Essay: Defining Need in Connecticut

 I recently saw this Facebook posting that i found interesting.

"Art Access: New Britain

CALL FOR ART

[Link in bio]

One of the primary means emerging artists have to build their exhibition resume and gain the attention of curators is to participate in juried art shows. Not only is substantial time and effort involved in the process of creating art and applying for juried shows, but most require a fee for application. For many artists with extraordinary work, their opportunity for significant exposure is limited by their financial ability to apply for more publicized shows involving known jurors. An application fee can be a significant amount to artists with lower incomes and often many cannot take the chance that a juror may not even select their work for display.

Most juried shows charge these entry fees to support the organizations they are part of and those fees are often integral to their budgets and operations; however these fees are keeping out a subset of the artist population. With generous support from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Art Access: New Britain is a juried art show focusing on artists living in households with income at or below the approximate state definition of “lower income” ($80,000). This juried show will collect no fee for application, involves a well established juror connected to a prominent museum, offers assistance to those who cannot afford to transport their artwork to the show, and involves juried prize awards.

This exhibition will be held at Gallery 66 in New Britain from August 12 to October 11, featuring an opening event and artist discussion, in addition to regularly held events at Gallery 66 such as monthly artist discussions and regular open mics."

What caught my eye here is the fact that that the Connecticut Office of the Arts has read the premise for this show and has decided its worth sponsoring. It's worth unpacking the assumptions being asserted here because nobody seems to have put an ounce of critical thinking into what problem this is going to solve or whether there are better ways of staging juried art shows.

Presumably the intent of constraining the household income of the artist to less than or equal to $80,000 will somehow limit participation to lower income artists. But this makes little sense. A single person and a married artist or an artist with kids or legal obligations makes hard capping an income profoundly unfair and could preclude true need and include individuals with no real hardship. In other words, its pointless.

And need isn't always an absolute condition. For the immediate few months I may be dead broke but in a few months that fiscal condition will change. Opportunity cost is often conditional.

The logical argument being made about juried shows is also flawed. Income has nothing to do with getting accepted or rejected from a juried art show. Ideally, the quality of the work is what gets a piece accepted or rejected. And the quality of the juror (e.g. de facto curator) is key. In either case, the artist's work IS "exposed" to the juror.

Any show that decides the identity of the artist is more compelling than the quality of that artist's work is playing with fire. The criteria of judging this show becomes the evaluation of the financial status of the individual rather than the work itself. Is the curation of the show intended to lower expectations based on something other than artistic merit? The point of juried shows to begin with is the assumption that your best work belongs in a show of selected best works.

And because the framing of shows like these emphasize identity politics, the chances of the work being taken seriously is eroded.  It's one thing for a patron or juror to find a diamond in the rough at any gallery show and its completely another to find that unique talent in a blizzard of artwork from an identified  class of "victims". Do the prizes go to the most needy, the most politically compelling or sympathetic, or to the identity artist of the month? Its unclear if participation will elevate or stigmatize the participating artists.

A far better way to help artists in need is for the CT Office on the Arts to support local Art Galleries all over the State by subsidizing gallery memberships for needy local artists - full stop. They all sponsor juried member shows. Such sponsorship might involve the basic membership fee and an additional group stipend for occasional transportation assistance.  This promotes fiscally sound galleries, community goodwill, and transparent artistic participation.  

My guide to gallery art show expenses and consideration are here.

Women Reframe American Landscape - NBMAA, Part 3

So what is the point of this show again?

The pretense of this show - the excuse for yet another Guerrilla Girl sorority occupation of a major American Art museum - is that 19th century women landscape painters are somehow under-exposed under the curatorial framework of Hudson River School artists.  Untangling the poor documentation of the Hudson River School legacy requires also wearing wading boots through the further GG's swamp of obfuscation and convoluted misdirection.  

Who are the Hudson River School?

First understand school as if it were a school of fish.  It is a fluid and highly diluted term for an increasingly growing subset of all American landscape painters regardless of identity politic persuasion. However, money and subliminal political blackmail talk loudly and my earlier comments in Part One and in Part Two speak to my opinions and concerns.

