NEW PALTZ – The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (The Dorsky) celebrates its tenth anniversary year in 2011. Formerly known as the College Art Gallery, The Dorsky first opened to the public in April 2001 and was officially dedicated on Oct. 20, 2001.
The museum will celebrate this important birthday with a series of tenth anniversary exhibitions, beginning with the exhibition From Huguenot to Microwave: New and Recent Works by Marco Maggi. This exhibition, which runs Feb. 12 – April 14, will open to the public with a preview reception on Friday, Feb. 11 from 5 – 7 p.m.
On the heels of the 2010 logo redesign for the State University at New Paltz, on Feb. 11 The Dorsky will also launch a new logo developed specifically for the museum.
The Tenth Anniversary Year exhibition program will highlight The Dorsky’s focus on the art and artists of the Hudson Valley, a unique region that has served as a source of inspiration and nourished artistic creation and innovation since the time of the Hudson River School painters.
Special anniversary events, including the museum’s annual fine wine + fine art event and a Fall 2011 anniversary party, are also being scheduled. These special events will be announced separately throughout the year.
Exhibitions Continuing from 2010:
Thoughts of Home: Photographs from the Center for Photography at Woodstock Permanent Collection
Curated by Wayne Lempka
Through March 18
Binary Visions: 19th-century Woven Coverlets from the Collection of Historic Huguenot Street
Curated by Leslie LeFevre-Stratton and Brian Wallace
Through March 18
The Illustrious Mr. X: Museum Collection as Character Study, Volume II
Curated by Greg Slick and Karlos Carcamo
Through July 17
Exhibitions Opening in 2011:
From Huguenot to Microwave: New and Recent Works by Marco Maggi
Curated by Brian Wallace
Alice and Horace Chandler and North Galleries
Feb.12 – April 14
Marco Maggi’s obsessively minimal yet coolly detailed artworks are studies in perception that reflect back, metaphorically and physically, on the viewer. This exhibition includes recent Plexiglas-and-paper objects, altered rulers and straight edges, aluminum-foil drawings, dropped-paper works, a video projection, and a new, large-scale installation work that intervenes in the gallery space itself.
Maggi’s use of materials, techniques, and references evokes, but never makes explicit, the connections between culture, power, and the image that are the subject of much recent contemporary art. Surveillance mirrors are decorated — and their ostensible users’ gazes disrupted — by skeins of tiny lines. Eyeglass lenses are augmented with — and compromised, functionally, by — similar webs of spidery cuts. A long series of stacks of paper cut with elaborate care divides one half of the gallery from the other while it mimics the operation of a printing press and, at one metaphorical remove, the production of art itself — and at another remove, that of artists themselves. Time-lapse video collapses the life-cycle of an apple — a humble New Paltz specimen (and visual simile for the town) — into a cosmically concise epigraph for life itself.
The artist’s works reveal the attention to detail, focus on process, and openness to chance developments and accidental outcomes that are so common (and so necessary) to printmaking, Maggi’s primary focus as a student and a continued thread in his work to date. Visual and physical swapping, the employment of support materials as central components, the leakage of imagery onto peripheral sections, an intensity of production that is too well-organized to be obsessive but too extensive to be immediately believable: these are the hallmarks of an artist who has both submitted to and mastered the rich technical and metaphorical landscape of the print medium.
Maggi has made several new works for the exhibition and lent other, recent, works; a private collector from the Boston area and the artist’s New York gallery have lent the remaining works.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1957, Maggi lives and works in New Paltz, N.Y., and Montevideo. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Maggi earned an MFA at SUNY New Paltz in 1998.
Maggi represented Uruguay at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo; he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York; Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, Montevideo, Uruguay; Centro Colombo Americano, Bogota, Columbia; and Syracuse University’s Lubin House Gallery, New York. His work is in numerous private collections as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, São Paolo; and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City.
The Upstate New York Olympics: Tim Davis
Curated by Brian Wallace
Howard Greenberg Family Gallery
March 30 – July 17
Exhibition reception Friday, April 8 at 5 p.m.
Combining his ongoing interests in performance, photography, sculpture, and poetry, Tim Davis has developed a series of video and installation works and objects entitled The Upstate New York Olympics. By turns uncanny, bold, ridiculous, illegal, and downright dangerous, Davis’ “events” document, and powerfully comment on, the artist’s concerns with the fundamentals of performance art, personal expression, regionalism, and the risks and rewards of the creative life.
Thick and Thin: Ken Landauer and Julianne Swartz
Curated by Brian Wallace
Sara Bedrick Gallery
April 9 – Oct. 23
Exhibition reception Friday, April 8 at 5 p.m.
Ken Landauer and Julianne Swartz, independent artists and a married couple, have produced distinct bodies of work that complement one another in process, form, and effect but have never before exhibited or made work together. Landauer’s drawings and objects play with scale and humor to provoke realizations about our expectations about representation and abstraction. Swartz’s sculptures, installations, and architectural interventions shift our perceptions of space, form, and light. Together and separately, their works address the ways we make sense of the world.
Hudson Valley Artists 2011: Exercises in Unnecessary Beauty
Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery and North Gallery
June 25 – Nov. 13
This year’s annual Hudson Valley Artists exhibition of new and recent work by emerging and mid-career artists is curated by Dorsky Museum curator Brian Wallace. The exhibition is open to artists living in Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester Counties who have not yet had a major one-person museum show and are not currently represented by a commercial gallery. Students are not eligible.
Artwork from the Permanent Collections of the Hudson Valley Visual Arts Consortium (working title)
Curated by Ariel Shanberg and Brian Wallace
Morgan Anderson Gallery and Howard Greenberg Family Gallery
Aug. 16 – Dec. 11
This exhibition highlights the permanent collections of the five members of a recently-formed consortium that includes the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Dorsky Museum, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Guild, Women’s Studio Workshop. Seeking to foster connections among the partners and their audiences, this exhibition focuses on historical, recent, and contemporary works from the region and showcases the extraordinary artwork that has been made by artists who have lived and worked in the Hudson Valley.
Reading Objects 2011: SUNY New Paltz Responds to the Museum Collection
Sara Bedrick Gallery
Nov. 12 – Dec. 11 (re-opens in 2012)
Staff, faculty and, for the first time, students, select and write about works from the Dorsky Museum’s permanent collection. Artworks and writings are on featured in the museum as well as in a published catalog. This is the fifth year of a popular exhibition that draws on the talents of individuals from many different fields, encouraging them to feel comfortable with their personal responses to the objects.
For more information about The Dorsky Museum and its programs, visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum, or call (845) 257-3844.
