Americans hunger for sweet things and twentieth-century mass marketing has turned American artists attention to candy, the forbidden fruit in the exhibition I WANT Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art organized by the Hudson River Museum. I WANT Candy examines the attractions and the tempting representations of a sweet tableau. 
 In her famous quote about the aesthetic joys of colored sugar, Simone de Beauvoir speaks to the enduring appeal of the food of decadence, frivolity, and abandonment: 
 I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops -- red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colors themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me. 
 That desire so inherent in Beauvoir s longing vision of sweets runs through most of the contemporary artworks in this exhibition. American artists fascination with the seductive lure of candy has increased dramatically since the 1960s when Pop Art began to challenge the severity of Modernism. Many of the works on view represent a return to figurative work and are indebted to Pop s embrace of kitsch. In Will Cotton s Candy Curls, 2005, a modern-day Marie Antoinette s headdress is literally transformed into a cornucopia of spiraling peppermint sticks topped by an ice-cream cone hat. 
 This easygoing decadence has not always pervaded American art. Perhaps uncomfortable with the sensual visual and gustatory pleasures of sugar, candy appears infrequently in 19 th-century still life. A few artists such as Raphaelle Peale and Joseph Decker incorporate the beauty of sugar into their work but always in keeping with their restrained aesthetic style, which does not suggest careless abundance to a somewhat puritanical American audience. 
 The menu has changed and so have artists perceptions. In paintings, watercolor and sculpture, I WANT Candy explores their work through the themes of Sweet Tableau: The Still Life Tradition; Candyland: The Innocence of Childhood; Sugar: The Food of Desire, Too Sweet: The Cavity of Consumerism and The Witch s Abode: Candy as Canvas. 
 Contemporary artists in the exhibition include:Becca Albee, Julie Allen, Peter Anton, John Baeder, Barton Lidice Benes, Mindy Best, Morgan Bulkeley, Neil Christensen, Orly Cogan, Sharon Core, Will Cotton, Cindy Craig, James Del Grosso, Marylyn Dintenfass, Dan Douke, Travis Conrad Erion, Emily Eveleth Janet Fish, Audrey Flack, Cara Wood Ginder, Ralph Goings, Susan Graham, Red Grooms, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Bruce Helander, Richard Hickam, Ruth Grace Jervis, Zane Lewis, Mary Magsamen &amp; Stephan Hillerbrand, Melissa Martens, Kim Mendenhall, Don Nice, Patricia Nix,Brendan O Connell, John Salvest, Masaaki Sato, Jessica Schwind, Beverly Shipko, Tjalf Sparnaay, Wayne Thiebaud, and Stephanie Jaffe Werner. 
 The exhibition is organized at the Hudson River Museum by Bartholomew F. Bland, Exhibitions Curator

I WANT Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art

Bartholomew F. Bland

Hudson River Museum

Michael Botwinick

Arts & Photography

The first major museum exhibition devoted to the glittering themes of café society will be presented in Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola, organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by Bartholomew F. Bland. 
 Andrew Stevovich, a noted contemporary figurative painter, depicts a world infused with colorful characters that gamble with demons and fate. Ordinary men and women in everyday situations and locations, restaurants and bars, at the beach, and on public transportation show us a mysterious world imprinted on their stylized faces, and ask that their stories be considered, whether melancholy, romantic, violent, or lurid. 
 Although Stevovich's paintings are set in the contemporary world, his crisp design, brilliant color, and meticulous surface finishes recall Renaissance works. .Stevovich paints in oil and pastel and is also an accomplished printmaker and etcher. Stylistically, many critics have commented on the relationship of Stevovich s work to that of the early Italian painters. Growing up in Washington, DC, he often visited the National Gallery of Art where he internalized the Italians bold colors and repetition of shape and form. Not surprisingly, almost all his paintings are boldly colored portraits with stylized figures, many sensuous lipped, like those in early Roman sculpture and Renaissance painting. He has never truly embraced landscape or still life. 
 Among the 75 works in The Truth About Lola is Popcorn, on view for the first time. A major new work, it provides insights into the artist s technique. Stevovich says, I work backwards. First I draw the faces and foreground objects, rather than beginning in the more traditional way by blocking colors. To increase the luminosity of color, Stevovich keeps his canvas as white and pure as possible, before applying color, At times, the disenchantment beneath the surface of many of Stevovich s paintings bursts into the open. Scenes of overt violence make up a comparatively small but distinct group of works in his repertoire. Discord contains one of the artist s few crowd scenes where everyone engages with each other, except the central female figure, who clutches her chest in bewilderment. The bottom of the panel is a rare instance in which Stevovich show a man threatening a woman. The man extends his fists like a boxer and the woman holds up a defensive hand. In the top left hand corner, another woman, in anguish, presses her hands to the side of her heard, recalling Munch s The Scream. This very German Expressionist-influenced work echoes the chaos depicted in canvases from the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, which the artist intriguingly combines with Renaissance-like painting. 
 Stevovich holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts College of Art. Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Danforth Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. Stevovich s work is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 
 The show, organized by the Hudson River Museum, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola

Andrew Stevovich

Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace Images on Leather at the Hudson River Museum The work of Winfred Rembert, a self-taught artist, who documents his life and the tumultuous moments of the American Civil Rights Movement, is on view at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, January 21 through May 6, 2012. 
 In more than 50 works on hand-tooled leather stretched, stained, and etched Rembert constructs scenes from the rural Southern town where he was born and raised, and peoples it with characters working the fields, joyous at church meetings, and enjoying its pool hall, jazz club, and café. His images are alive with figures and color, and dense with pattern. Some, more somber, convey the strife and grief of his own experiences of a near lynching and prison life. 
 Growing up in 1950s rural Georgia, Rembert did backbreaking labor in the cotton fields. A young man, he was arrested during a 1960s civil rights march, and survived a near lynching. A prisoner serving an unjust seven-year sentence, he learned to make pattern and design on leather by watching a fellow inmate create tooled leather wallets. Years later, adding color on tanned leather, Rembert conjured a world of incredible brutality and close personal ties existing in discomforting proximity. The exhibition s riveting themes include the Cotton Field series, where cotton balls snake relentlessly through rows of toiling field hands: Rembert said, curved [cotton] rows make a beautiful pattern. But as soon as you start picking, you forget how good it looks and think how hard it is. There just isn t anything you can say about cotton that is good. 
 Amazing Grace, the first major museum exhibition of Rembert s work, incorporates historical photographs of places in Georgia, a documentary of his life by noted filmmaker Vivian Ducat, and gospel music both recorded and performed by Rembert in the Hudson River Museum galleries on several dates. Music, pivotal in Rembert s life and art, and has contributed to his success as a mentor to young people. 
 Rembert, who now lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, has shown his art at the Yale University Art Gallery alongside Hale Woodruff, a mid-20th century artist who also chronicled rural Georgia.. Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale Art Gallery said, I found myself captivated by the work of an entirely self-taught artist who was unaware of the strong affinities of form, subject matter, and narrative that he shared with Hale Woodruff and other towering figures of African-American Art such as Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden. 
 Organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, the show, is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue of essays by Bartholomew Bland, Director of Curatorial Affairs; Roger Panetta, History Professor, Fordham University; Ellen Keiter, Curator of Contemporary Art, Katonah Museum of Art; Fordham University Ph.D. candidate Clifton Watson, and Irma Watkins-Owens, Associate Professor, African and African American Studies, Fordham University.

Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace

Ellen Keiter

Irma Watkins-Owens

Clifton Watson

Roger Panetta

Winfred Rembert

About the Author\nBartholomew F. Bland is Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, where he has organized a number of exhibitions related to the art and history of the Hudson Valley Region including, Westchester: The American Suburb and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. He also curated A Field Guide to Sprawl for Arts Westchester, which examined of the impact of the suburban lifestyle on the physical environment, an exhibition that traveled to Yale University. Among his survey exhibitions for the Museum related to the Hudson River School are Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth and Greener Pastures: Images of Arcadia at the Hudson River Museum. 
Pat Hardy practiced for many years as a City civil litigator before completing a Ph.D. in 2008 at the Courtauld Institute on 19th-century British art. She has subsequently worked as Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Curator of Works on Paper at National Museums Liverpool and is currently Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London. Most recently she co-curated the Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum, contributed an essay Dickens and the Social Realists to the exhibition catalogue Dickens and the Artists, Yale University Press, 2012, and is currently writing a book on the imagery of emigration. 
Tara Dawson is a freelance research assistant who works at the Hudson River Museum in the Public Relations and Curatorial departments. In 2011 she conducted research for the Museum s exhibition Elihu Vedder: Voyage On the Nile and its exhibition catalogue. Tara holds a Masters in Museum Studies from New York University, 2010, and a Bachelor s from the University of Rhode Island, 2008. 
Geoff Snell is currently writing his doctoral thesis, A Forest of Masts: The Image of the River Thames in the Long Eighteenth Century, an exploration of the visual representation of the Thames and how it evolved to reflect changes in London as the city grew into a major port and center of a commercial empire. He has been collaborating with and supported by the National Maritime Museum, London, the University of Sussex, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council. In 2011, Snell won a Visiting Scholarship from the Yale Center for British Art, where he undertook a comparative study of Thames-related works by 18th-and early 19th-century artists represented in the Paul Mellon Collection, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington. 
Laura Vookles is Chief Curator of Collections at the Hudson River Museum. She has been a curator and essayist for the Museum s publications The Old Croton Aqueduct: Rural Resources Meet Urban Needs; Next Stop Westchester! People and the Railroad; Westchester: The American Suburb, Dutch New York: the Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, and Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth. In the 25 years that she has served at the Hudson River Museum, she has focused much effort on Glenview, the Museum s 1877 Hudson River home for which she completed numerous furnishing, conservation, and interpretation projects.