Curatorially and traditionally, prestigious museums attempt to represent the finest examples of the subject(s) they may be exhibiting, researching, or promoting the discovery of. In more recent years, the assault on these institutions has crippled the ability of these institutions to ethically and professionally function.

So it is up to critics such as myself to research and educate patrons of the arts as to the veracity of shows such as these that smell of dubious quality.

Let's narrow candidates who belong on the short list of artists who can be recognizably identified as members of the Hudson River School (HRS) of artists as those listed in Wikipedia's short list. Susie M. Barstow, among other females (not that this show has anything to do with sex!). So that's not a bone of contention.

Something that is argued by the curators of this show however is that Barstow has been historically abused. This drips with irony as Barstow's work constitutes abut half of the third of the show dedicated to 19th century women artists who made art during that period. The aesthetic floggings continue - poor Susie.

So, What's the Geographic and Temporal Context for this Part of the Show?

More precisely, the historically bounded Hudson River School's important activity happens between 1825 and fading by 1875 - a fifty year run though many of the artists lived and worked longer to diminishing or changing interest.

The artists in question begin working not much sooner than 50 years after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 is still a fresh memory. 

In 1825 there are 24 states in the Union.  In 1875, ten years after the Civil War, there are 37 states in the Union and by 1890 there are 44.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution arrive in America from 1830 to 1840. This includes the proliferation of tourist steamboats out of NY City up the Hudson River. The Catskills become early vacation and tourist destinations for the wealthy. In 1837, the Adirondacks are mapped and by the 1870's routine access to the Adirondacks broadens the geographic scope of these artists.

The temporal sweet spot for the production of HRS artwork by its most famous practitioners is 1830 - 1860.  There's nothing absolute about this as there is an original cohort of artists followed by a second-generation whose work is closely coupled to the HRS profile and prescription. The National Academy of Design becomes a proxy for the HRS artists during this time.

Portable metallic tubes for oil paint are invented in 1841.

Thomas Cole who starts the historically significant HRS landscape painting movement dies in 1848.  

Barstow would have been 12 years old at that time. By 1860, Barstow is 24 and so she is clearly a second generation artist in this category and any claim that she is being marginalized really needs to explain away how she could be confused with the first generation of artists who defined the genre. 

Nine years after Cole's death, in 1857, the 10th Street Studio is opened In New York City. This is where both male and female, famous and wannabe HRS artists establish studios. Cole spent most of his career living and working in Cedar Grove in the Catskills.

A publication called The Crayon is published between 1855 - 1861 and essays in it prescribe very specific instructions for the creation of HRS paintings. By now, innovation within HRS practice is discouraged and rejected.

It should also be noted that landscape painting is unrivaled during these few decades. Google has created a very good timeline of the scope of work.

The NBMAA HRS Collection

 Gallery 5 on the first floor of the museum holds a rich and varied collection of HRS works and it should be made much more obvious that these works complement the WRAL show upstairs.  For grins and giggles let's see what the museum has to say about them.

IMO, this is pretty thin gruel.  It reads like the summary paragraphs of a high school essay assignment.

And its very little help in attempting to ground any of the women artists upstairs. A more detailed timeline and nuanced explanation of likenesses and differences in style would be far more useful considering the richness of the collection.

Where Susie Barstow Fits

The body of work that we get exposed to in the Suzie Barstow section of the show is a sparse sampling.  The majority of pieces do not stand out even as HRS candidate pieces. They are plain, sometimes dull, and not particularly interesting nature snapshots.

The pieces that do distinguish themselves, distinguish themselves in aesthetic sweetness.  Barlow, unlike many of the other artists involved, seems to have developed a color scheme that amplifies the landscape colors.  Rather than sublime the landscape colors pop in both impossible and irresistible ways. Barstow's best work is well-crafted, commercial quality illustration.
 
And, based on the samples exhibited the paintings emulate the HRS look, they never achieve the spirituality that Cole, Church, or others succeeded in projecting.  Nor are her pieces particularly atmospheric (see: Inness or Bridges work in the galleries).  In fact, for Barstow and many of her circle the compositions and problem space are boilerplate, compositionally centered and predictable outdoor scenes.

