This year’s edition of Upstate Art Weekend, highlighting more than 130 arts organizations, galleries, museums, residencies and creative projects to celebrate the Hudson Valley’s strong arts community, officially begins today, July 21. While it’s no secret that New York’s “upstate” (which, by the way, any local will say is definitely not Rockland or Westchester, but I digress) has a long-standing reputation for attracting creative thinkers and visual artists, the Hudson Valley region’s arts and culture history extends far beyond the selected attendees of this weekend’s event – from indigenous craft traditions to the influence of Augusta Savage to Kate Millet’s Art Colon y for women.
Before Dutch colonizers decimated many of the region’s pre-existing indigenous communities and forced the remaining survivors west to reservation lands, the Muhheacannituck Valley, also known as the Hudson River, was the long-time homeland of many indigenous groups, including the Munsee Lenape, Muh-he-con-neok, and Kanien’kehá:ka, whose roots in the region date back to 12,000 years There is. In these communities, day to day practices including ancient basketry, pottery, instrument and tool making, and clothing making.
In the 1800s, the Catskills’ sublime landscapes and picturesque river views served as transcendental muses for environmental artist Thomas Cole and his fratty fleet of Hudson River School painters. These artists created detailed landscape works displaying both realistic and idealistic depictions of nature and rural scenes. Inspired by the piety of the region’s rugged wilderness, their art reflected an era in the United States that romanticized discovery and exploration in a way that paralleled notions since disavowed of white westward expansion. These harmful colonialist ideologies that exacerbated stereotypes about Indigenous culture and land continued to be confronted in contemporary artwork. Multimedia artist Wendy Red Star, a member of the Apsáalooke tribe, uses research-based practice combined with humor and primary source imagery to challenge these stereotypes.
Furthermore, although the legacy of the River School movement is widely remembered as being dominated by white men, several historically underrepresented female painters had a huge influence on its development, including the adventurous mountaineer Susie Barstow, Eliza Pratt Greatorex, Harriet Cany Peale, as well as Cole’s own sister, Sarah Cole, and daughter Emily. Their works are currently on display at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill as part of the exhibition Women are reframing the American landscapewhich runs until October 29.
In 1960, Storm King Art Center opened, originally conceived as a museum for paintings from the River School before quickly becoming a major outdoor sculpture venue that spans approximately 500 acres and houses one of the largest collections of contemporary outdoor sculpture in the country.
The area has also attracted other communities of creatives and freethinkers seeking pastoral refuge – sometimes at the cost of displacing existing communities. In the late 1800s, artist colonies began to emerge along the Hudson River as expansion continued rail transport increased accessibility to rural towns outside of New York. Cragsmoor and Bronxville Lawrence Park became cultural havens for the city’s painters, musicians and writers seeking new inspiration at the time.
In 1903, wealthy artists Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Jane Byrd McCall, alongside their colleagues Bolton Brown and Hervey White, founded Byrdcliffe, one of the oldest arts and crafts colonies in the United States that is still in operation today. An experimental art utopia just outside of Woodstock, Byrdcliffe included more than 30 art buildings and galleries, a library, an art school and a barn.
Whitehead frequently invited independent artisans and designers to the colony to engage in traditional craftsmanship, which included furniture, pottery, textiles, and metalwork. After his death, his son turned the arts commune over to the Woodstock Guild of Craftsmen, who renamed it Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Over the years, the guild has hosted many guest artists, including Bob Dylan, Philip Guston and Eva Hesse.
One of the Hudson Valley’s most important and enduring artistic legacies is that of sculptor Augusta Savage, known for her portrait busts of prominent black figures such as WEB Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, as well as her work as a critical mentor and educator in the Harlem Renaissance. His masterpiece”Lift up every voice and sing(also called “The Harp”, a title she supposedly hated) was a 16-foot plaster sculpture commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The work was torn down shortly after the event closed. In a time of personal financial stress and depression, Savage moved from Harlem to a farm in Saugerties in 1945, where she lived until 1962. While working as a lab assistant at the KB Products Corporation, Savage became involved in the local community as a summer art educator for young people. She continued to practice her art in her spare time, sculpting friends, families and tourists with clay and plaster, as she could not afford bronze. In 2001, Savage’s home and studio upstate was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
In the mid-20th century, the Hudson Valley region increasingly became a hub for radical creatives. In 1978, writer, artist and activist Kate Millett and her partner Sophie Keir created the Women’s Art Colony Farm — a self-sustaining, experimental artists’ commune in LaGrange centered on collaboration, feminist discussion, and agrarian lifestyles.
Funded by the sale of Christmas trees on Bowery Street, the colony, often referred to as “the farm”, has been home to many prominent feminist artists and activists, including Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Hammer, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann and Gloria Steinem. In 2012, the colony registered as a non-profit association and was renamed Millett Center for the Arts.
Foundation of Virginia-born painter and printmaker Benjamin Wigfall Communications Village in the early 70s, transforming an abandoned mule barn into a studio that became a local hub for artistic creation and mentorship. An artist whose work focused primarily on abstract expressionism, Wigfall was the first black arts educator at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
He chose the barn as the site for his studio, which was located in Kingston’s working-class, mostly black neighborhood of Ponckhockie. For the rest of the decade and into the 1980s, Wigfall’s studio grew into a vibrant community engraving space where Ponckhockie’s youth were able to learn from and assist prominent black artists of the day whom Wigfall had invited to Kingston.
In 1974, a trio of wealthy New York patrons, dealers, and art historians established the Dia Art Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on advancing artwork from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as proof artistic initiatives and projects that may not otherwise receive funding due to their scale or scope. In 2003, the foundation opened its contemporary Dia Beacon Museum along the banks of the Hudson River which currently features exhibits by Rita McBride, Senga Nengudi, Louise Bourgeois and others.
Today, the Hudson Valley is teeming with organizations such as the Forge project and the River Valley Arts Collective, who are dedicated to growing the area’s arts and culture community. Local groups continue to work to dismantle persistent colonialist power structures and raise historically marginalized voices, as well as to preserve lush natural areas that continue to attract artists from everywhere.
“For artists based in the city, we are hungry for [the natural landscape] because that’s what we don’t have,” said Queens-based artist Weihui Lu. Hyperallergic. A multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on time, land and loss, Lu recently presented “Requiem II” (2022), a fabric and wood installation at the 2022 Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Artist Residency Exhibition.
“From the luxury of time to the ability to rest and be fully present, being in the natural landscape embodies a different way of living,” Lu said.
