“Winslow Homer: The Nature and Rhythm of Life” on view at Cooperstown’s Fenimore Art Museum through August 24, displays a small but comprehensive collection of paintings shown in its entirety for the first time. On loan from the Arkell Museum, which is located in Canajoharie and was established by Bartlett Arkell, founder of the Beech-Nut Company, the show, which also includes two other Homer works, one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, enables the viewer to take in the range of Homer’s work within the space of a single room.
Artist Judy Pfaff has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, and now, 10 years after the MacArthur, she has yet another feather to put in her cap: the International Sculpture Center’s 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award. Pfaff, a longtime professor of the arts at Bard and co-director of the college’s Studio Arts Program, has the added pleasure of sharing the honor with her close friend and fellow sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, who also is being recognized by the ISC (stay tuned for an upcoming article about von Rydingsvard).
Georgia O’Keeffe is most commonly associated with stark, mystical, and deeply sensual paintings of New Mexican hills, mesas, adobe walls and crosses, simplified and abstracted into a symbolist language, along with its skulls and bones, often floating in an exultant, spiritually charged space.
Global warming, pollution, invasive species and many other human-induced problems are imperiling the Earth’s ecosystems, and artists around the world are responding. Linda Weintraub’s new book, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press; 2012) is a call to action. Conceived as a textbook with eco art genres, strategies, issues, and approaches carefully schematized and indexed, To Life! will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art and saving the Earth.
Joan Snyder is at work in her Woodstock studio, dabbing papier mache onto a large canvas. In the large white room, which is illuminated by skylights and adjoins the house she shares with her partner, Margaret Cammer, the painting sings, its vivid, white rosettes like soprano notes emerging from a basso continuum of sweet, dripping purple soaked into the canvas, with a scrawl of red providing a screeching counterpoint. Snyder, in a loose sleeveless gray T-shirt, stands, looks, and applies the material a few times before graciously taking a break to speak to her afternoon visitor.
