The Arts

The Director Picks her Favorites: Curator’s Choice at Chace-Randall Gallery in Andes
Chace-Randall Gallery presents Curator’s Choice, a group exhibition by the gallery’s permanently exhibiting artists, from November 13 to December 31. A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, November 14 from 5 to 7 pm.

A strong believer in the work of each and every one of her artists, gallery owner and director Zoe Randall admits that not every painting, photograph, sculpture or unique work on paper in the gallery strikes a cord within her as deep as another does. Yet, she is always reticent to point out her favorites. “Although the gallery is very much about my personal aesthetic, I don’t love every piece in which I do find merit. Relevance may not be subjective, but taste is,” says Randall. “It’s my job to present the finest works I can, but never to intrude upon one’s personal taste,” she says. Still, Randall finds that her customers, more often than not, want to know which pieces she prefers over others—which pieces she would chose for her own home. Curator’s Choice is the opportunity to find out.

Participating artists are Mark Beard, Mariella Bisson, Rimer Cardillo, Keith Cardwell, Grant Collier, Michael Fauerbach, Judith Lamb, Inverna Lockpez, Patrick McCay, E. Ira McCrudden, Jenny Nelson, Lisa Pressman, Alberto Rey, Christine Rodin, Meredith Rosier, Christie Scheele, Sharon Wandel and Marie Vickerilla.

There will be no “red-dotting” in this exhibition. Works will be wrapped from the wall, another piece replacing it. “I want people to have the opportunity to buy art for their holiday pleasure, whether a gift for themselves or another,” says Randall. There will be no sneak previews, as it cannot be determined what will sell when. The only assurance is a fine exhibition of the finest artists showing in the Western Catskills. The exhibition, however rotating, will remain for viewing pleasure all winter.

Chace-Randall Gallery is located at 49 Main Street in Andes. Season gallery hours are Saturday, Sunday and Holiday Fridays and Mondays from 11 am to 5 pm and by appointment. Winter hours will be by appointment only. For more information, call 845 676 4901 or visit www.chacerandallgallery.com.

Hudson Valley Philharmonic’s 50th Anniversary Season continues with “Brilliantly Brahms”
The Bardavon is pleased to continue the 50th anniversary season of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic with a program called: “Brilliantly Brahms” with HVP Principal Guest Conductor Elizabeth Schulze and featuring the 2009 winner of the HVP String Competition Li Lao performing one of the greatest works for violin and orchestra: Tchaikovsky’s: Violin Concerto, op. 35, D major on Saturday, November 7 at 8 pm at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie.

The concert will also feature Mozart’s Don Giovanni, K.527, Overture and Brahms Symphony no. 4, op. 98, E minor. Ticket holders are invited to a pre-concert talk with Maestro Schulze one hour prior to the performance.

Appointed to the position of HVP Principal Guest Conductor in 2008 and praised by critics as “an ideal music director whose infectious energy is as contagious as her exuberant and thoroughly committed musicianship,” Elizabeth Schulze is currently the Music Director and Conductor of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra and the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Schulze has held the positions of Associate Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., Music Director and Conductor of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra in Iowa, and, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Assistant Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. Ms. Schulze also served as Music Director and Conductor of the Kenosha Symphony Orchestra in Wisconsin for seven seasons. In recent seasons, she has also been a conducting assistant and cover conductor for the New York Philharmonic.

Violinist Li Lao made her debut at age 7 in the largest hall in China—The Great Hall of the People Beijing. Li has taken lessons from Gidon Kremer, Ruggiero Ricci, Itzhak Perlman and Vadim Repin and has concertized all over China and North America as a recitalist and as a soloist with orchestras including Cincinnati Concert Orchestra, Cincinnati Philharmonic, Xiamen Symphony Orchestra, Beijing Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Youth Orchestra and many others.

Li has won several competitions, including First Prize of China Central Conservatory Violin Competition and the special prize for the Best Chinese Work Contestant in 2001; special prize for “The excellent young contestant” at the China (Qing Dao) International violin competition, 2005: China National Violin Art Competition, the National Violin Competition. She also won First Prize of the Great Wall International Music Academy Competition and College Conservatory of Music concerto competition in 2007.

Li won a full scholarship to attend Itzhak Perlman’s Music Academy, Meadowmount Summer Camp in New York and Great Wall International Music Academy. She has served as concertmaster and concertmaster assistant in the Itzhak Perlman Music Academy, the Great Wall International Academy and CCM Concert Orchestra.

Tickets for the Bardavon’s presentation of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic “Brilliantly Brahms” are available at the Bardavon Box Office, 35 Market St., Poughkeepsie, 845 473 2072 or by calling TicketMaster at 845 454 3388. For further information, visit www.bardavon.org.

Recent Photographs by Hardie Truesdale at Mark Gruber Gallery
You may think you know the Hudson River or the Shawangunks pretty well—until you see them through Hardie Truesdale’s camera lens. Anyone can take a picture but it is a master photographer who, though the landscape may look familiar, can show the viewer a world they’ve never seen before. The exhibit, Behind the Lens—Recent Photographs by Hardie Truesdale, runs at the Mark Gruber Gallery in New Paltz through December 2.

