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About the Exhibition
from A SENSE OF PLACE | Artists from the Woodstock Masters Series | Kleinert/James Center for the Arts
By Douglas I. Sheer
As part of the Byrdcliffe Forum, launched in 2020 to offer additional virtual content during the pandemic, ten artists were selected by the Forum committee to represent Woodstock in a series called, “Woodstock Masters.” Each artist is a highly accomplished practitioner and known for living in or near the Woodstock community, and many have shown or taught locally.
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The artists include Nancy Azara, Jenne Currie, Donald Elder, Yale Epstein, Mary Frank, Heather Hutchison, Portia Munson, Judy Pfaff, Joan Snyder, and Hongnian Zhang. During the virtual talks, each artist showed examples of their art and answered questions about their lives and experiences. All ten talks can be viewed on the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild YouTube channel. Stylistically, among their oeuvres: Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, classical realism, patterning and decoration, political art and neo-Cubism.
What makes Woodstock really Woodstock is naturally hard to quantify, but it is a combination of geography, demographics, and its unique aesthetic and critical art history The sum total equals what we have called 'a sense of place ' It is both who is here today and who has been here before, such as founders of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in 1902, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Jane Byrd McCall.
Other artists who have called Woodstock home since 1902 have included:
Alexander Archipenko, sculptor, Milton Avery – painter, George Bellows –painter, Manuel Bromberg– sculptor, Harvey Fite – sculptor, Milton Glaser –graphic designer, Philip Guston – painter, Robert Henri – painter, Eva Hesse –sculptor, Gaston Lachaise – sculptor, Yasuo Kuniyoshi – painter and sculptor, Ethel Magafan – painter (mother of Jenne Currie), Georges Malkine – painter, Fletcher Martin – painter, Anton Refregier – painter, Zulma Steele – painter, and Bradley Walker Tomlin – painter. Many of the deceased, my parents included, are buried in the Woodstock Artists Cemetery.
Artists have continued to arrive in Woodstock for different personal reasons. All have found in that choice a kind of sanctuary from city life and a shared immersion into a more contemplative environment.
