The Artist and the Astrophysicist

photo by
Sue Weisler   
R.I.T. photographer
at an illustrated talk by Steve Carpenter
on the left and Adam Frank on the right




With artwork, an interesting question arises about collaborations - who gets to sign the work?
There are historical precedents to consider, and the business of giving credit where credit is due has to be addressed.  How do you determine whose contributions you are looking at?

Sometimes more than one artist signs the work, and in contemporary art we are seeing many more collaborations.  In the past we had the products of the atelier system, master artists then had the services of students and assistants who brought the art to life.  In this system we only knew who these assistants were if they went on to make a name for themselves later for their own artwork.

In the 1970's and1980's I worked as an artist with my father, Arthur Singer, on images that often found their way into publications - either books, collectibles, and even postage stamps.  Whenever possible, we both signed the actual artwork.

Controversy surrounds some collaborations - witness a court case mentioned in a recent New York Review of Books over the validity of an Andy Warhol silkscreen work.  Determining what is an authentic print can involve a lot of detective work, - but is a collaborative work somehow less original?  Does it matter that the Warhol Factory made the print and the artist signed the image?  Hasn't that process been part of the artworld for decades?

Our understanding of what the practice of fine art really is - changes and expands like the universe that astrophysicist Adam Frank talked so passionately about.  He came to R.I.T. to give an illustrated talk with painter, Steve Carpenter late in March.  When they speak about deep space and star formation, they talk about a creative process, full of light, violence, and extreme beauty.  This was a collaborative venture between the artist and the scientist - to try to find and touch the reality of these grand events and see some reflection of humanity and how we are a part of this astonishing array.  Paintings start as printing on canvas,  employing yet another artist - Tony Dungan - to make digital files that develop a foundation that will accept  thick paint.  Equations try to give  mathematical explanations for the phenomena of star formation.  The equations are etched like hieroglyphs in the paintings and only hint at the intellect at work trying to decipher distant hot spots in the universe.

Collaboration in the visual arts was unusual, if it fought with expectations of the solitary figure at work - alone in a studio creating work of value.  I think we are beginning to see a greater emphasis and resonance with ideas that are brought about by collective spirit, and aggregate talents.

Adam Frank
at R.I.T.
Photo by
Sue Weisler

Saturation

Skyline from Pier 92
by Anna Sears


For artists, a shakeout is underway.  This screening process determines whether you have a network that will sustain you - or sidetracks you if you've set unreasonable goals that can't be maintained.  A recession tests your mettle.  Most of the artwork from artists that we know comes from a broad middle class (raised with ambitions and aspirations) - but will that demographic cohort be able to ride out the slow times ahead? We worry that the visual artworld has become complacent, and conservative.  A case could be made that the Armory Show which we visited this week fell flat even though many of the old stalwarts lined the miles of booths along Pier 92  and Pier 94 in Manhattan.

We really paid attention to everything - looking for some rewards in and among the newcomers from
Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America.  One goes to the Armory Show to catch up to what is happening around the globe, and this year a lot of minor art failed to grab me or make an impression.

Maybe the dealers were playing it safe, or maybe it was the cold pristine weather outside, but the crowd was thin on the Modern side of the Armory Show.  Small paintings from a 35 year old Brit named William Daniels caught my eye. The two on view vibrated with delicious color and buoyancy.  John Walker had a large collection of small paintings from the "Harrington Road Series" - a real temptation to buy #52-54 but I couldn't scrounge up the $28K.

Tony Cragg

There seemed to be many Tony Cragg amalgamations which come in many materials ( the one above in a rustyish color had some appeal ) but even here, this art seems to be repeating itself.  Hybrid artforms like the constructions by Zach Harris at the Meulensteen booth holds some promise for the future.

Zach Harris

As in past years, you might have stopped to look at the metallic wall hangings from El Anatsui, a sculptor born in Ghana - who now has an international following.  His work, made from pieces of tin cans and bottle caps is seductive and flows like satin curtains of red and gold.  The handiwork is obsessive and unusual and makes a case for recycling!

