Hudson Circle is an exhibition that imagines a context for art built on collective awareness of ourselves as part of nature. Artists like Thomas Cole, Raph Albert Blakelock, and Edwin Church forayed into the landscape, embodying the idea that individual genius is the essence of creative accomplishment. These artists appreciated the natural world and the early conservation efforts associated with an already dwindling majestic landscape. Today, we find ourselves with a deconstructed hero myth and a Hudson Valley changed by commerce, technology, and the American myth of limitless growth. The “I” that paints the glorified landscape and gives it value cedes to a new model.
Hudson Circle seeks to recreate the intimate conversations of artists sharing their ideas on a porch in the Hudson Valley. Themes include the observer effect, deconstructing the language of painting, cultivating the imagination, and being open and vulnerable to the porous nature of our surroundings as an impulse to create work. Hudson Circle seeks to explore and make visible the formative histories underlying conversations between its participants about place, joy, and the future of making.
