Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art presents June 16 Panel Discussion at Woodstock’s Kleinert/James Center for the Arts

NEW PALTZ – The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz (The Dorsky) and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild present a panel discussion entitled “Representation and Its Discontents,” on Saturday, June 16 at 5:30 p.m. The event will take place at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, located at 34 Tinker Street, in Woodstock, N.Y.

Moderated by Susana Torruella Leval, the panel features curators and art historians Avis Berman, Patterson Sims and Tom Wolf. Referring to artists they have studied during their own careers, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Milton Avery, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Stuart Davis, Andrew Wyeth, Philip Pearlstein, Roy Lichtenstein, John Currin, the panelists will explore the variable, complex interface between representation and abstraction.

This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist, curated by Torruella Leval and now on view at The Dorsky through July 15.

A reception will follow the panel discussion.

PARTICIPANTS

Avis Berman, an independent writer and art historian, has written extensively on painting, sculpture, photography, design, and museum history for numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, ARTnews, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Antiques, and Art & Antiques. Since 2001, she has directed the oral history program of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

Patterson Sims is the author of books on Ellsworth Kelly, Jan Matulka, Willie Cole, and Philip Pearlstein, and the highlights of the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Until 2008, Sims was the director of the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J., where he also organized several exhibitions, including Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands and Philip Pearlstein: Objectifications. Previously he served as deputy director for research support at the Museum of Modern Art, associate director for art and exhibitions, curator of modern art at the Seattle Art Museum, and as the first designated curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection of 20th century American art.

Tom Wolf is a professor of art history at Bard College. He is active as a curator and has written extensively about 20th century American art, including publications about Yasuo Kuniyoshi (among them Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Women and “Kuniyoshi in the Early 1920s,” in The Shores of a Dream: Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Early Work in America). He has also published studies of the art colony at Woodstock, N.Y., and the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts colony that preceded it.

Curator of Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist, panel moderator Susana Torruella Leval is an art historian and museum consultant based in New York City and Woodstock, N.Y. She has worked in New York since 1970 as an art historian and curator, specializing in Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American contemporary art. She was director of El Museo del Barrio from 1994–2001. She also served as chair of New York City’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG) and as vice president and president elect of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist

This important exhibition offers a retrospective view of the 70-year career of Eugene Ludins, a Woodstock painter of landscapes, political allegories, and portraits. Beginning with his residency at the Maverick colony in Woodstock in 1929 until the time of his death in 1996, Ludins was a leading member of the Hudson Valley arts community.
He was also the Ulster County director of the federal arts program of the WPA from 1937-39, as well as an avid baseball player. His 20 years of teaching (1949-69) at the University of Iowa gave depth and breadth to his work as an American painter. This exhibition’s 60 paintings, 35 drawings, 20 sketchbooks, archival photographs and memorabilia, and two works by Ludins’s wife, sculptor Hannah Small, animate the life of an artist who was an American original and also emblematic of his time.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, located at SUNY New Paltz, is fast gaining wide recognition as the premier public showplace for exhibition, education, and cultural scholarship about the Hudson Valley region’s art and artists from yesterday and today. With more than 9,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed over six galleries, the Dorsky Museum is one of the largest museums within the SUNY system. The Dorsky was officially dedicated on Oct. 20, 2001. Since then it has presented over one hundred exhibitions, including commissions, collection-based projects, and in-depth studies of artists including Robert Morris, Alice Neel, Judy Pfaff, and Carolee Schneemann.

For more information about The Dorsky Museum and its programs, visit
http://www.newpaltz.edu/museum, or call (845) 257-3844.