At the end of a long row, in a quiet space, the work from Egyptian born Susan Hefuna glowed.  Her simple geometries were moving, as were her methods of using translucent tracing paper.  This work which is very architectural exists in the same spaces that Julie Mehretu seems to inhabit- manifest layers of linearity conjure up mental structures; and suitable spaces for art.

There was a lot less photography of any consequence this year.  I was amused by James Casebere's upscale model homes, and there was a dynamic large leaf from the Starn Twins, but I found a gallery of real flowering trees more attractive.  And what was that neon fence about?  As with the show last year, Pierogi of Brookyln featured a Patrick Jacobs mini diorama made with unworldly skill and amazing patience.

But we had to move on, and get up to New England.  Foster + Partners designed and built a new world for the MFA in Boston, and this is a much needed revitalization for a grand old museum.  You can still seek out your favorite Winslow Homer painting, or troll for beauties among the Hudson River School, but my favorite works in Boston came from the Near and Far East.  Japanese prints make up part of my personal collection, so I like to see what is on view in the special exhibition titled " Flowers and Festivals".  I was knocked out by a Kuniyoshi diptych showing a tree grafted with 100 varieties of chrysanthemums -all in bloom - from 1843.  This is a form of horticultural prowess that is truly spectacular!

Also on view were Japanese baskets - the likes of which you have never seen - to delight the eye.  From Turkey I was pleased to see the Iznik tiles and bowls and my curiosity was piqued by Qajar metalwork from 19th century Iran.

Many parts of Boston's Museum of Fine Art were still under construction, so we didn't get the full impact of what they had to offer.  Stopping for a cup of tea on the main level, we relax in a spacious, comfortable meeting area under skylights that let in afternoon rays which we soak up before we hit the road.

Weather vanes at MFA
photo by Anna Sears

Transformation and Transcendence

The Freedom Place Collection and the Frederick Douglas Resource Center Gallery

Alma W. Thomas
"Snoopy Sees A Day Break on Earth, 1970, oil on canvas

I grew up in a household with a deep respect for African American art, and also art of indigenous peoples from around the world.  My father was a collector, my parents both working artists.  The music we heard at home: spirituals, blues, jazz or soul had a transformative aspect for us.  The music and lyrics took common local occurrence and cast it as universal experience, and the best art does this seemingly without effort.

African American art had the power to deal with years of oppression and turn it into something expressive, positive, and motivational - looking for a way to become an agent for change; seeking a better life.  The aspirations of a people can be seen and felt in artwork collected by Stuart and Julia Bloch in their exhibition: The Freedom Place Collection" now on view at The Mercer Gallery located on the campus of Monroe Community College.

Five artists contribute paintings, drawings, and collage that fill the modest gallery space with light, life, and surprising detail.  The majority of this traveling collection however remains unseen in the present venue because of space restrictions, but we are still very lucky to have the opportunity to see this art that prior to this show remained in a vault.

These artists, all people of color, faced rejection - and the effects marginalized them in the art market which skews all cultural output.  Nevertheless, artists put their heart in their work, and that makes a difference.  When you walk into the gallery you might expect overt political statement, but what you get is often the solitary, poetic side of human nature, and personal observation.  At the door, the art of Benny Andrews conveys this light touch even if the subject is an elegy to a life lost ("Hero's Ascension") or a portrait of the artist's mother ( "Viola Study").  Andrews favors collage and quirky pen and ink as in the drawing of fellow artist Raphael Soyer, and in the big book cover for "The Ribbon Dance".

Robert Freeman recounts in a television interview the frustration he felt at trying to find gallery representation; the effects of lingering racism clouding the future for the visual artist.  Freeman paints big and bold expressive strokes of color on larger size paintings that remind me of David Park and Emil Nolde.  Freeman's concerns are figurative, with perhaps biblical reference in "Eve and the Serpent", and a party in "Garden Encounters ll" painted in 1988, while he was a teacher at Harvard in Boston.

