HRM Presents New Exhibitions for Fall 2022

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YONKERS, NY, October 14, 2022 — Hudson River Museum is proud to present two new exhibitions for fall 2022 that consider the lasting power of landscapes and the intersection of American art and popular culture. The Bierstadt Brothers: Painting and Photography, which will open to the public on Friday, October 21, 2022, features work by Albert, Charles, and Edward Bierstadt, three artistic brothers whose distinctive perceptions of the American landscape had a significant impact on American art and the commercial image revolution. Also opening on October 21 is Matrix: Prints by Women Artists, 1960–1990, which explores this period of experimentation in printmaking among women artists in particular, who used the artform as a means of creative expression and also a way to enter the male-dominated art market. Both exhibitions were organized by the Hudson River Museum.

Laura Vookles, Chair, HRM’s Curatorial Department, states: “These exhibitions embody the spirit of discovery, diversity, and connection at Hudson River Museum and the different ways images are a powerful form of expression. We embrace this opportunity to understand the local to the national legacy of the Bierstadt brothers in painting and photography through exceptional loans and new gifts, while shedding new light on three decades of influential and trailblazing women printmakers in Matrix.”

 

The Bierstadt Brothers: Painting and Photography
October 21, 2022–September 10, 2023

We live in an image-driven culture. From magazines and billboards to our phones and virtual reality headsets, we are surrounded by pictures at any moment of the day. We document our experience with photos and, through the photos of others, have vicarious adventures. This love of images, and the rise of mechanical printing processes that made it possible, had its origins in the mid-nineteenth century. Albert, Charles, and Edward Bierstadt’s distinctive perceptions of the American landscape had a significant impact on American art and the commercial image revolution.

The Bierstadt name is most often associated with youngest brother Albert’s iconic paintings of the American West. Today, his art opens up conversations about native land rights and colonization that reframe his audience’s nostalgia for “wilderness” and myths about the “frontier.” This exhibition showcases four paintings by Albert ranging from the Rocky Mountains to the South Pacific and photographs by Edward and Charles of the Hudson Valley, Niagara Falls, and Yosemite Valley. Together, this compelling display demonstrates the brothers’ distinctive perceptions of the American landscape and their lasting legacy on American art and popular culture.

Albert and Edward Bierstadt both had local connections: Albert lived in Tarrytown from 1866 to 1882, and Edward came to Yonkers in 1886 to photograph notable residences of Westchester, including the interior of Glenview, originally designed by Charles W. Clinton in 1877 for the John Bond and Emily Norwood Trevor Family, and today, the Museum’s historic home on the National Register.

The exhibition features an important loan from the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, as part of the Art Bridges Collection Loan Partnership initiative, as well as generous recent gift by Greg and Fay Wyatt to the Museum’s collection, an oil on paper painting by Albert Bierstadt of a seascape, believed to have been patented in 1889 when he was on a trip to Alaska.

The exhibition is made possible, in part, by Lorraine W. Shanley and David H. Snyder.

Albert Bierstadt’s Dawn at Donner Lake, California is generously lent by Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, as part of the Art Bridges’ Collection Loan Partnership initiative.

Exhibitions are made possible by assistance provided by the County of Westchester.

 

Matrix: Prints by Women Artists 1960–1990
October 21, 2022–May 14, 2023

Printmaking has served as a stepping stone for many women artists, enabling their work to reach the masses thanks to its accessible form. Matrix: Prints by Women Artists, 1960–1990 explores a period of experimentation in printmaking among women artists, who used the art form as a means of creative expression and also a way to enter the male-dominated art market. In printmaking, a matrix is the plate, block, or screen that holds the ink. More generally, it is defined as something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form.