The scenes consist of a stream or pool of water surrounded by banks of  paper birch trees. Light effects are redundant from one painting to another.  Whatever abstraction exists within the paintings appear to be the byproduct of efficiency and economy rather than experiment or improvisation. 

The larger issue is that much of the pedestrian HRS look and feel is being produced at the end of the century seems to be homogenized. This may speak to the demands of the remaining patrons who had not yet abandoned the genre or it may simply speak to a long tail commercialization that in scarcity required ever sweeter and domestic cosmetic changes.

And the rhetorical descriptions that bookend her work as well as the others is that they were outdoors doing all the same stuff the male artists were doing.  That's true. But is it exceptional for women at the time and the answer is no. In fact one of the accusations about the HRS painters is that their work became a tourist magnet to the area that eventually despoiled the landscape.

In other words, *everybody* who could afford it vacationed or traveled up the Hudson, into the woods, and, because photography was a new and not ubiquitously available, people either sketched or bought prints of the places they visited - a perfect storm for the commercial success of the HRS cohort.

Barstow simply conducted a train the trainer business - teaching teachers the HRS principles and selling the resulting craftwork.

Unpacking the Rise and Fall of the HRS

Thomas Cole and those he influenced most greatly were romanticists first and foremost with a heavy dose of, let's call it Dark Nouveau - darker mythological themes found in the more decorative Art Nouveau genre.

His paintings would include American Indians who were no longer occupying the territory, fairies, Biblical allusions, and dystopian visions of nature trampled by the march of progress. While the GGs argue that there is no Eden and Eden never existed, they disparage the evidence of Cole's art.

Cole and others shared a sacred vision of nature - a religiously colored gaze. Cole is not painting actual representation - not plein air. Sketching Clubs (male, female, and coed) existed because sketching was the more effective and efficient way to capture scenic information.  And these paintings were taken as the best knowledge available for urban populations to actually see and dream the New World.

Cole's paintings are exercises in transcribing his sketches through his religious memory gaze of the, now, composite landscape scene. There is little botanical accuracy involved in his work and he will be criticized for these very reasons much as he is aesthetically valorized for the same reasons. 

In this context, Barstow and her generation of landscape painters explore the same intellectual territory as Cole's cohort with the added advantage that the geography is well documented, the ability to paint plein air is much easier due to tube paints, and the formula for the HRS landscapes is already baked.

For patrons then and now, the accuracy of Barstow's botanical studies, her craft of picture-making, and her understanding of the formula are as good, better, and good enough to admire and love regardless of their historical or intellectual ranking.

The Fall

There's an unfortunate generalization about the demise of the HRS genre and that is that a criticism of the work appearing in a New York newspaper unexpectedly and conclusively diminished the value and prestige associated with the work of these artists.  More truthfully, the piece was a broadside by Impressionist challengers to the status quo.

A second, far more important, complementary barometer of change, can also be found in the NBMAA collections and that is the art of Marie Cassatt whose conversion to Impressionism is compelling and disruptive. The artistic changes in her art signal as well as anyone's the advent and ubiquitous conquest of the French Impressionists and multiple waves of Modern Art that will submerge and swamp any market for previous generations of American art - HRS being no exception.

The stagnation and relatively old-fashioned landscape narrative gives way to figuration at home and aesthetic revolution abroad.  The women exhibited in this show remained forever anchored to this fashion. The as now, American educators are the last to learn or change.

The Pyramid Scheme

HRS paintings are rebounding in value by leaps and bounds.  As with so many mediocre women artists who are disingenuously being promoted as individuals far more significant than they really were or are - buyer beware.  The wake of GG advocacy seems to be a pump and dump aesthetic behavior that really needs some examination.  Museums who should and in many cases do know better are selling off masterworks to acquire work out of the car trunks of less than credible dealers who manufacture and depend on identity politics to leverage their wares.