Richard Yarde's "Front #2/ Back #2 works on a grand scale for watercolor on paper.  There is a signature style in evidence that looks like patches of cloth on a quilt, and an imposing figure built this way confronts the viewer.  Watercolor portraiture is not easy to achieve, but I especially liked Yarde's distorted pointilist painting of the Erskine Hawkins big band painted in 1983.

Years ago, I had the chance to shake Romare Bearden's hand in congratulations at his opening at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery (in Manhattan) and I remember a soft spoken big man who wasn't looking past you when he spoke (an especially annoying habit in the New York City artworld).  Bearden often cut collage materials from things that arrived in the mail, and I found one of my illustrations glued to part of a composition he made.  So we shared something in common as he related his interest in birds, especially in the tropics where he spent part of the year.

Bearden's imagery has a classic balance, even when he is recalling "Memories of High Cotton - Picking Cotton" a collage from 1977.  This intensely felt work of art focuses as much on the green hills, as it does on the folks ( almost abstractions) with patterned bags picking cotton under bare trees.  During his working life, Bearden was a social worker, and jazz aficionado, who painted and made prints with
Robert Blackburn in New York City.  Bearden was among a very few African American artists who had achieved national visibility, and this year there will be a set of stamps honoring his life and art.

Even though there is an element of abstraction in Bearden's art (see his radiant watercolors "Highway" and "Indigo Night"), he doesn't strip his art of recognizable imagery as occurs in the paintings of Alma Woodsey Thomas.  My cousin, Michael Rosenfeld has featured Alma Thomas' paintings at his gallery in New York City for many years, and I was happy to re-acquaint myself with the three works on display in the Mercer Gallery.  "Snoopy Sees a Day Break on Earth" an oil painting from 1970 is a most striking example, with each tangible stroke of color applied without a second guess.

Alma Thomas lived most of her life in Washington, D.C. and I would like to think that her presence there was a model for younger artists to follow.  She was the first African American woman to be given a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and also the first to earn her MFA from Columbia University.  The paintings on view in the "Freedom Place" exhibition suggest that she should take her rightful place among the other Washington Color Field painters like Morris Louis and Ken Noland.

Across town, at 36 King Street, a modern art gallery snuggles up to quaint homes along the park near the Susan B. Anthony House.  What a find!  The Frederick Douglass Resource Center and Gallery offers a wide-open space to view Pepsy Kettavong's show "Lynching in America".  Not squeamish, Pepsy Kettavong takes on the most difficult subjects, this being the first of three exhibitions dealing with murder, starvation and sex trafficking.  Not shy of the controversial images, Pepsy rivets your attention to a larger than life size noose which hangs ominously in the middle of this cavernous space.  Accompanying the noose, are tableaux with a picnic table full of goodies, above which hangs a photo of a dead African American.  Imagine the grotesque notion of having a meal in the midst of such a horror.

Pepsy Kettavong has been the author of public sculpture honoring Rochester and in his new series he promises to open a dialog and address issues that other artists can't or won't deal with.  Art in this case offers a path to transcendence by dealing squarely with issues that are an attack on all of humanity.

Representations from Six Nations

The Haudenosaunee territory is comprised of almost two million acres of central and western New York, established with the signing of the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794.  From this area, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy emerge to include Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga and the Tuscarora.Among their number are many skilled craftspeople, and gifted fine artists.  Now long overdue, an effort is being made to introduce the contemporary visual arts of the Haudenosaunee people in a gallery setting.

