Hudson River Museum Presents New Exhibitions for Summer 2022

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YONKERS, NY, June 6, 2022 — The Hudson River Museum is proud to present our new exhibitions for Summer 2022—Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections and Federico Uribe: Plastic Reef. Order / Reorder explores new approaches to looking at American art that reconsider past and present expressions of American identity, with works from the HRM collection in unexpected new pairings, exciting loans from regional artists, and a selection of special loans from the Joslyn Art Museum. Federico Uribe: Plastic Reef is a vibrant and immersive installation depicting an underwater environment filled with creatures, including sea anemones, mussels, and “swimming” fish—all created from upcycled plastic. With this truly sensory experience, the artist confronts and reminds us of the fragility of life in this vibrant world and the disastrous impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems worldwide.

We are also thrilled to announce the reopening of Pop Art icon Red Grooms’s The Bookstore, which has been temporarily closed to the public due to construction of the Museum’s new West Wing. This immersive site-specific sculpture with dazzling color, decoration, and pattern, an homage to the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Mendoza Book Company, has been a beloved and highly visited highlight of the Hudson River Museum for more than forty years. With satirical social commentary built into the thousands of book volumes depicted, the work remains as fresh as ever.

“These exhibitions provide an exciting opportunity to dramatically reframe how we look at the Hudson River Museum’s rich collection,” said Director & CEO Masha Turchinsky. “They are a testament to the power of collaboration, from the local to the national, including our wonderful partners at Art Bridges and the Joslyn Art Museum. We are building on our commitment to elevating diverse voices, providing reflections of who we are as a community, and offering innovative opportunities to engage with art and with one another.”

 

Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections
June 17, 2022–September 3, 2023

Art as both creative output and curated object is in constant dialogue with the past and the present. It is this never-ending conversation that pushes art into its future, forcing us to continually reimagine the ways in which we project a vision of ourselves and the world around us. Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections explores approaches to looking at American art that consider expressions of American identity from new perspectives. The exhibition is co-curated by Laura Vookles, Chair, Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum, and Bentley Brown, Adjunct Professor of Art History at Fordham University and PhD Fellow, NYU Institute of Fine Arts.

The works on view range across genres: portraiture, figural studies, still life, landscape, and abstraction. Recent additions to the Museum’s collection and other artworks on view for the first time are joined by visitor favorites, paired with special loans from the Joslyn Art Museum and contributions from regional artists. Rather than structured chronologically, the installation is designed to spark discussion through juxtapositions of styles, outlooks, and eras. Works by renowned artists are in conversation with those now emerging.

“It’s been inspiring and invigorating to work with Bentley Brown, my HRM colleagues, and numerous artists to look at our collection with fresh eyes, considering new ways it can spark interaction and wonder, as well as meaningful conversations about current issues,” said Laura Vookles, Chair of the HRM’s Curatorial Department. “We welcome our communities to find joy in art, consider new viewpoints, and explore their own creativity, as well as the many stories to be found in the Museum’s rich collection.”

Co-curator Bentley Brown stated, “There are times when we need to reevaluate what has been done, reimagine the narratives we have created, and then reconsider how we will move forward. These past two years have certainly been a testament to this. And I believe this labor starts at the local level and at museums such as the Hudson River Museum that are so rooted within the community.”

The exhibition invites viewers to find connections in unexpected groupings of objects. For example, arranging works by Hudson River School artist James Fairman, Southwest painter Eanger Irving Couse, and Shinnecock Nation photographer Jeremy Dennis side by side offers fresh insight into traditional assertions of who owns and has access to nature and current efforts by artists to combat erasure. Alison Moritsugu and Valerie Hegarty remind us that nineteenth-century visions of pristine nature presaged its destruction, and that the preservation of “wilderness” requires environmental stewardship. Contrasting images by Hananiah Harari and Winfred Rembert assert the dignity of the working class, whether at work or at play. In considering the impact of Modernism, art on view ranges from a 1951 rug designed by Henri Matisse for Alexander Smith & Sons in Yonkers to a mixed-media piece by Jamel Robinson, which demonstrates a new generation of artists that have embraced abstraction with new and impactful results.

The gallery experience will include ways for visitors to provide feedback on favorite themes and artworks, as well as to propose new pairings and groupings—all to help the Museum crowdsource ideas for future rotations and reinstallations.

Several works in this exhibition are generously lent by Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska as part of the Art Bridges’ Collection Loan Partnership initiative.

Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections is made possible by generous support from the New York State Senate and Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins.

Exhibitions are made possible by assistance provided by the County of Westchester.

#HRMOrderReorder

 

Federico Uribe: Plastic Reef
June 17, 2022–February 12, 2023

From a distance, Plastic Reef appears to be a colorful and beautiful underwater world. Up close, one can see the hundreds of pieces of plastic, which are carefully cut and arranged. The result is playful yet communicates a real and present threat. In this installation, artist Frederico Uribe challenges us to reflect on Mother Nature’s pivotal presence and be inspired to give back what was taken from her: marine species and corals.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Federico Uribe currently lives and works in Miami. In 1996, the artist abandoned his paint brushes and canvases in favor of household objects. His artwork resists classification and emerges from intertwining everyday objects in surprising ways that maintain a formal reference to art history. Over the past decade, his artwork has been collected by and featured in multiple museums around North and South America and exhibitions in Europe and Asia.