The Panoramic River: the Hudson and the Thames

Pat Hardy

Laura L. Vookles

Geoff Snell

Tara Dawson

This exhibition is the final episode in the artist s series on Colonial America, his successful combining of art, history, and sometimes wicked but always fun-to-read commentary on people Europeans adventurers and explorers, North American Indians, freed and enslaved blacks, and ravishing women who love, laugh, and die on the banks of the Hudson from Manhattan up to Lake Oneida. The action begins in 1791 and continues through 1793, real time for New York City just flaunting its new identity on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, and thriving under English rule. The city s first denizens, the Dutch, are has beens, unwillingly departed from the city they called New Amsterdam, and now skirmishing with their Iroquois allies in the Hudson Valley nearby to the north. Real and not real, fact and fiction, Frengland (a combo of France, England, and Ireland) and Batavia (the Netherlands) fight the climactic Battle of Yonkers, recorded and viewed for the first time at the Hudson River Museum, situated by the river in the very countryside that inspired the 19th-century Hudson River School painters. The landscapes of three artists, Jasper Cropsey, Asher Durand, and James Renwick Brevoort, paintings on view at the Museum, inspired Frohawk s scenic work for this exhibition, which also include almost a dozen new pieces among them The Battle of Yonkers and the Death of Iroquois Chief Joseph. Also new to Frohawk s story and the Hudson Valley is a Trojan Horse. Named for the war machine with which the ancient Greeks surprised the Trojans, Frohawk s horse holds some surprises of its own it sports two heads and is filled with warriors from both sides of the quarrel. Glass figures, they are fragile and exhausted from the wars. The wooden horse soars 22 feet high in the center of the exhibition and is illuminated from within. For Frohawk followers, favorite characters reappear, too, among them Bonnie Prince Johnnie and his flamboyant general Orlande, Duc du Rouen, who admidst his crew was a gilded peacock with sapphires for eyes. Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), an Illinois native who now lives and works in Los Angeles, California, first studied photography, film, and writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His recent solo exhibitions include the Wadsworth Athenaeum (Hartford, CT), Wellin Museum of Art (Clinton, NY), the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, CO). The exhibition is organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated its Deputy Director Bartholomew F. Bland.

Frohawk Two Feathers: Kill Your Best Ideas - The Battle for New York and its Lifeline, the Hudson River

Frohawk Two Feathers

One hundred years ago the Panama Canal linked east to west, opening for the first time in history a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Now the Panama Canal Expansion Project, slated for completion in 2016, will open a new water lane to more and larger ships. Celebrating today s Panama project, Oh Panama! looks back to the determined and spirited efforts of the architects and crews who accomplished the 1914 canal that was captured in paintings by Jonas Lie from the West Point Museum Collection, United States Military Academy. Lie s paintings continue today to impress viewers as a sublime and beautiful document of man s relentless quest to conquer nature and harness its riches. 
 Norwegian-born painter Jonas Lie (1880-1940) inspired by a motion picture documentary of the construction of the canal visited the Panama Canal Zone for three months in 1913. He was enthralled by the feats of engineering required to dig the Culebra Cut, as well as the sublime visual qualities of the massive trench being carved across the Isthmus of Panama. Working tirelessly in the intense tropical heat, he produced oil sketches and drawings and took careful notes on the technical aspects of the canal construction. 
 Recognized by his peers as a scientist and a poet for his depictions of New York City, Lie s canvasses were both historical documents of technological progress and dramatic interpretations of the urban environment. The thirty known pictures he made of Panama are lively and colorful, capturing the spirit of that endeavor as well as its heroic quality and monumental scale. Lie recalled the Panama experience as a pivotal moment in his career, one from which he received national recognition for his work and also developed the aesthetic and technical strategies that influenced his landscape compositions from that point forward. 
 When Lie returned to New York, he exhibited twenty-eight paintings from the Panama cycle at the Knoedler Gallery; two The Conquerors and Culebra Cut were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts before the exhibition embarked on a national tour in 1914. The exhibition was very popular with broad interest in Lie s paintings fueled by publicity photographs, news reports, and the release of documentary films following the canal s progress, such as the Edison Company s The Joining of the Two Oceans, The Panama Canal.

Oh Panama! Jonas Lie Paints the Panama Canal

Kirsten M. Jensen

Hudson River Museum and James A. Michener Musuem

Alien Nations 2020

Coral Gables Museum and Lehman College Art Gallery/CUNY

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