Exhibitions > Past

Asher Brown Durand, Adirondack Mountains, N.Y., ca. 1870

The Hudson River to Niagara Falls: 19th- Century American Landscape Paintings from the New-York Historical Society

Through December 13, 2009
Morgan Anderson Gallery, Howard Greenberg Family Gallery, Corridor Gallery

Curated by Dr. Linda S. Ferber

Forty-five 19th-century landscape paintings of the Hudson Valley area, with emphasis on works by artists of the Hudson River School.

The Hudson River—A Great American Treasure: Greg Miller

September 19 – November 29, 2009
Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery

This exhibition presented twenty recent color photographs of Hudson Valley landscapes by Orange County, NY-based photographer Greg Miller. Depicting views of the river and environs from New York City's George Washington Bridge to the river's small upstate tributaries, Greg Miller's views of well-known-and less well-known-vistas capture the complexity of this important tourist destination, venue for trade and industry, and site of this country's first significant conservation efforts.

Inscription: Hoegen&Stikker (Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker)

September 19 – November 29, 2009
Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery & North Gallery

Inscription was an artist-residency-based multimedia investigation of perception, representation, and the Hudson River by Amsterdam-based artists Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker. The exhibition was commissioned by the Dorsky Museum as part of an artist residency program celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River.

The exhibition, an artistic investigation of naming and perceiving that takes as its starting point the naming, mapping, and defining of the Hudson River, addresses fundamental questions about how we perceive and represent the world.

SDMA's 2009 exhibition of work by emerging area artists surveys connections between culture and environment. Museum curator Brian Wallace selected 21 artists/artist teams from the mid-Hudson Valley and organized an exhibition featuring artwork, information, presentations, activities, and other projects connecting global issues such as sustainability, ecological awareness, and bioethics to our immediate surroundings.

This exhibition presents objects from the SDMA permanent collection displayed in a variety of groupings. Each of these groupings is designed to provide new perspectives on the works displayed and to draw attention to the strategies that museums use to present and contextualize objects.

Eva Watson-Schütze worked with Alfred Stieglitz, among other essential figures in the history of American photography, and in 1902, she became a founding member of the Photo-Secession, organized by Stieglitz to promote aesthetic photography. Watson-Schütze's rich, soft-focus platinum prints were featured in some of the major exhibitions of the time. Important examples of Schütze's photographs from all phases of her career are included in this exhibition.

A selective exhibition of Graves' large- and medium-scale sculptural works and several sets of his works on paper. Works from Graves' This Mirror Can Crack A Stone series meld resonant ancient awareness with acute psychological subtleties. The Loud in the Blood series, with its elliptically archaic and codedly scientific iconography, embodies Graves' ability to portray deep contradictions in his work-these sculptures and drawings refer simultaneously to anthropomorphized beasts and to magnified views of the human circulatory system. Other sculptural works in the exhibition, which explore the properties of stone, metal, and other materials, are both coded self-portraits overlaid with sets of references of great importance to the artist as well as deft and thoughtful studies of movement and form.

In 1969 photographer Maggie Sherwood impulsively bought a houseboat and renovated it to include a space where she could stage photography exhibitions. This was the genesis of the Floating Foundation of Photography, a regular program of group shows that began to receive significant critical attention by the early 1970s. This exhibition explores the energy and audacity of Sherwood and her circle as they invented a uniquely subversive course for the dissemination and use of photography at a key moment in its recent history

Lilo Raymond, a long-time resident of the Hudson Valley, has worked as a professional and fine art photographer for more than three decades. She began exhibiting her work in New York City in 1977 after studying with the renowned teacher David Vestal. Her personal work is defined by its sensitivity to light and often a unique high-key tonal range, which evokes an elegant vision and a quiet beauty. This exhibition is selected from photographs in the SDMA permanent collection and includes many recent acquisitions.

Zulma Steele, Byrdcliffe, ca. 1914, oil on board, Collection of the Byrdcliffe Art Colony of the
Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Aileen Cramer Fund in memory of Aileen B. Cramer

The Byrdcliffe artists' colony was founded in Woodstock, NY between 1902-1903 by Jane and Ralph Whitehead, Hervey White and Bolton Brown. Inspired by the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris, Byrdcliffe sought to create an idyllic life of self-sufficiency through the creation of handmade furniture, ceramics, jewelry, and textiles. The works on view in this exhibition are on extended loan to the SDMA from the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Arthur A. Anderson, and Douglas C. James.

Reading Objects 2008

March 29 – December 14, 2008
Sara Bedrick Gallery

A Muslim saint carried in a basket, ca. 1830
North India. Opaque watercolor,
Gift of Daniel J. Ehnbom, 1991.004

Part of an ongoing interdisciplinary series featuring works from the Museum’s collection accompanied by texts written by University faculty and staff.

Defining Art:
Recent Acquisitions 2005-2007

February 2 – December 14, 2008
Morgan Anderson Gallery

Stuart Klipper, Tabular Berg from the Astrolabe Glacier, Dumont d'Urville Sea Southern Ocean (in the immediate vicinity of the magnetic south pole), from the USCGC Polar Sea, Antartica, 1989 (from On Antartica, 1989, C-print, Gift of David A. & Helaine Dorsky, 2006.034.002

Selected works in a variety of media by Bernice Abbot, Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sandro Chia, Don Nice, Nathan Olivera, Robert Rauschenberg, and more.