In Plastic Reef, the artist weaves together everyday plastic objects—such as used bottles, bottle caps, plastic cutlery, flip flops, and more—in curious and unpredictable ways to recreate a marine coral reef and its interdependent life forms. With his unique sense of beauty, Uribe plays with the juxtaposition between this whimsical and lively subject matter and its potentially destructive material—plastic. The artist confronts and reminds of the fragility of life in this vibrant world. Uribe invites reflection on the indiscriminate use of plastic and the disastrous impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems worldwide. More than ten million metric tons of plastic enters our oceans every year, and it persists in the environment for centuries. Our plastic waste is endangering all the world’s oceans, including life-sustaining coral reefs. The artist first created Plastic Reef as a special display at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Federico Uribe stated, “Living in a coastal city has made me very conscious and sensitive about the need to conserve marine environments and ecosystems. Plastic production is increasingly inexorable, particularly in the developing world, and it is an indicator of development.”

The themes of nature’s interdependence and regeneration explored by the artist complement the concurrent exhibition Cycles of Nature: Highlights from the Collections of the HRM and Art Bridges.

Exhibitions are made possible by assistance provided by the County of Westchester.

#HRMPlasticReef #FedericoUribe

 

Red Grooms’s The Bookstore
Collections Spotlight: Late Twentieth-Century Art
Opening June 17, 2022

With its amusing details, riotous color, and exploding perspectives, The Bookstore by Red Grooms has been a beloved highlight of the Hudson River Museum for more than forty years. In the late 1970s, the Museum commissioned this pioneer of site-specific sculpture and installation art to create a sculpto-pictorama that would introduce visitors to contemporary art, enliven the Brutalist architecture of its 1969 addition, and function simultaneously as an artwork and a working gift shop. In 2008, to ensure its preservation, the environmental sculpture was restored and re-installed in this gallery, in collaboration with both the artist and Tom Burckhardt, a painter and sculptor who assisted Grooms in his large-scale creations for many years.

Each time a visitor encounters and enters The Bookstore, they experience a creative moment, during which they are transformed from passive audience into active performer. Grooms offers us the choice of two entrances: the stately and scholarly Pierpont Morgan Library, or the busy and modest Mendoza Book Company, which was the oldest secondhand bookshop in New York City before it closed in 1990. To Grooms, this particular fusion is his “idea of heaven.”

The installation is complemented by Collections Spotlight: Late Twentieth-Century Art, a selection of figural and abstract prints from the late 1960s to the 1980s by contemporaries of Grooms including Judy Chicago, Chryssa, Barbara Kohl, Robert Motherwell, Alice Neel, Robert Rauschenberg, William Scharf, Ursula Seus, Andy Warhol, and Jack Youngerman.

 

Teaching Artist-in-Residence

During his residency in summer 2022, award-winning pianist and composer Daniel Kelly, will conduct a series of programs in the galleries and workshop, engaging with the works of art on view through sight, sound, movement and words. He will lead workshops where participants will create individual responses to what they see and understand through artmaking, poetry, storytelling, music, and movement, sharing and performing their works of art. Under the artist’s guidance, these creative outlets will enable visitors to channel and express the emotions we all bear in today’s fraught environment, exposed through encounters with powerful works of art, revealing and healing.

 

Related Programs

The exhibitions will be accompanied by a rich array of interdisciplinary programs, including public discussions, music and theatrical performances, and hands-on workshops. A selection of these programs include:

Curator Tour: Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections
Sunday, June 26, 1pm
Join co-curator Bentley Brown, Adjunct Professor of Art History at Fordham University and a PhD Fellow at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, on a walkthrough of Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections. Ponder pairings and juxtapositions that may surprise, delight, and spark new realizations about the power of art to frame historic narratives and address current concerns.

Family Studio Art Workshop: Clayform Coral Reefs
Saturday & Sunday, June 18, 25, 26, 1–4pm
Create a beautiful and colorful underwater world inspired by Federico Uribe: Plastic Reef, an installation made of recycled plastic materials that mimic marine ecosystems and reflect on the disastrous impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems worldwide. Sculpt your miniature underwater oasis out of clay and recycled materials in a 3D diorama.

Curator Tour: Plastic Reef and Cycles of Nature
Sunday, July 10, 1pm
Take a tour with Laura Vookles, Chair of the HRM’s Curatorial Department, through the exhibitions Cycles of Nature and Federico Uribe: Plastic Reef to experience the cyclical essence of nature on grand and small scales. Plastic Reef addresses the life cycles of oceans, their life-giving properties, how they are being transformed by pollution and climate change, and what we can do to protect them. George Bellows’ powerful Evening Swell, 1911, gives us a sense of the day-to-day, season-by-season struggles of fishermen who make their living from the sea. Lee Krasner’s Re-Echo, is part of the artist’s Earth Green series, which she produced after the sudden death of her husband, artist Jackson Pollock, in 1956. In both works, on loan from Art Bridges, sustenance and hope coexist with struggle and loss.

 

Images: Left: Tijay Mohammed (Ghanaian, b. 1985). Ruby Bridges, 2021. From the Pride of Our Village series. Acrylic, paper, gold leaf, fabric, charcoal, and markers on cardboard. Collection of the Hudson River Museum. Museum Purchase, 2021 (2021.5.2). Right: Federico Uribe (Colombian, b. 1962). Plastic Reef, 2019. Plastic. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Roz Akin.

 

Press contact:
Jeana Wunderlich
jwunderlich@hrm.org
(914) 963-4550 x240

 

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