Until now, with a few exceptions, these artists of central and western New York have been overshadowed by more popular arts from tribal regions in the southwestern U.S.  Think of the distinctive pottery of Nampeyo or Maria Martinez.  Perhaps, because there is a history of trade goods made for sale in the southwest (that was lacking in the east) there was a public perception that not much was going on in the eastern part of the country.  From the west, traditional crafts, primarily weaving and ceramics were elevated in the minds of collectors.  Then one must factor in the past relationship of "ethnographic" arts from Native American peoples and the place they were usually given (if at all) in museums and galleries.  Here in 2011, there is a growing awareness and acknowledgement of the contributions, both past and present, of indigenous peoples - and what better place to start looking at this issue than here and now.

                                          G. Peter Jemison "Albino Crow", 2011
                                                                                        

A good primer on the state of these affairs was found in Victor, New York last week in the Town Hall when G. Peter Jemison gave an illustrated lecture for the Friends of Ganondagan.  Jemison is not only a preserver of traditions, but also an active contemporary artist who has long been instrumental as a curator of exhibitions featuring Native Americans.   Jemison is a member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, and he is a manger of the Ganondagan Historic Site near Victor, NY.

When you appreciate art, you bring your experience and culture along with other baggage.  So, it is refreshing to see things from a different angle, and it can also be challenging (art does that directly and sometimes obliquely).  Jemison highlighted the artwork of living artists and guided the listener with stories and anecdotes that helped profile the present state of Native American art in this region.

Last year, at Nazareth College, and more recently at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, G. Peter Jemison helped organize exhibitions with many of the same artists that he featured with his Power Point demonstration in Victor.   Coming from outside the Native American culture however, this viewer needs to have a guide to better understand the creation stories, and layers of cultural tradition that is part of the fabric of the Haudenosaunee arts.  There is a history to deal with and a current situation that presents itself.

A history lesson is summoned forth through the power of the "documentary" video by Shelley Niro.  Titled "The Shirt", this short video runs about six minutes but captures your attention with acerbic humor, and truth telling - spelling out a position as clear as day.  Intercut with scenes from the Niagara River and Falls, an Indian woman stands her ground, wearing her white shirt and an American flag bandana.

She hardly moves and the camera slowly pans, the only things that change are the slogans you see on her shirt.  The shirt then narrates a history of deceit and murder, and after all these calamities have happened, all she is left with is her shirt, and in the last frames of the video - even that is taken away.  The pain and humiliation is compounded with injustice; the feelings are palpable.

The Native North Americans who invented the game of Lacrosse might never have imagined how popular their sport has become.  Recently, in July 2010, an Iroquois team of athletes were invited but were unable to compete in an international tournament because they were denied an opportunity to travel on their own nation's passports.  This is commemorated in two works at The Everson Museum, in the exhibition "Haudenosaunee: Elements".  There, the artists Tracy Thomas, and Frank Buffalo Hyde fashion graphic statements that dramatize this incident.

Co-curators Deborah Ryan of The Everson, and artist Tom Huff received some assistance from Aweeneyoh Powless, an intern and student currently getting her master's degree in studio art at R.I.T.
Aweeneyoh is also an award winning dancer, and her performance paintings are documented in another video, as well as on the walls of this compact exhibition.  Ms. Powless's art bridges the realms of culture crossing over boundaries between European painting traditions and North American rituals and celebratory dance modes.  Like the painter, Yves Klein, Aweenyoh Powless makes expressive use of her body; her footprints make a mark for each movement as she carries herself across the canvas.

There are some powerful statements in the exhibition, some that are three dimensional, some two dimensional paintings, and other hybrids created for the show using video and casts of figures in encaustic (a pigmented wax), or a work like Jolene Rickard's corn pounder with music, printmaking and wood sculpture.

Tom Huff has a suite of carvings on the ground floor, and other sculptures placed amongst his fellow artists above on the second floor.  These are more traditional carvings which embody a mythology that reaches back in history, but projects a vision forward of strength, protection, and unity.  Haudenosaunee:
Elements, an exhibition featuring 21 artists, representing Six Nations continues at The Everson Museum in Syracuse for the month of January.

