Hudson River Valley Artists: Past & Present

This lecture focuses on art in the Hudson River Valley. To begin, we will explore the sublime nineteenth-century landscapes in which Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and others memorialized the beautiful Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains in images that codify discovery, exploration, and settlement between 1825 and 1870. We will then examine the region’s fantastic institutions today, including Storm King, Dia Beacon, Magazzino Italian Art and Forge Project. Specifically, we will focus on Storm King Art Center, from its conception by Ralph E. Ogden as a museum for painting in 1958 to its current 500-acre campus hosting an unparalleled collection of modern and contemporary sculptures. Highlights will include works by Alice Aycock, Mark Dion, Andy Goldsworthy, Menashe Kadishman, Maya Lin, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Alyson Shotz. Next, we will consider Dia Beacon, retracing its transformation from a Nabisco box-printing factory into a unique site for large-scale sculptural works and paintings, photographs, and video and sound installations dating from the 1960s to the present. Finally, this talk will close by introducing Magazzino Italian Art, which, since 2017, has presented exquisite exhibitions of Italian art stretching from Arte Povera to the present, and Forge Project, a Native-led organization that cultivates and advances Indigenous leadership in arts and culture.