Series:

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

14 total works

Cover of Videofreex
Videofreex surveys the history and mythology of the Videofreex, a collective of artists, storytellers, and activists who produced and disseminated alternative media across New York and other US communities during the 1970s. The Videofreex exploited the new technology of portable video as an emerging medium for creative expression and as a democratic tool for disseminating independent points of view in a pre-digital age. By establishing the first pirate television station in the United States, the Videofreex created a base for media education and training as well as a media art center hosting local and international visitors. Many of the core members of the Videofreex are active today as artists and media makers.

Videofreex includes essays examining the historical and cultural scope and legacy of the Videofreex; essays surveying selected art installations by the Videofreex; notes on the videotape preservation of the Videofreex Archive; reflections on one of the author's work with Wave Farm, a contemporary Catskills-based media arts organization with a parallel history to the Videofreex; and essays by Videofreex founding members, reflecting on their collective contributions to art, technology, and community engagement.

Cover of Along His Own Lines
Called "America's greatest living painter" by Esquire magazine in 1936, Speicher (1883–1962) was one of the foremost realists of his generation, closely associated with George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Leon Kroll. The exhibition catalogue examines Speicher's oeuvre, including his artistic development, subject matter, choice of models, influences, and the critical reception of his work. The catalogue contains three essays. The primary essay by curator Valerie Ann Leeds consists of a general assessment and critical review of Speicher's career and his place in the art world of his day. Another essay authored by Tom Wolf explores Speicher and his relationship to Woodstock. A third essay, by Daniel Belasco, surveys Speicher's drawings. The catalogue is the first to present a significant body of Speicher's work in color.

Cover of Jervis McEntee
Jervis McEntee presents new scholarship and color reproductions that redefine McEntee's place in the history of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. The lead essay by exhibition curator Lee A. Vedder makes the case that McEntee was far more than a painter of somber late fall landscapes. He set his own course, absorbing influences of his fellow Hudson River school painters including Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, and Asher B. Durand, while also responding to the atmospheric painting of J. M. W. Turner, the trauma of the Civil War, and the shifts in American tastes to French Barbizon painting and Impressionism. Additional essays expand the scope of McEntee scholarship. Kerry Dean Carso presents the influence of the landscape and industrial development of Rondout (later Kingston), New York, McEntee's native city. David Schuyler reappraises the art and career of this fascinating artist, who played such a pivotal role in the art and culture of his day. The catalogue also includes reprints of key texts from the rare memorial publication Jervis McEntee: American Landscape Painter (1892).

Cover of Bradley Walker Tomlin
"The gentleman Abstract Expressionist," in the words of poet John Ashbery, Bradley Walker Tomlin was known for his elegance in both painting style and personal comportment. The book includes over forty paintings, works on paper, and printed materials, charting Tomlin's development from art nouveau illustrations of the 1920s to large-scale Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s. The exhibition explores his formative years in Syracuse, early patronage by Condé Nast, and the important role played by the Woodstock art colony. Tomlin is best known as a key figure in the New York School and had close friendships with Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, and Robert Motherwell. Unlike most of his peers, Tomlin focused on the impersonal possibilities of art. His carefully orchestrated paintings resonate with our time's renewed interest in abstraction and design.

Cover of Dick Polich

Dick Polich

by Daniel Belasco, Dick Polich, and Sara J. Pasti

Published 27 September 2014
Dick Polich tells the story of the man who founded Tallix in 1970 and revolutionized the world of American fine art foundries. As an art fabricator, Polich typically remains behind the scenes. This publication, the catalogue for the exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, explores the history and processes of Polich and his foundries Tallix, Polich Art Works, and Polich Tallix, from the 1960s to the present. Contents include an art historical survey by Daniel Belasco, a personal account of the craft of the foundry by Dick Polich, and new statements about working with Polich by artists Rona Pondick, Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Janine Antoni, Martin Puryear, and Jeff Koons. The Dorsky Museum exhibition is the first to examine Dick Polich's influence on contemporary art.

Cover of On the Street and in the Studio
The history of photography concerns its materiality as much as its imagery. The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz is firmly engaged with this history of reinvention. Nearly half of the collection came to the museum from a single source: photography specialist and dealer Howard Greenberg. On the Street and in the Studio documents the enormous contribution made by Greenberg in building a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography at the Dorsky Museum. The catalogue includes an essay by curator Daniel Belasco that surveys the strengths and characteristics of the collection. An interview with Howard Greenberg sheds light on how he collects photographs and chooses to present them to institutions. The portfolio section features images of both the photographic images and reverse sides of nineteen prints in the collection by Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott, James Van Der Zee, Margaret Bourke-White, and others, revealing how there is as much relevant information on the back as on the picture itself, an insight made available for students and the general public.

Cover of Andrew Lyght
This is a venture into the departures, encounters, discoveries, and transgressions that inform Andrew Lyght's artistic practice and life. While living and working for decades in various cultural contexts such as Guyana, Canada, and the United States, Lyght has pursued an extensive inquiry into the mechanics of art making. Curated by Tumelo Mosaka, Andrew Lyght: Full Circle is the artist's first museum exhibition since he moved to Kingston, New York in 2006. Best known for his flexible and volumetric forms, vibrant paintings, and abstract linear drawings, Lyght creates a wide range of works that analyze the structural properties of painting and reanimate pictorial space as an open system. Over the many years he has developed an art form that explores the built environment as a dynamic pictorial subject, introducing new ways of seeing the world around us.

