through March 10.
Caitlin MacBride's "Palm to Poplar: Devotional Labor" at the Kinderhook Knitting Mill
In 2017, MacBride began researching Shaker material culture through the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her focus led her to create the current series on view in Kinderhook. MacBride considers her study of Shaker culture as vital to her knowledge of American art, most notably the Shaker impact on Modernism. “Learning about the Shakers helped fill in a gap I felt like I’d missed in art history,” she says.
MacBride’s exhibition at the Kinderhook Knitting Mill, "Palm to Poplar: Devotional Labor" offers a compelling peek at the core themes in Shaker aesthetics: pattern, isolation, tension, and piety. The imagined conversation happening between the aged Shaker objects in this show—most of them dating from the 1950s—and MacBride’s painterly reconsideration of these objects reveals a surrealist-cum-realist atmosphere, one that infuses her work with a strong psychological edge. Through April 29.
Bobby Grossman's "Low Fidelity" at Time and Space Limited
The New Gallery has curated a show of Bobby Grossman's photos from the downtown New York City scene in the late 1970s, "Low Fidelity." Having befriended David Byrne and Chris Frantz at Rhode Island School of Design, Grossman was on the scene from the very beginning. “Chris mailed me the CBS Talking Heads demo while I was still in school, hoping they could play an early gig in 1976. They invited me down to CBGB for the first shows with Television, Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones,” he says.
He was the house photographer for Glenn O’Brien’s cult public-access variety show “TV Party.” Other subjects he fixed his lens upon include Blondie, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Robert Fripp, Johnny Thunders, and fellow Chelsea Hotel resident Sid Vicious. He also captured Jean-Michel Basquiat and William S. Burroughs. March 9-31.
"Burgers for Breakfast" and "you think, you know" at Turley Gallery
Vacillating between cartoony visions of ecological traumas, hazy painterly incarnations, and graphically nostalgic vignettes, two concurrent exhibitions featuring three artists on view at Turley Gallery in Hudson invoke realms of grotesque sweetness balanced by poesy. In the main space, "you think, you know" featuring paintings by Daniel Herwitt and Kevin Ford is a bipolar psychological workout of sorts while "Burgers for Breakfast" includes elegant, stylized works on paper by Mark Joshua Epstein.
Together these three artists offer vivid “worlds within worlds within worlds” that provide a stimulating rendezvous with joyful utopias gone wrong (Herwitt), hallucinatory dreamscapes (Ford), and nostalgic graphic treats to nourish one’s artistic soul (Epstein). The combination is that "you think, you know" what’s on the menu, but it’s "Burgers for Breakfast" in this topsy-turvy land of silly, soupy, and sexy make-believe. Through March 17.
"Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna" at the Lehman Loeb Art Center
After graduating from Vassar College in 1940, Rollie McKenna (1918–2003) worked independently as a sought-after architectural and portrait photographer, making distinctive yet underrecognized contributions to American modernism and documentary photography. McKenna’s work was published in numerous books and magazines including Fortune, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. She made iconic portraits of many artists and writers, including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Alexander Calder, Truman Capote, T. S. Eliot, Laura Gilpin, Henry Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, and Eudora Welty. This exhibition is the first survey of McKenna 's prolific output. Through June 2.
"Hoops" by Sean Hemmerle at Front Room Gallery
Poughkeepsie-based photographer Sean Hemmerle traveled across the country for his latest exhibition “Hoops,” which features 24 photographs from the US, Holland, Iraq, Lebanon, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Palestine, Iceland, Mexico, Cyprus, France, Morocco, and China (Knowledge drop: Basketball is the most popular team sport in China.) Some of the photos are of historically important locations to basketball, such as the backboard in Springfield, MA, the birthplace of basketball. In the photograph Springfield College, Springfield, MA, USA 2023 a nondescript rectangular backboard stands stoically on a cracked, beat up blacktop surrounded by a wall of pine trees, their branches forming a natural enclosure that provides a stark contrast to the man-made structure. Most of the photos are of locations not traditionally thought of to be havens for basketball. Through April 7.
"Olalekan Jeyifous: Even in Arcadia... " at Art Omi
In addition to referencing the visual motifs of retrofuturism and solar/salvage punk, the exhibition also engages with the contentious history of the Hudson River School, a landscape painting movement active in the mid-19th century. By contrasting bucolic renderings of Hudson Valley landscapes with a nuanced, sustainable model for a post-industrial community in the region, Jeyifous satirizes the art movement while mapping his vision for a productive and fruitful relationship between the land and its inhabitants. March 16-June 2.
"Global Connections" at the Dorsky Museum
"Global Connections" shines a light on four artists who crossed paths in New York during the 1920s. The city was rapidly becoming a cultural hub that attracted artists from distant states and far-flung countries. Isami Doi moved to New York from Hawaii, Aaron Douglas from Kansas, Miguel Covarrubias from Mexico City, Mexico, and Winold Reiss from Karlsruhe, Germany. The artists also spent time in working in Woodstock.
Though related by geography, their styles differed considerably: Covarrubias was primarily a caricaturist of people observed in his travels; Doi made paintings and wood engravings about personal experiences and mythology; Douglas shaped the Harlem Renaissance through socially-conscious African-centric imagery; Reiss incorporated elements of graphic design into realistic portrayals of people whose ethnic identities fascinated him. Through April 7.
