Officials at the Hyde Museum are looking for a strong 2017, with an exhibition schedule that includes one of the country’s greatest living watercolorists, an innovative contemporary artist, the most influential abstract artist of the postwar era, the annual Juried High School Show, and a massive exhibition of American folk art.
Featured exhibits this year include:
• Lorna Bieber: Forces of Nature, through May 14
The photo murals and montages of Bieber will be featured in the Hoopes Gallery. The artist manipulates stock media photography in scale and medium, reinterpreting the natural world, and evoking a sense of collective memory. Her works re-create nature as an idyllic and poetic world of familiar images. Bieber was trained as a painter, but turned her attention to photography while working for magazines. Her subject matter includes natural elements such as trees, flowers, and animals, as well as figurative subjects, sometimes with references to art history.
• Marking the Moment: The Art of Allen Blagden, Feb. 12 to April 16.
Blagden is a distinguished contemporary realist with longtime ties to the Adirondacks. He is well known for his paintings of animals, birds, landscapes, and people in the style of Winslow. His love of wildlife and birds stems from an internship illustrating for Serengeti National Park in Kenya, working for the Department of Ornithology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and summers spent in the Adirondacks.
Marking the Moment features 62 works by Blagden and is curated by Caroline Welsh, art historian and director emerita of the Adirondack Museum.
• The Juried High School Show, May 6 to May 28.
For the 26th year, some of the brightest talent in area high schools will be on display in the 26th annual Juried High School Show, which runs May 6-28 in the Charles R. Wood Gallery. Students from schools in Warren, Washington, Saratoga, Hamilton, and Essex counties are invited to submit works, from which a jury of local art professionals will select 100 to be displayed.
• Selections from the Feibes & Schmitt Collection, opens in June.
Modern and contemporary art takes over summer, as the highly anticipated Feibes & Schmitt Gallery is scheduled to open in June and, with it, the inaugural exhibition, Selections from the Feibes & Schmitt Collection. The inaugural exhibition will include works by some of the most influential artists in the postwar era, including Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson, Bridget Riley, and Andy Warhol.
• Ellsworth Kelly: Slow Curve
• Ellsworth Kelly: Fruits & Flowers, June 25 to September 24
Of the two exhibitions devoted to the printed work of Ellsworth Kelly, Slow Curve will be in the Charles R. Wood Gallery and Fruits & Flowers will be in the Whitney-Renz Gallery. Kelly is one of the most influential abstract artists in the postwar era. Slow Curve examines this ground-breaking artist’s experimentation with curved fields of color, ranging from tight ellipses and shapes with rounded corners to broad arcs and segments.
Fruits & Flowers reveals the root sources for many of Kelly’s geometric shapes, derived from line-drawn images of plants, fruits, and flowers, through a selection of 26 lithographs. Both exhibitions are from the Collections of Jordan Schnitzer and his Family Foundation in Portland, Oregon.
• A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America, Oct. 8 to Dec. 31.
The final major exhibition of 2017 celebrates art traditions in rural areas of New England, the South, and the Midwest between 1800 and 1925. The exhibition features more than 60 works from the distinguished collection of Barbara L. Gordon, including still life, landscape, portraits, sculpture, and distinctive examples of decorative art that exemplify the breadth of American creative expression.
Made by self-taught artists and artisans, who often lacked formal training, the works did not adhere to the established artistic taste in the urban centers along the East Coast. The result is art that is colorful and creative, often with traditional themes and functions. This stunning exhibition showcases the nation’s vibrant folk art traditions that prevailed in the United States for more than a century.
For more information, visit www.hydecollection.org or call 792-1761.