Barstow has been compared to Jervis McEntee. The art of the two is distinctly different. What is worth noting and comparing is the fact that McEntee is a lesser known HRS artists and that he, like Barstow, continued painting well after the HRS declines in popularity.

His journals deserve research funding more than another GG episode of Mr. Peabody and Sherman rewrite American Art History.

Women Reframe American Landscape - NBMAA, Part 2

 Part two of this review of the Women Frame American Landscape will examine how the Guerrilla Girls character assassination of the Hudson River School white male painters in Part One attempts to justify the inclusion of the Contemporary artists whose relationship to anything having to do with  landscape is a brain teaser in addition to being a challenge to artistically critique.

A summary statement for this division of the show includes the following context.

Landscape Today Claims

The first paragraph can claim that the cohort of Contemporary art solicited for this show are outstanding artists and yet anyone with a set of clear eyes and even a small exposure to art history can see that the actual art objects were either mailed in as an after-thought or thoughtlessly manufactured to satisfy the thirst to justify the political narrative. Nothing here indicates a deep interest in landscape art or even a sustained body of dedicated work to create a new vision of landscape.

The phrase "Reimaging the single point perspective and horizon line" in relation to the politics of any painting is pure nonsense.  The Hudson River School paintings are largely romanticized (atmospheric and :luminous") woodland scenes in which architecturally obvious perspective is absent. And horizon lines are defined by natural ambiguity rather than consistent and uniform horizons.

This word salad is an excuse to include an disproportionately large inkjet print of a digital photo rendering of an I Spy-ish collage of forest floor artifacts by Tenya Marcuse. The wall label description sugar coats it as having something to do with the Hudson Valley where she lives, weaving, and the ecosystem. Oh yeah, something, something... perspective.

Okay. So what?

 The claim that this work "holds economic, historical,-snip- spiritual and personal realities" is no different today than in the nineteenth century. Only the opinions have changed. As an artist, the political identity politics that saturate this work add zero value to its aesthetic contribution to the show.

As I said in Part one, the Guerrilla Girls assertion that they upturn male-dominated histories is nonsense.  They don't have a clue about that history as is obvious by their so-called contribution to the show.

Plesset's piece is cheap appropriation of Thomas Cole's original work.  She turns it into a coloring book learner's copy of the work.  The reason?

The assertion that art historians (who, when, and with what frequency) criticized copies by women more harshly than anyone else smells funny. Copies are rarely original art except with forgeries and the idea that anyone in their right mind might spend the time criticizing copies rather than the originals makes zero sense.

Some reference:

"Sarah Cole (1805-1857)

Sarah Cole was an American landscape painter and the sister of Thomas Cole. Although she did paint some original compositions, many of Sarah Cole’s surviving paintings are copies of her brother’s paintings, including her painting View of Catskill Mountain House. "

 

Does this seem harsh?

Plesset suffers from the same intellectual deficiency that afflicts the Guerrilla Girls. There is very little veracity to the claim that she or they are doing anything artistic at all. They don't do the research or do it so incompetently that that its worthless.  There is no historical recovery in appropriating Sara Cole's need to cash in on her brother's popularity to earn a living. And every woman artist of the time who painted in the Hudson Valley (and there were multitudes) isn't a Hudson River School peer by magical thinking association.

This show, if it illustrates anything, makes clear that rather than adding clarity to art history - a sludge of belligerent advocacy of woman artists whose work needs to be independently promoted on their own merits is instead being shoehorned and distorted into categories they don't belong to and strains credibility.

The Invasion of Private Space

Another repeating and identifiable pattern of political bullying that has become a recognizable trademark of Guerrilla Girl interventions is the act of violating either the space, integrity, or belongings of their intended targets.  This is not an act of virtuous pursuit of truth or anything high-minded. There's a sociopathic fascination with, for lack of a better word, molesting the subject.

Plesset's grooming of Cole's sister's knockoff is intended to cheapen the original as if anyone can manufacture these things with a well articulated grift.

Likewise two another artist's offerings,  Shin and Mattingly, somehow acquired some of Cole's belongings and there's a necrophiliac ambiance to the readymade application of these artifacts  to their art. In both cases there's an implied indifference to the sanctity of their belongings as if being indifferent to the objects entitles the individual to be indifferent to the art  (just another object) and finally indifferent to the history involved.