The Print Club at 80

Satan's Camaro
a printmaking collective
at the Lockhart Gallery
in The Memorial Art Gallery
part of an exhibition
celebrating
 The Print Club of Rochester's
80th anniversary


The Print Club at 80

Walk down the hall to the Lockhart Gallery inside The Memorial Art Gallery this winter and inspect the works on paper.  No, this is not a show of octogenarian book collectors, it is an exhibition titled "Great Impressions" honoring The Print Club of Rochester as it turns 80 years old.  The Print Club is dedicated to fine art printmaking and fosters interest from artists, print collectors and students of this widely varied artform.  It also sponsors, through membership dues, the creation of signed limited edition hand pulled prints that are among the benefits of joining this engaging group.

Of course there are other art clubs in the city of Rochester, but none have such a specific focus, as you will see from this show.  "Great Impressions" is made up of 33 presentation prints which were selected to represent various techniques and highlight the accomplishments of some of this country's greatest printmaking artists.

I guess it is fair to disclose that I have been on the board of The Print Club for a number of years, and I have worked hard to raise the level of recognition for printmaking through my art, and through my work for this non-profit organization.

A new generation of artists is coming up to rejuvenate printmaking, -witness the materials in the vitrine around the back of the show and read all about Satan's Camaro.  Here,  techniques used to make their prints are as delicate as smoke and as hard hitting as a steamroller (no, literally!).

It is not easy to summarize this small show, and as the sign says in front, it is almost impossible to define printmaking today.  Traditional printmaking usually employs an artist who creates an original image on a block or a plate that is then transferred onto paper or other substrate, but that would leave out silk-screen, photogravure, Solarplates, and much more.

"Great Impressions" is not a tutorial on how prints are made, but rather a greatest hits show of beautiful art that can be had for the price of a membership.  You can start a collection on a tight budget and still get world-class art for your home or office.

Some of the artists you will encounter go back to the initial days of The Print Club.  Thomas Nason and Henry C. Pitz may not be familiar names to the gallery goer, but one of my favorites, James D. Havens should be known to a wider audience especially for his wonderful woodblock print " Blackberries".

In the early years of The Print Club, most prints - etchings or wood engravings were printed with black inks on white paper and Claire Leighton's "Cotton Pickers" is a good example of this.  If the artist had a particular knack for a medium like lithography you might find evocative light and shadow, giving a print graphic impact in a work like "Adirondack Cabin" by Rockwell Kent.  Today, art by Rockwell Kent is among the icons of early 20th century American art.  But it is hard to predict whose art will be elevated to this status - you just have to look for the gems among this collection.

Among the prints on view you will find major names in the field like Clare Romano who wrote a book with her husband John Ross called "The Complete Printmaker" (it was her artwork that got me started making prints when I was ten).  Our local talents are not left out of the show and you will find a colorful photo lithograph by Joan Lyons, and graven images by Ron Netsky and Jerome Witkin in the Lockhart Gallery show.

The Print Club has commissioned modern artists to make an edition each year to be distributed to club members, and some recent highlights include Carol Wax's mezzotint,  Gregory Amenoff''s print "Arcadia" and Paul Resika's color etching of a boathouse.  Seeing this bounty of terrific images makes me want to know more about each artist's work, and maybe even take one home to hang on my wall.
If you want to know more about The Print Club look at the web site:  www.roc-printclub.com



Take a look at this new resource:
http://culturehall.com/resources.html

Re:Vision

Photo by John Pfahl
Cedar Mesa, UT
from the show "Metamorphoses de la Terre"
at Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has been looking around museums and galleries for contemporary art these days, that the energy revealed is so scattered, the focus is so personal, and the methods so diffuse, that this era could be summed up for its ephemeral art.

The aesthetic of early 21st century art is more ambiguous than let's say the irony of the 1960's.  Maybe I can catch a thread of a story first told by Marcel Duchamp and carried forward through Robert Rauschenberg and made manifest in the art found in the shows titled "Alternating Currents " presented in venues around Buffalo.

