A group exhibit at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts showcases historic tonalist landscape paintings by Woodstock artists and photos by the Woman’s Photographers Collective of the Mid-Hudson Valley that depict water in its many forms—rain, snow, ice, fog and the Hudson River itself.
“Sharing the Space,” on view through Nov. 30, includes landscapes from the 1890s by Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead, the painter and photographer who co-founded the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in 1903 with her husband, Ralph Whitehead. The couple believed that artists should live a simple rural life and held the natural world in even higher regard than art, architecture and culture, values that were at the core of their multidisciplinary “art convent” in the Catskill Mountains, according to Heidi Nasstrom, an art history scholar who grew up in the Woodstock area and wrote her dissertation on the couple.
Whitehead was a proponent of tonalism, a style defined by restrained palettes of subtly interrelated colors, and is represented in the show by several auster paintings of fields and meadows.
Two paintings by Zulma Steele, one of the first residents of the colony, picture the Catskill Mountains at different times of the year. In each, a meandering pathway leads to the faroff horizon. “Byrdcliffe in the Snow” (1910) shows the site with a fresh coat of snow, while “Purple Hills” (1914) depicts a summer sunset ripe with orange hues over stately purple mountains. The show also includes a work by Birge Harrison, co-founder of the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting (1906-1922). His evening landscape shows the sun suspended above a river, its light dancing across the water.
The exhibition includes 50 photographs by 16 contemporary artists—Gail Albert, Joan Barker, Ana Bergen, Nancy Donskoj, Jill Enfield, Mary Ann Glass, Lori Grinker, Maria Fernanda Hubeaut, Kay Kenny, Dorothea Marcus, Dana Matthews, Meryl Meisler, Susan Phillips, Carla Shapiro, Kelly Sinclair, and Ruth Wetzel. They offer a fresh perspective on the same region that so enraptured Whitehead, Steele, and Harrison.
“Throughout time, people have sought solace in nature in search of beauty and quiet, although each generation expresses this desire differently,” Anne Arden McDonald, an artist and collective member who curated the exhibition, wrote in a news release.
As a counterpoint to the more traditional landscape images, artists Gail Albert, Maria Fernanda Hubeaut, and Ruth Wetzel contribute enigmatic photographs of surfaces of water. Albert looks into pools that reflect tree branches looming above. Hubeaut makes striking abstractions of the cracked, marbled surface of ice. In “Romancing the Stone,” Wetzel turns her camera on a tiny flower that peeks out from the deep, dark blue.
Many of the show’s landscape photographs bear a similar mood to the tonalist paintings, such as Nancy Donskoj’s ashen photographs of particularly evocative trees set in foggy vistas. Similarly restrained are the works of Jill Enfield, Mary Ann Glass, and Carla Shapiro, whose painterly images were made using processes that gave the photographs a hazy, aged appearance, despite having all been printed in the last decade.
One of the most impressive parts of the exhibition is an installation made in a collaboration between artist Dana Matthews, writer Ginger Strand, and mudlark (that is, one who scavenges for treasures in the riverside muck) Lisa Durfee. Titled “Drowned River,” it’s a multimedia portrait of the Hudson River comprising circular photographs, found objects and text that traces the river’s history, from its significance to the Mohican people—to whom the it was known as the Mahicannittuk, meaning “the river that flows both ways”—to its depiction by the painters of the Hudson River School.
“The river is the source of life for our valley, and is undeniably the most important living part of our community,” Matthews said in an interview. “Its ability to refract a glistening light that mirrors our emotions has made the area irresistible to artists for centuries.”
The Kleinert/James Center for the Arts is open Friday through Sunday, 12-5 p.m.
Matt Moment is a contributing writer. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.