January Art Highlights
1/8 through 2/15- THREE CONTEMPORARY PAINTERS THAT HAPPEN TO BE WOMEN, paintings by EILEEN MURPHY, DARSHAN RUSSELL, and DONISE ENGLISH, at Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson—Brooklyn-based—by way of Mount Holyoke and Pratt Institute—Eileen Murphy captures that part of the world on a canvas writ large: rooftops, freeways, and the Williamsburg Bridge. Unlikely subjects are rendered in perfect detail, almost as if photographed through a magic filter. Darshan Russell takes a more rustic approach, with her vibrant colors and bold, almost Cubist shapes. A longtime Hudson Valley resident, Russell re-interprets familiar area locations through her own personal and engaging language. Bard College and SUNY New Paltz graduate Donise English has created a new exhibit of abstracts using encaustics—or pigmented beeswax—giving her simplistic, tribal images a glossy, varnished surface texture. Carrie Haddad Gallery, 622 Warren St., Hudson,www.carriehaddadgallery.com, 518.828.1915. Opening reception Sa 1/10, 6-8 PM
1/9 through 2/1- DONALD ALTER: BEYOND BLACK MOUNTAIN (paintings), at Garrison Art Center, Garrison—A product of the influential Black Mountain College (in N.C.) and contemporary of Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph and Anni Albers, Newburgh-based Donald Alter—now 78 years old—is still going strong. Curated by Tony Moore and Harald Plochberger, this show “finds Alter’s recent Hudson Valley landscapes to reflect and in some ways epitomize his oeuvre. Inventive, abstract, figurative, luscious, naive, sophisticated, mysterious and at times evoking an edgy anxiety, these paintings and drawings are a summation of a lifetime of quiet achievement. The works contain something of a utopian vision or apparent innocence, coupled with an anxious foreboding of the ‘thicket’ of both human and natural worlds. Always inventive and ‘perfectly’ orchestrated, these landscapes are peopled with literal and metaphorical references to space and time, recent and current events, psychological realities and, above all, to a certain delight in the craft and sincere belief in picture making.” Garrison Art Center, 23 Garrison Landing, Garrison, www.garrisonartcenter.org, 845.424.3960. Artist talk with Alter, Moore, Plochberger, and writer Vivian Goldstein, Su 1/25 3 PM
2/7 through 2/28- MOTHERS FOR FASCISM, new paintings and works by STEVEN STRAUSS, at Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts, Kingston—Primarily using American and European “new-wave” through “exploitation” era film imagery as source material, Mothers for Fascism explores themes of coping and coming of age in new post-war(s) (WWII/Vietnam/terrorism) “free” worlds, as seen and experienced by each war’s successive generation of women. Angst and conflicts arise between the adults/parents who are held to a more conservative view on life, hardship, and personal expression vs. their children who, increasingly, through the subsequent decades begin to have more and more personal freedom, in this exploration’s case, sexual, peaking in the ‘60s, and then going over the top into the ‘70s through the present. Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts (KMOCA), 103 Abeel St., Kingston, www.kmoca.org. Open Sa 12-4 PM or by appt. Opening reception Sa 2/7
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