Aware of light and color, adept at composing, an affinity for the subject, control of all technical aspects of the art—it’s a complex blending of skill, talent and character that creates an image that captures the universal imagination. They say it’s not what’s in front of the camera that makes a good photo, it’s what’s “Behind the Lens”.

Mr. Truesdale is the co-author of two books. His first explores the Hudson Valley from source to ocean outlet. His second opens the Adirondack Mountains to his camera and his extraordinary vision. Both are available at the gallery.

Mr. Truesdale uses a variety of cameras to photograph his subjects. His archival digital prints are created in several formats, many images available in HDR.

The Mark Gruber Gallery is located in the New Paltz Plaza in New Paltz, NY. Gallery hours are Monday from 11 am to 5:30 pm; Tuesday through Friday from 10 am to 5:30 pm; Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday by appointment. For more information, please call 845 255 1241.

Animal Spirits I: The Personal Iconography of Peggy Cyphers & Kathy Ruttenberg
Animal Spirits I—a two-person exhibition of giant new abstract paintings by Peggy Cyphers, many of them painted during creative tenures at the Byrdcliffe Colony and surroundings, and life-size mythologizing sculptures by Kathy Ruttenberg, who is currently also working in several other media—is the Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Guild’s autumnal exhibit at its Kleinert-James Arts Center in the center of Woodstock.

The exhibit title, taken from the name of Cyphers’ latest series, acknowledges both artists’ penchants for dream-like iconography and tone that reaches deep into the natural world for points of resonance. It also sets the stage for a further exploration of regionally-based or inspired artists who utilize the Catskills’ and Hudson River’s natural habitat, as well as non-human elements to mirror animal “feelings.”

Cyphers has been exhibiting consistently since the early 1980s, when she was a key member of the East Village art scene of the time. She works her large canvases in a visual form of automatic writing as a way to combine interests in Darwin’s theories and Shamanism, or between the underlying poetry of quantum physics and the strange lyricism of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Scientist writings.

“I play around with different things and try to bring them together in my paintings,” she says. “There’s something powerful up there in the Catskills that has always pulled artists…. It’s renewing.”

She starts her monumental paintings in a corner and moves around the edges towards the center, which tend to remain more open than that which surrounds it. Some brushstrokes are reminiscent of cliffs, others of bird wings or bats. All tend to swirl. The latest paintings have a chasm-like quality about them, focused up on glimpses of hope-embracing sky. Each is worked around some animal’s inner spirit, as a means of getting at things we’ve buried within ourselves as humans.

“I don’t think they’re about darkness,” she says. “The light comes out of the dark.”

Ruttenberg’s work, seen in galleries from L.A. to New York, and featured in the windows of Macy’s Herald Square flagship store a few years ago as part of its annual garden show, encompass a private sense of narrative, an un-self-conscious teeter-totter relationship with psychological revelations and metaphoric allusions, combing a child-like exuberance of expression with an adult sense of wounded reserve.

“My world is a place where the wind blows and emotions are high,” says Ruttenberg. “I want the viewer to feel the rawness of instinct, something we cannot control but is within us. This is our connection to the natural world, become anthropomorphic in our ability to identify with species we feel we can see in ourselves.”

She, like Cyphers, surrounds herself with pets, and fuels her work through voluminous readings, interests and self-reflection.

In addition to several large floor pieces filling the Kleinert’s gallery space, Ruttenberg will be hanging ceramic sculpture’s from the gallery’s rafters, while Cyphers makes the walls flow with her 70- and 90-inch tall paintings, all focused on the opened back windows’ of the key Guild exhibition and performance space.

Both artists like to address the surfaces of what they do through palettes and processes, uses of mirror effects and repetitive iconography, as well as what they’ve been reading, observing, listening to or experiencing at the time they’re working, making their aesthetic choices logical. Or at least understandable.

On deeper levels, both women talk, outside their actual art works, about man’s onslaught on nature, about the many ecological battles we must prepare to fight over the coming years. And yet, by the time these matters have been distilled into their paintings and sculptures, they’ve been simplified and gained resonance by being personalized. We recall what it is to pet the cat, hold the dog, learn from the birds. And in those simple actions is the prototype, they seem to insist—in their individual channeling of deep Animal Spirits—how we should treat all things we meet in the world.

Brought together, their art is powerful and provocative, evocative and inspirational. A perfect mixture, says curator Paul Smart, for the late autumn season leading up to Thanksgiving, when the leaves fall and the bones of our earth starts to show itself again. The nights lengthen and our thoughts turn back inward.

For more on each artist’s individual work, visit www.peggycyphers.com or www.kathyruttenberg.com.

Animal Spirits I runs through November 19. The Kleinert-James Arts Center is located at 34 Tinker Street in Woodstock. For more information, call 845 679 2079 or visit www.woodstockguild.org.