Hudson, N.Y. — If you are in the mood for some first-rate contemporary art, do yourself a favor and get over to Olana and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site to see this summer’s major collaborative show, River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home.
The show has been curated by the painter Stephan Hannock and the art historian Jason Rosenfeld, and they have built it around a couple of main ideas. First, both Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Frederic Church (1826-1900) – the painter who constructed and landscaped Olana – not only painted in their homes, but showed their work there, brand new and sometimes still wet, we are told. If these places suited contemporary art in the nineteenth century, the curators ask, why should they not in the twenty-first? This exhibition is their compelling answer.
Second, Cole and Church were artists who not only adored the Hudson Valley but who maintained a lifelong stylistic conversation. Their homes are either side of the river and only two miles apart, and for years after Church outgrew his formal studentship to Cole, a dialogue of complex influence continued between them. In much the same way, the artists who are represented in this show all have more or less local links – some of which are made explicit in their work – and in many cases they have also exercised influence on one another’s work.
Still, we should commend Hannock and Rosenfeld for their lightness of touch: this is not one of those shows that is top-heavy with the curators’ rationale, and the real pleasure to be had here stems pretty straightforwardly from the quality of work they have included.
Not everything in the show is what you might expect. In the West Parlor of the Thomas Cole house for example there is a group of four tiny photographs. These turn out to be a group of early Cindy Sherman self-portraits, made immediately before the Untitled Film Stills that launched her as a celebrity artist. As such, they offer a fascinating glimpse into her artistic psyche. Rather lacking the subtlety that makes the later series so compelling, they offer instead an almost carney-like roughness, and a palpable eroticism that Sherman returned to much later in her career.
Just up the stairs from these, and by complete contrast, you will find a group of five of Thomas Nozkowski’s jewel-like abstract paintings. Nozkowski, who lives in High Falls, N.Y., is really one of the most remarkable painters working today. Each of his pictures has its roots in real world experience – a recent group derived from his walks on Shawangunk Ridge near his home, for example – but as they develop they take on shapes and colors that are entirely imagined. Part of the fascination of Nozkowski’s work is that while every picture he makes is utterly unique, they are all unmistakably his. He is a genuine original.
No less original, and perhaps even more difficult to categorize, is another local resident, Charles LeDray, whose work you may have seen in a major retrospective at the Whitney in 2010-2011. LeDray’s sculptures have something oddly toy-like about them, though they refer to a world that is entirely grown up. It makes for an unsettling experience, though one that is often laugh-out-loud funny as well.
Village People – which is one of the two installations that LeDray has made specifically for River Crossings – shows him at his very best. Around the walls of one of Thomas Cole’s bedrooms, and just out of reach, hangs a series of rather less than life-size caps, each one emblazoned with a logo, slogan, or company name. After a bit of contemplation it becomes obvious that many of them (or possibly all of them) have some oblique reference to the artist in whose home they hang (COAL – COKE – FUEL OILS), to the Hudson River that was his inspiration (NEW LONG RIVER CHINESE BUFFET) or to some other quirky aspect of what and where they are.
One of the real strengths of River Crossings is its broad range. There are almost thirty artists represented here, and many of them are every bit as intriguing as Sherman, Nozkowski and LeDray. There is a 7-feet-high wall-hanging sculpture of the Hudson made from recycled silver by Maya Lin. There is a Chuck Close tapestry. There are massive-scale landscape photographs by Lynn Davis and a wonderful elegant sculpture in local woods by Martin Puryear. And, of course, all of this work sits alongside the paintings of Church and Cole that are such a key part of any visit to their houses. The combination is pretty much unmissable.