The 1960s ushered in an era of massive social change, including in the feminist movement, which sought equal rights and opportunities and greater personal freedom for women. Artists such as Minna Citron, Chryssa, Helen Frankenthaler, the Guerrilla Girls, Louise Nevelson, Faith Ringgold, Julia Santos Solomon, Miriam Schapiro, and Nitza Tufiño, experimented with the medium during these three decades and became a formidable matrix from which a new generation of printmakers would develop. Individually and collectively, these artists expanded the genre through their mastery of technique and collaboration, while defining and broadening a new, more inclusive voice and visual language. They are now role models to embolden a new generation.

Exhibitions are made possible by assistance provided by the County of Westchester.

 

Teaching Artist-in-Residence

During his residency in fall 2022, award-winning pianist and composer Daniel Kelly will conduct a series of programs in the galleries and workshop, engaging with the works of art on view through sight, sound, movement and words. He will lead workshops where participants will create individual responses to what they see and understand through artmaking, poetry, storytelling, music, and movement, sharing and performing their works of art. Under the artist’s guidance, these creative outlets will enable visitors to channel and express the emotions we all bear in today’s fraught environment, exposed through encounters with powerful works of art, revealing and healing. Learn more here.

 

Related Programs

Curator’s Tour of The Bierstadt Brothers: Painting and Photography
Saturday, October 22, 2:30pm
Join Laura Vookles, Chair, HRM Curatorial Department, for a tour of The Bierstadt Brothers, which showcases the work of Albert, Edward, and Charles Bierstadt with an iconic collection of the brothers’ distinctive perceptions of the landscape and homes of the Hudson Valley and the American West. Photographers Edward and Charles’ artotypes and sterographs are featured, as well as paintings by Albert from HRM collections and loans from Joslyn Art Museum and a private collector.

(For Members) Director’s Tour of Matrix: Prints by Women Artists, 1960–1990
Saturday, November 19, 11am
HRM Members are invited to join Director and CEO Masha Turchinsky for a tour and conversation about printmaking as an important medium of communication, expression, freedom, and solidarity for women artists during two pivotal decades of the twentieth century. Attendance is limited to 20.

Musical Journeys: Stories and Sound
Sunday, December 4, 1–3pm
Create works of art and poetry/creative writing inspired by stories from your life and the works of art exhibited in the Cycles of Nature, with Daniel Kelly, who will improvise musical versions of your stories.
Support provided by Art Bridges.

Musical Journeys: Culminating Performance
Sunday, February 12, 3pm
Join Daniel Kelly and a guest musician for a special performance inspired by Cycles of Nature. Highlights of the concert will include musical improvisations and stories and poems created by the participants of the previous three public workshops.
Support provided by Art Bridges.

The Romanticization of the West: A Virtual Conversation
Wednesday, February 15, 7pm
You are invited to an important talk about ownership and access to the land. This virtual conversation will take place between Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Richard & Mary Holland Assistant Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum and contemporary artist Nathaniel Ruleaux, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, whose work addresses westward expansion in relation to his family’s history and historical imagery. The two speakers, both of whom are based in Omaha, Nebraska, will discuss westward expansion and culturally determined concepts of the human relationship to nature and the land from the differing perspectives presented by works on view in The Bierstadt Brothers and Order/Reorder: Experiments with Collections. Busciglio-Ritter will talk about painters like Bierstadt, who played on nostalgia for “wilderness” and myths about the “frontier,” and Frank Tenney Johnson, who traveled west to photograph Indigenous and Mexican people and then used this visual archive to create his paintings. Ruleaux will focus on works by Indigenous artists and bring the belief in a tangible physical connection between the body and the natural world to bear on the conversation, and also reference his own work.
Support provided by Art Bridges.

 

Image: Albert Bierstadt (American, born Germany, 1830–1902). Mount St. Helens, Columbia River, Oregon, ca. 1889. Oil on canvas. Collection of J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox. Image: Courtesy of Questroyal Fine Art.

 

Press contact:
Jeana Wunderlich
jwunderlich@hrm.org
(914) 963-4550 x240

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