Whatever spirituality the artist invested in their work can be rationally dismissed.  After all, if the posthumous loot of an artist's estate can be re-appropriated to disparage their reputation then no one will object to a disingenuous tweaking of their historical character.

The Conflation of Landscape with Land Ownership Claims 

The Gorilla Girls sorority is careful to curate shows that are always representative of their enablers. Antone who agrees with their particular viewpoint and will add another iconic letter to their alphabet parade is eagerly enlisted.

And so a number of works by indigenous women is included.

One piece by W. Red Star is an organized collection of signs from the midwest relating to navigating through Native American labeled destinations.  Personally I'm not offended by useful signage and maybe this is a comment that the Hudson River School painters had unobstructed views of the landscape. So true. AND... it takes a woman to really drive this point home!

The art of Jaune Quick To See Smith has become a de facto sidekick of GG sorority infused gallery shows. She represents the politically correct, wise noble native archetype whose virtuous virtues are, well, native.

Her work claims that the existing government, its monetary system, and the rule of law governing property ownership are just an inconvenient social trapping.

Unfortunately, Smith's "critical questions" are, quite honestly, juvenile as is the imagery and exercise of her messaging. She makes a broad unsubstantiated accusation that that all North America is stolen land from cultures whose own claim of ownership is dubious at best or profoundly different from the rest of humanity. Her myopic opinions include the idea that historical confrontations were always maliciously one-sided and then she sugar coats all that in GG sorority virtue slogans [woman, race, commerce, ad nausea].

Your eyes aren't deceiving you.  Diversity metrics require little more than a non-white skin tone and a claim to a cultural charm - in this case beads. The irony is that she charts the United States of America with Western civilization's cartography (hat tip: Columbus). By now it should be obvious and compelling that no trespassing signs were ignored by colonial settlers, money is bad so why bother paying for anything, and don't forget grammar and gender. Got it? Bonus observation - north is north and south is south.

But that's not all.

In this piece North is south and south is north - "a thing of Indian power".  Sorry, I'm not buying it (too soon?). Have a look.

Jaune "Quick to See" enrolled (who knew???) in an Indian tribe and what she sees, in my opinion is a window of opportunity to pass off some crafty art that more appropriately belongs in a 12 x 12' tent at an arts and crafts show than a museum. This is not the stuff of representative fine art produced by Indians - this is just opinionated, self-serving propaganda.

Even the most average middle school child knows that Columbus was the first of many, many previously failed attempts to navigate the Atlantic ocean west to the North American continent.
Navigational errors? Really? In addition to being pathetic art its historically as useful as driftwood.

And confusing the map with the territory is a long learned lesson from far more authoritative sources than Smith. Oh well.

The Kitchen Sink

The rest of the GG sorority contributions are nothing to pay good money to see if you're looking to enjoy or broaden your love of landscape.  It's a mixed bag of tedious videos, climate warnings less effective than no littering signs, and an unimpressive litany of readymade woke, bumpersticker virtue signaling.

As an artist I find the abuse of museum gallery space for this kind of nonsense aesthetically sinful. As a critic I wonder how curators, in good faith, get away with selling this artistic malware. For artists and wishful young artists this set of galleries has nothing positive to be learned and in many cases flaunts a systematic weakness toward political bullying as curatorial practice.

This section of the show abuses the Hudson River School fraternity of painters for being citizens of their time. And by GG sorority word salad definitions the show is an act of violence and bigotry toward long dead historical actors who can no longer accurately contextualize their "lived experiences".

 In part three we'll examine the rest of it.

Women Reframe American Landscape, NBMAA - A Review, Part 1

 The Women Reframe American Landscape exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art is yet another in a litany of Guerrilla Girl muggings of vulnerable and weakling American Art institutions. In this case, they co-opt valuable museum wall space with disingenuous curation and intent.