I do find an art of sublimation, an art of aura, with an atmosphere of indirection in the exhibit which is celebrated under the larger aegis of "Beyond, In Western New York" when I recently visited the Albright Knox Gallery.

The show does touch on a few real experiences, one of which I found in a drawing by Joan Linder of an office (at a mortuary?).  Joan sets about trying to create a match between her drawing ( all those obsessive little lines) and the rather mundane equipment found in the outer office with notes tacked up on shelves -highlighting cremation services- amid boxes of latex gloves that serve as bookends.

Kai Althoff contributes a menagerie of sculpture on a circus theme - a large lady made of wire bends over backwards - and immediately my mind reverts to Giacometti's "Woman With Her Throat Cut".  Maybe it is the grim atmosphere outside the museum that clouds my vision, I just can't feel the necessity of the cage with the playful lion, except that it gives a friendly nod of recognition to Sandy Calder.

Sheldon Berlyn's colorful abstract paintings remind one of the formalist days, but these paintings sometimes are too thin, and I really prefer David Reed for a good gestural sweep, or even someone like Polly Apfelbaum for a new color-field experience.  Victoria Bradbury on the other hand did sound a deeper note of history; of nostalgia, and employs today's technology to revise our notions of what a photograph can signify.  The painterliness of this installation is informed by processing software - which is the magic lantern projection of today, here using images of a bygone era conflating past and present.

James Carl's sculptural presence is welcome in the present company because of its primary focus on form.  Overlapping and creating woven patterns of plastic window shade/blinds isn't a unique idea ( I think of Martin Puryear) but at least Carl's sculpture lends tangible form to a very understated exhibition.

Richard Huntington's paintings mingle with the old masters of modern art to a great and subversive effect, especially as a next door neighbor to Matisse.  A funny "Our Lady of Perpetual DeKooning Shapes" at least got me to chuckle, a rare thing in this dissolute gathering of regional art.

Leaving that all behind me, I travel down Elmwood in Buffalo to Nina Freudenheim Gallery, and walk into an oasis of photography by John Pfahl.  I have been following his work for years and recently I see that he has revisited his "Altered Landscape" series with experiments taking old images and reworking them by applying blends, and digital blurs; making the earth malleable and "plastic".


Suddenly, photography is an expressionist canvas in which anything can happen.  In a few instances this concept is almost indistinguishable from reality, as in the lava forms found and photographed at the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii.  Some images have been subtly exxagerated, other images like "Lower YellowstoneFalls" verge on kitsch.  My favorite images from Cedar Mesa in Utah, remind me of color field paintings, very frontal and tactile.

Carl Chiarenza in the Dean's Gallery
at R.I.T.

Unless you work at Rochester Institute of Technology, and happen over to see Dean Frank Cost of the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, you probably would never know of the Dean's Gallery.  It isn't much more than a modified hallway that allows Zerbe Sodervick and her Gallery Management class to mount shows mostly of alumni art.  This season we have been treated to a wonderful showcase for Carl Chiarenza which he aptly titles "Ephemera" ( which comes full circle to my earlier characterization ).  You may know Carl's work from his many books and exhibitions ( some of these books- lavish portfolios- are included in the exhibit).  Carl says of his work, " My process creates form and subject simultaneously", which might sound like a formula but really isn't.  What Carl does is create collages  (which are later thrown away) and photographing his artwork at very close range - leaving only the photo as evidence that a collage ever existed.

So, there is a dynamic and a value placed on what remains; the photo is the final state of affairs for the performance of this art that owes a debt to the cubism of Picasso, Braque, Schwitters and Anne Ryan.  Carl's artwork is so intimate, so improvisational, and also at times presented on such a monumental scale ( especially for something so humble in its origins) that it is viewed as completely transformational- and for that,  it simply must be seen.

