The Dorsky opens two new exhibitions on February 10th

NEW PALTZ – On Friday, February 10, from 5 to 7 pm, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art will hold an opening reception for two new exhibitions: The Leonardo Series: Drawings by Anthony Panzera Based on the Work of Leonardo da Vinci and Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS

The Leonardo Series: Drawings by Anthony Panzera Based on the Work of Leonardo da Vinci
This exhibition features 65 drawings by Anthony Panzera based on Leonardo da Vinci’s notes and drawings on the human figure contained in Leonardo’s original notebooks. Panzera’s drawings and related information sheets illustrate selected entries from Leonardo’s theories on the relative proportions of the head, torso, whole body, leg and foot, and arm and hand. These drawings exemplify the humanistic orientation and intellectual concerns of Leonardo da Vinci. The Leonardo Series is the product of Panzera’s 30-year study of Leonardo’s work as well as a lifetime spent teaching and drawing from the human figure.

Panzera is a member of the National Academy, a professor of Drawing and Printmaking at Hunter College, CUNY, since 1968, and an alumnus of SUNY New Paltz. His works have been widely exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and are represented in many private and public collections. Panzera is represented by Quidley & Company Gallery of Boston and Nantucket.

The exhibition, which is curated by museum staff, is on display from January 18 through April 15, 2012 in the museum’s Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery and North Gallery.

On Sunday, March 25 from 2-3 pm at The Dorsky Museum, Anthony Panzera will present a gallery talk on his work.

Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist
This important exhibition offers a retrospective view of the 70-year career of Eugene Ludins, a Woodstock painter of realist and fantastical landscapes, provocative political allegories, and insightful 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. Ludins 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 twenty years of teaching (1949-69) at the University of Iowa gave depth and breadth to his work as an American painter. This exhibition’s sixty paintings, thirty-five drawings, twenty 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.

The exhibition is curated by Susana Torruella Leval, an art historian and museum consultant who is based in New York City and Woodstock, NY. The exhibition is accompanied by a hardbound, full-color, 150-page catalog that includes essays by Leval, art historians Tom Wolf and Avis Berman, Judith Small Nash, and Peter R. Jones.

Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist will be on view from February 11 to July 15, 2012 in the museum’s Morgan Anderson Gallery, Howard Greenberg Family Gallery, and Corridor Gallery.

On Thursday, April 12 from 5:30-7 pm in The Dorsky Museum, exhibition curator Susana Torruella Leval will present a lecture on the exhibition. This event is co-sponsored by the Art History Association and The Honors College.

On Sunday, May 13 from 2-3 pm in The Dorsky Museum, Leval will host an informal gallery talk on this exhibition.

On Saturday, June 16 from 6-7:30 pm at the Kleinert/James Art Center at 34 Tinker Street in Woodstock, NY, Ms. Leval will moderate a panel discussion called “Realism and Its Discontents.” The panel will be preceded by a reception at 5:30 pm.

Also on display is the following exhibition, which is continuing from Fall 2011:

Reading Objects 2011: Responses to the Museum Collection
This popular exhibition draws on the talents of many individuals from different disciplines and fields across the campus—encouraging participants as well as viewers to explore their ideas and feelings about art objects. A new addition this year is the involvement of students. The exhibition, which features 25 objects with responses from two individuals each, is accompanied by a catalog. Reading Objects 2011 is on display in the Sara Bedrick through July 15, 2012.

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.