Cover of Mary Reid Kelley
Mary Reid Kelley celebrates the first museum exhibition devoted to the finely crafted and researched costumes, objects, and drawings that Mary Reid Kelley creates for her visually and intellectually stimulating videos. An essay by curator Daniel Belasco analyzes the sources and significance of the working objects in how they promote the "unreality effect" of Mary Reid Kelley's videos, which combine both the analog and digital and the personal and historical. A conversation between Corinna Ripps Schaming and Mary Reid Kelley and her long-time collaborator Patrick Kelley reveals insights into their working process. For the first time, the full range of the artist's costumes, props, drawings, furniture, and accessories are photographed and presented as unique works of art.

Cover of Carl Walters and Woodstock Ceramic Art
Drawing on the first major exhibition of Carl Walters in over sixty years, this catalogue includes an extensive critical essay by curator Tom Wolf and an additional essay by modern ceramics expert Adrienne Spinozzi. The catalogue places Walters (1883–1955) within the context of development of ceramic arts in Woodstock over two generations ago, from the Byrdcliffe Guild in the early twentieth century to the younger modernists who worked in the Maverick in the 1920s and 1930s. Spanning a career that lasted over forty years, this fully illustrated catalogue features approximately thirty prime examples of Walters's witty and original three-dimensional ceramic figures as well as a selection of works on paper from private and public collections in the Northeast. Perhaps best known for his creation of the glass panels on the doors of the original Whitney Museum of American Art, Walters was unusual in that he made both functional objects and independent ceramic sculptures.

Cover of Intimately Unfamiliar

Intimately Unfamiliar

by Sara J. Pasti

Published 15 March 2017
This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Intimately Unfamiliar: New Work by SUNY New Paltz Art Faculty, curated by Michael Asbill, on display at the Dorsky from January 25 through April 9, 2017. The participating artists teach courses in printmaking, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic design, ceramics, metals, and art education, as well as basic foundation courses. They are also professional artists and designers who exhibit their work in major museums and galleries throughout the world. Born in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and across the United States, these professionals collectively bring a wealth of experience and perspectives to art and art education. The fully illustrated catalogue was designed by Dimitry S. Tetin and features texts by curator Michael Asbill, Sara J. Pasti, and Anne Galperin.

Cover of The Floating World
The first-ever catalogue dedicated to light artist and holographer Rudie Berkhout, The Floating World focuses on the transmission holograms Berkhout made from 1978 to 1989, a peak period of his creativity and professional recognition. In a transmission hologram, a rear-mounted light shines on a glass plate to illuminate a three-dimensional image. Curator Daniel Belasco situates Berkhout in the art and culture of his day, from the mass-produced holograms on the cover of National Geographic to the other artists working at the intersection of technology and audience participation. Holography scholar Martina Mrongovius provides a detailed account of the technology and craft in Berkhout's working process. Additional catalogue components include reprints of two important artist statements, multiple illustrations of exhibited art works, bibliography, and detailed exhibition history. Berkhout envisioned his abstract holograms as the marriage of science, art, and philosophy.

Cover of In/Animate
In/Animate surveys the past decade of work by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, internationally renowned metalsmith and head of the Metal Program at SUNY New Paltz. Curated by author Akiko Busch, the exhibition explores a variety of artistic processes using iron, copper, brass, silver, and enameled steel. Mimlitsch-Gray's domestic artifacts suggest a coalescence of body and thing, conveying the mutability of the animate and inanimate and reflecting the intimacy between people and the objects they use. A spoon could be a lip, or a dangling twist of fabric, a vein. Over forty meticulously crafted works contribute to the contemporary conversation about how household objects express ideas about presentation, utility, and class.

Cover of Sara Greenberger Rafferty
The boxing term "gloves off"—frequently used as a metaphor to characterize brutal political campaigns and post-9/11 military interrogation—aptly describes the subtle aggressions in American popular culture that Sara Greenberger Rafferty lays bare. Blurring the lines between two and three dimensions, Rafferty attaches her wall-mounted works using custom-painted screws that break up the images. She also deploys cracked paint resembling viscous bodily fluids, further "wounding" the objects. Over the past decade, Rafferty has referenced the language, gestures, and props associated with stand-up comedy. This exhibition includes a new large-scale work entitled "Jokes on You," featuring images of ephemera from the collections of the National Museum of American History, which was part of Rafferty's study during her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Index cards from the Phyllis Diller "Gag File," scanned and recontextualized by Rafferty, underscore the trauma associated with cultural mores that assert control over women's bodies, such as marriage and consumerism.

Cover of Text/ures of Iraq

Text/ures of Iraq

by Sara J. Pasti

Published 15 March 2017
Text/ures of Iraq presents work by New York-based sculptor Oded Halahmy, a Jewish native of Baghdad, alongside that of eight contemporary artists from Iraq: Hayder Ali, Amal Alwan, Mohammed al Hamadany, Ismail Khayat, Hanaa Malallah, Hassan Massoudy, Naziha Rashid, and Qasim Sabti. Gathering works that reference Iraq's literary past in an effort to better understand the region's present, the book finds its constituent artists celebrating their country as a pastoral idyll, where people of different beliefs, cultures, and ethnicities peacefully coexisted for centuries, while also mourning the gradual, more recent fraying of Iraqi culture. The layered and abraded surfaces of some of the pieces speak to the persistence of violence, while the picturesqueness of others captures the powerful affective textures of nostalgia and exile.

The book also features examples of modern Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy, including some variants of this form that evoke hurufiyah, an influential modern Arab variant of Lettrism that uses the swoops and curves of the Arabic alphabet as painterly gestures. From abstract collages constructed out of the remains of destroyed books to the Hebrew calligraphy seen in Halahmy's art, these works demonstrate the importance of the literary in Iraqi society, culture, and visual arts of the past and present day.