Radius 50

Juried by Cathleen Chaffee, Chief Curator of the Albright-Knox Gallery, the third annual Radius 50 exhibition, highlights work by some of the very best artists living and working in the Mid-Hudson/Catskills region.

The WAAM, which this year is celebrating its Centennial, has long been a leading regional arts organization. As we begin our second century, we are in the midst of a major initiative to institute programming reflective of the evolving needs of our region’s artists and art enthusiasts. Radius 50 epitomizes these efforts and provides gallery visitors with an overview of how the artists of our region are contributing to the unfolding narrative of art in our time.

JURORS STATEMENT

Given the diversity of voices among the artists who participated in the Radius 50 exhibition by submitting their work, it would be impossible to articulate a single theme that unites the artists who were ultimately selected for participation. However, visitors to the exhibition will discern three key threads which are often braided within individual works on view.

Numerous painters, printmakers, and sculptors included here have made abstractions with a lyrical and light-handed touch. Many of these works are quietly grounded in and abstracted from the natural world and its phenomena as well as biomorphic form in ways that evocatively leave room for the viewer to bring his or her own interpretation to these innovative and diverse compositions.

Careful and close observation can, in the hands of some artists, lead to an almost slavish realism. In the figurative works chosen for inclusion here, however, the artists have found that which is surreal and enigmatic lying just beyond our immediate or surface impressions of everyday life, commonplace objects, and ordinary people. In these works, memory and symbolism complicate figural composition.

Finally, and definingly for the entire exhibition, many artists selected have taken the power and precarity of the natural world as subjects. Some artists work to arrest and capture the complex beauty of insects, birds, and mammals while others choose to isolate and study abstracted fragments. In fragile slips of cut and collaged paper, miniscule altered seeds, fragments of fired clay, and image after image, these artists powerfully illustrate our radical dependence on the flora and fauna around us, so much of which is being dramatically affected or destroyed by climate change, human development, and expansion.

Very little great art evolves without a strong local ecosystem of fellow artists, educators, and art spaces. Clearly such a network is in place within the region served by the Woodstock Artist Association and Museum. It has been a pleasure to spend time looking at and thinking about the work of the many artists who submitted for the 2019 Radius 50 exhibition, and to work with the team at WAAM who beautifully oversaw the installation of the show based on my selections.

Although it was difficult to choose from among so many impressive submissions, I hope you will find – as I do – that the works on view capture the extraordinary skill present in the work of artists from this region. I am honored to have been asked to participate in this fascinating process and to have been invited into these artists’ work, which they have so generously offered to share with their community. I thank each of them.

Cathleen Chaffee