POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Celebrating the launch of a new exhibition—Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues—that explores the art and myths of the Hudson Valley, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar is hosting a panel discussion (2:00 p.m.) and opening reception (3:30 p.m.) on Saturday, February 22, featuring Hudson Valley artists Tanya Marcuse, Qiana Mestrich, and Lisa Sanditz. The panel will be moderated by Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of the Loeb. The exhibition runs until August 17 and is part of a legacy that began two hundred years ago as landscape painter Thomas Cole traveled up the Hudson River to paint the Catskill Mountains—a voyage that marked the mythical origin of the so-called Hudson River School of American landscape painting.

Across two centuries, artists have portrayed the Hudson Valley as an earthly paradise remote from the modern world. Though close to New York City, the region came to represent its idyllic opposite: a promised land of pristine beauty, pre-industrial lifeways, and utopian enclaves. In the wry words of one New York journalist, the Hudson Valley became a “great green hope” for the “urban blues.” At the same time, this enduring pastoral myth cloaks the region’s active ties to urban tourism and trade while obscuring histories of violent settlement, enslaved labor, and resource extraction. Gathering historic and contemporary art in various media, the exhibition invites viewers to explore how the Hudson Valley has been pictured as a place both proximate to the city and its opposite—a “great green hope” as much myth as reality.

Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues kickstarts a Loeb initiative, generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, to reinterpret and reinstall the museum’s significant collection of art from the Hudson River School. “The exhibition is helping us to develop new strategies for displaying and interpreting this core collection,” said Bart Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Loeb, “in ways that serve the Loeb’s teaching mission and commitment to a positive impact in our communities.”

Themes and Artworks

The works included in Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues span more than 200 years and encompass a variety of media: print, painting, photography, and sculpture. Starting with The Hudson River Port-Folio, dating to the 1820s, the show moves through the centuries to explore the development of landscape traditions in the Hudson Valley. This rough chronology aims to reveal how the rise of arts and artist communities in the region relied on (and encouraged) a simultaneous growth in suburbanization, industrialization, and romantic myth-making.

To better understand this narrative, historic paintings by artists of the Hudson River School are placed alongside contemporary works like Lisa Sanditz’s Kaaterskill Falls, which depicts the famous Catskills landmark inundated by selfie-taking tourists. Works from the Loeb’s collection are supplemented by loans from nearby institutions, such as the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and Woodstock Artists Association and Museum. These additions offer a more complete vision of artistic migrations to the Hudson Valley in the early twentieth century. In the fascinating 1926 Map of Woodstock, for example, visitors will see the constellation of artists’ studios and homes that had come to dot the upstate hamlet.

Bringing the exhibition’s narrative to the present, the curators have included works by contemporary artists living in or inspired by the Hudson Valley. A relatively recent arrival in the region, Qiana Mestrich created her zine (up)rooted in collaboration with her children, illustrating how they explore the outdoors in their new environment. Meanwhile, the Chinese artist Yan Shanchun made his Hudson Valley–inspired series, Memory and Fantasy, without ever stepping foot in it—transforming the region from a physical geography into a mythic ideal.

In conjunction with Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues, the Loeb has commissioned Tamara Aupaumut, an artist of Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican, Oneida, and Brothertown descent, to create two papier-mâché sculptures responding to the exhibition’s themes. “Dispelling the myth of the so-called Hudson River School paintings in this region is important in recognizing the truth and the destruction that comes along with lies, greed, and genocide,” writes Aupaumut. “I hope my work will inspire viewers to engage with the world as a relationship. A relationship that is reciprocal, nurturing, and loving. One that needs to be reconciled through honesty, accountability, and action in order to restore harmony and balance for all life.”

Two complementary exhibitions are also being showcased at the Loeb. The first is an installation related to Great Green Hope by Vassar student Harrison Brisbon-McKinnon ’26, titled Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Black Space-Making from Harlem to the Hudson Valley (February 8–August 17); and the second, Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman (February 22–August 17).

“On view concurrently in adjacent galleries, Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues and Water/Bodies differ in format and approach, yet they complement each other in concept and theme,” said Lombino. “Each exhibition presents artist responses to the relationship between the urban and the rural, industrialization and environmental preservation, and the effects of that exchange across time and space.”

Additional programs will be announced.

Organizers

John P. Murphy, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings

Ian Shelley, Loeb Collections Curatorial Fellow