Edge of the Sublime represents the first-ever retrospective of works by one of the most important enamelists working today. This exhibition explores the artist’s creative use and development of a variety of enameling and metalworking techniques to produce highly color-saturated imagery on signature brooches, necklaces and pendants. Curated by Jeannine Falino, former Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Edge of the Sublime debuted at Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts before traveling to the SDMA and museums nationwide through 2010.

Randy Green, Untitled, n.d., dye transfer print, CPW1995.090

This exhibition, featuring photographs related to the summer season, explores connections between privacy and expressivity, two typically distinct states of mind that often intersect in the summer. These thirty-five photographs were selected from over one thousand three hundred works in the permanent collection of the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), which is on extended loan to the SDMA through a collection-sharing partnership established in 1995.

Summer’s intensity arises, in part, from the season’s emphasis on self-conscious exposure and frankly camera-aware posing—postures found (on both sides of the camera) in some works in the exhibition. Others capture the heat thrown off by the effort of negotiating physical obstacles and formal constraints; these photographs—abstractions and obstructions—refuse to give everything up to the viewer. Other photographs depict physical or psychological agitation of one kind or another: landscapes tortured by heat from above or below, and venues for and scenes of pleasure marked by actual or feigned tensions that hint at the heat and disturbances of summer. Still other photographs reveal private moments, intimate encounters, and personal realizations: a group of works depicting single, paired, absent, and linked bodies suggests summer’s languorous suspension of time and the drama of the season’s individual moments, and a group of works featuring visual and textual statements of identity embodies the power unleashed in declarations of self made, heatedly, with joy, anger, pride, or bravado.

Co-curators Ariel Shanberg, CPW executive director, and Brian Wallace, SDMA curator

Graham Taylor, Yongka Sunset, 2008, Acrylic on canvas

Noongar Boodja:
Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Ecology and Culture

Corridor Gallery
July 11 – September 28, 2008

For the Noongar people of South-western Australia the word boodja means "land" or "home." This exhibition features paintings by three Noongar artists – Athol Farmer, Troy Bennell, and Graham Taylor – inspired by drawings of the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children who were incarcerated at the Carrolup Native Settlement in Katanning in Western Austrialia. In works reflecting the Carollup Style that had developed at the Carrolup Settlement, these artists explore the complex relationship between Noongar culture, landscape, and history.

Hudson Valley Artists 2008:
The Medium is the Message

June 6 – September 7, 2008
Alice and Horace Chandler & North Galleries

Hudson Valley Artists 2008 takes Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message and expands it to include all forms of artistic expression in which the medium is integral to the meaning of the finished work. From painting, sculpture, and photography to video, web projects, and installations, the artists explore the materiality of art-making and the meaning inherent in their choice of media.

Juried by Denise Markonish, curator at MassMoCA in North
Adams, Massachusetts.

Lewis Hine, Powerhouse Mechanic, 1920, gelatin silver print,
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

A Discerning Vision:
Photographs from the Collection of Howard Greenberg

March 28 – June 22, 2008
Howard Greenberg Family Gallery

Photographs from the collection of Howard Greenberg, featuring work by Consuelo Kanaga, Sid Grossman, Lewis Hine, Saul Leiter, and more.

Lida Abdul, Brick Sellers of Kabul, 2006, 16mm film transferred to
DVD (video projection), Courtesy Giorgio Persano, Turin

Intimacies of Distant War

February 8 – April 13, 2008
Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery

This exhibition, an attempt to put the current war on view and in context, brings together past and current work by Lida Abdul, Leon Golub, Daniel Heyman, An-My Lê, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann and others. These artists, in disparate but connected ways, investigate the intimate emotional impact of distant conflicts.

Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Burroughs (W.S.B. in
Egyptian Museum exhibition), 1953, gelatin
silver print, printed 1997, 2004.038.045

Beat and Beyond:
Photographs by Allen Ginsberg

March 28 – July 6, 2008
Corridor Gallery

Selected photographs by Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), American poet and leading apostle of the Beat Generation. Includes portraits of members of the "Beat" era of the 1950s and 1960s and self-portraits.

Kerr Eby, Constant, n.d., Drypoint

The Feminine Image:
Art from the Coykendall Collection

February 8 – April 13, 2008
North Gallery

A thematic exhibition of prints and drawings organized by SUNY New Paltz introduction to Museum Studies students Crystal Diaz, Jennifer May, Hannah Van Wely, and Einav Zamir.

Sarah Abramson, Abandonment, 2008
Copper, graphite varnish, stainless steel

BFA/MFA Thesis Exhibitions

April 25 – May 20, 2008
Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery & North Gallery

Thesis exhibitions are open the following special hours:

Friday, Monday, and Tuesday from 11:00a.m.-5:00p.m.
Saturday and Sunday from 1:00-5:00p.m.

John Frederick Kensett (American, 1816 - 1872)
Cattskill Mt. [sic], ca. 1849, Graphite on beige wove paper

Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation

January 23 – March 16, 2008
Corridor Gallery and Howard Greenberg Family Gallery

From a collection assembled by Dia Art Foundation artist Dan Flavin, this exhibition includes important drawings and oil sketches by John Kensett, Aaron Draper Shattuck, Sanford Gifford, Jasper Cropsey, and James David Smillie. The exhibition is organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.