Karma Comes To See You

Alex Grey
1985
"Journey of the Wounded Healer"
Psychedelic
Optical and Visionary Art


"Psychedelic Optical and Visionary Art, Since the 1960's" is a slowly opening time capsule with a provocative premise: can an art exhibition hold together polar opposites?  My experience as an artist, looking at this show, is one of amusement and wonder- this is an effort at revisionist art history in the making.  When a minimalist Frank Stella can hang on a wall in close proximity to Albert Alvarez "Karma and Death" - they do seem to pervade my consciousness....  What kind of story is this show trying to tell? Is it extolling the virtues of recreational drugs? It certainly takes me back to the old mantra of "sex,drugs, and rock n roll".

Outlined here for the viewer:  there once was a time when all the rules were challenged and a few were broken (but this might also be read as over-the-top indulgent and narcissistic).  Is that the point?  Is this show a cautionary tale?  I would have loved to be in the room when the ideas for this show were developed..

Then again, what need does this show answer?  It is a cabinet for the curious, and maybe it will also pull in some of the baby boomers who actually lived through the experience of the 1960's.  Looking back, if the 1960's brought a period of self-indulgence, it was also a period of the civil rights movement and the birth of feminism, plus an anti-war movement that swept the country.  Social activism, and heightened consciousness for every living thing seemed to co-exist, thank you very much.  That is the background providing a foundation for the art on view at The Memorial Art Gallery.

If you believe the philosophy professor and art critic Arthur Danto, then the historical narrative of progress in art came to an end with Andy Warhol's "Brillo Box" - and what we see here in this show is an implosion - where the practice of art fragments and consumes itself.  Zap Comix - popular underground reading material from R. Crumb (not represented in this show - but tonic for the 1960's) is sorely missed as is the anarchic painter Peter Saul, and the optical art of Bridget Riley ( just to name a few missing links).

Enter the exhibit under the theatrical lights that create a swirl on the walls and floor ( and in your mind) and you find the sophisticated in a dialog with the self-taught.  Years ago, many of the paintings on view would have been considered Folk Art, but maybe these distinctions are disappearing.  This is part of my impression that this show is a tug-of-war between various art world factions.

I have my arguments with Fred Tomaselli (about copyright issues) but I like his constellations of pills in "Ripple Trees" that is one of the keystones of this show.  Within his work there is an interest in nature and geometry,abstraction, silhouette and reality all rolled into one.  I think a hallmark of late 20th century art is a layering of representation and meaning, in several paintings in this show such layering creates a busy surface which takes time to read properly.

Sometimes the reading of the painting is not as logical as one might expect.  An example might be the Cartesian spaces described in the painting by Al Held ("South of West 1") that lead to visual paradox.  The wall label mentions string theory, but my guess is that Al Held is trying to subvert the strict logic of geometry which he obsessively constructs.

I had the good fortune to be present at the creation of one of the major paintings on view, so I can remember it first as a drawing on canvas, and then remember the process that Alex Grey employed (great clarity and sense of purpose).  His "Journey of the Wounded Healer" has attracted many who come to marvel at this triptych that describes three stages of life (and death).  Alex was my neighbor for a while, and he learned his craft while working as a medical illustrator and a preparator of cadavers for dissection. A follower of Tibetan Buddhism, Alex and his wife Allyson are building a museum in Wappinger's Falls New York for their artwork.

I mentioned obsession before, and that seems to be another characteristic of this exhibition -  excessive detail( gone is the modernist slogan "less is more").  Exceptions are made for artists Phillip Taafe, Stella, and Victor Vasarely - who are more attentive to a stricter premise and give little attention to embroidery.

George Cisneros provides "Cascades of Jubilation" - a video presentation complete with dark room and round mirrors that is the equivalent of Pac-Man( a prototypical video game) built with a primitive computer from the early 1980's.  In those days even the photo on this page would have required more memory capacity than what was on board that old Apple ll.  Boy, have we come a long way in such a short time! ( or is that an illusion too?).