Sylvia Sleigh
Invitation to A Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill - 1979-99
Through January 8

In fall 2006, the Museum acquired the painting Invitation to a Voyage, the famous panorama by Sylvia Sleigh. At the time Director Michael Botwinick said, “This is one of the most significant gifts of art ever made to the museum.” At the opening that year for the painting’s first showing here, Sleigh visited the Museum, and a year after her death in 2010, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, among her many accolades.
    This September the Museum, for the first time, will fill a gallery with the entire work — 14 panels. Completed in 1999 over a 20-year period, the panorama was a challenge Sleigh set to take on large-scale history painting.     Invitation to a Voyage, in two sections, Riverside and Woodside, commemorates a trip the feminist painter took to Fishkill to picnic with art-world friends on the Hudson’s banks. Shown here is a panel from each section with the photographs from which they were modeled, later, in oil by Sleigh in her Manhattan studio. Sylvia Sleigh is pictured in the right corner of the Woodside photograph and painting.