The pretense of this exhibition claims that Suzie M. Barstow is  having a first retrospective (woo hoo!) and the reason is that, well, she provides the plausible pretense that the Ever-Victimized American Woman Artist can be tightly coupled to a male group of painters who became known as the Hudson River School.

The problem with this disingenuous marketing backbone is that Barstow's art constitutes less than half of the show though her work recognizably has something observably having to do with what I hope we can agree upon is landscape.

The lion's share of this show however is a crapscape of identity politic drivel that no legitimate aesthetic gatekeeper for a museum should ever allow this junk pile of nonsense to occupy.  This is not a recentering of women anywhere.  This is a multi-gallery spaced petri dish for the cultivation of the Woke Mind Virus whose anti-intellectual tentacles are strangling fine art appreciation on a global scale.

By now our shared bullshit detectors are all tingling at the same time.  We are are being told straight faced that George Orwell warned you about these weasel words deployed from the mouths of politicians.

Everything the project claims not to attempt, it attempts pathetically to accomplish over and over and over. Let's put a clothespin on our noses and start with the Guerrilla Girls entry.

Yes. Yes. We are led to believe that the GGs"were galvanized by research and statistics" on women *in* the Hudson River School and something about reality. One can only image a bat-signal like beacon shining from the campus art building declaring "Guerrilla Girls Assemble!" - we need a poster!

And so a poster was manufactured. These posters represent one of a number of defamatory techniques that are standard fare for projects such as these. The white male artist(s) who will get mugged need to be softened up patriarchal style. They must be held responsible for 21st century progressive Democrat, politically correct expectations about neo-history. The ritual dry-humping of their previous reputations by the Guerrilla Girls is perfunctory to make the neglected, historically abused, and otherwise victim's victim to look that much more *marginalized*.

In their "poster" they take an axe to the HRS artists.

The allegedly criminal behavior of the Hudson River School painters were that they were an all-white, all-male, who shared a cohort of patrons. Aiiiiieeeeeee! This was about the time of the civil war.

So Edward Mitchell Bannister lived and worked in the Boston, MA/Providence, RI geography not the Hudson.

Robert Duncanson is considered a second-generation member of the Hudson River School (typical of GG "research"). He too might be geographically challenged in having a beer on the Hudson because he worked in Ohio. From Wikipedia before the thought police eliminate the reference: "Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist.^["

The Guerrilla Girls successfully use race-baiting to promote the smashing of the patriarchy that is point of these projects.  But their poster couples even more allegations worth deflating.

Again, Guerrilla Girl scholarship is nonexistent in these allegations. The Hudson River School art is more or less a romanticized vision of an American Eden along the river. The *noble indigenous indian* rhetoric is a magical thinking, manufactured historical narrative.  The American continent was not populated by millions of nation park natives who performed any such inhabitation, cultivation, or protection (from what?). 

Indians, like all of the rest of humanity, exercised their culture and governance all over the Americas. the migration of Europeans to the Americas changed that. The unspoken truth is that innumerable wars have been fought on this continent against fellow European governments and against Indian populations. The art of Hudson River School painters has nothing to do with any of that.

Indians were not relocated to the moon.  They relocated to continental reservations where they run casinos, watch TV, and vote.

Nobody is immune to disease.  Sexually transmitted diseases from Indians afflicted Europeans. The likely disease being implied by this photograph is malaria that sickened everyone it afflicted.

The United States judicial system is better place than an art museum to established claims of ownership.  The GG unsubstantiated allegations that these claims have any legitimacy is based on a romantic fantasy that history can be unwound to somehow undo what's done.   To criticize the romanticism of the HRS painters for human progress is a fool's errand but the Guerrilla Girls are promoting this grift as plausible truth.  It's not.  

The photograph used in this indictment poster is by Seneca Ray Stoddard who photographically documented the industrialization of the Hudson not necessarily its eventual degradation at the hands of masses of tourists and commercial arts and crafts landscape painters such as those featured in this show. A show of his photography would be a breath of fresh air here.

And their conclusions about the area becoming a mess is predictably inaccurate as well - profoundly so. A Bill Moyers PBS show on the Hudson documents the GG inaccuracy.