Maya Lin, Silver River- Hudson, 2011, recycled silver, 81 x 45 x ¾ in., ©Maya Lin Studio. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, Courtesy Pace Gallery
Ironically, the work that superficially most resembles the landscapes of the 19th-century artists – Hannock’s paintings – is cut from very different cloth. Like Cole, Hannock painted the Oxbow in the Connecticut River. While Cole’s painting features a self-portrait of the artist in the foreground, Hannock instead insinuated himself into his painting by collaging in reproductions of works of art or photos of people and places. “I was treating the rhythms of these vistas as a format for a diary, recalling things that happened at these places and writing about it. The text weaves itself through the geological formations.” Contrary to the sentiments commonly associated with traditional American landscape painting, Hannock said that his motivation “was not to paint pretty places, but rather to set a stage for the stories that come to mind while I’m painting.”
Not unlike Cole and Church, whose finished paintings were made in the studio, Hannock eschews plein air painting, instead relying on ink drawings and notations made at the location, “which are then built up with a lot of license and geological wherewithal to suggest a given place. My effort is to create a mood, set a stage, much in the way that British filmmakers David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock set up a scene with a long establishing shot to convey a mood.” But one suspects that Cole himself might discover an affinity with Hannock’s interest in theatricality and irony, given that the Romantic ideal of the wilderness and agrarian landscape that he helped formulate occurred just as it was being obliterated by industrialism.
Hannock said that he was approached by Olana following the buzz from a presentation about Hannock’s art at the New York Public Library in the spring of 2013, which was presented by Sting. “He drew a parallel between my past life as a hockey goalie and my penchant for not having a foreground in my compositions,” Hannock recalled, noting that he and the famous musician “are godfathers to each other’s daughters.” Hannock was commissioned by Sting to make a painting of the singer’s home city of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England; the canvas, which was completed in 2008, measures eight by twelve feet. The two men subsequently are collaborating on a limited-edition letterpress book featuring Hannock’s woodcuts and Sting’s lyrics.
“The Olana folks asked me to do something. I said, ‘You have to collaborate with the Cole house and do contemporary art, and let me pick the work,’” Hannock said. Olana agreed, and Jason Rosenfeld – “the hottest curator on the planet; he did the massive pre-Raphaelite show at the Tate, as well as shows in D.C., Moscow and Tokyo; the tours he leads at the Metropolitan Museum are packed,” according to Hannock – was brought on to provide curatorial ballast.
Hannock said that many of the artists he chose were “friends and acquaintances of mine from the trenches. When you’re making art, you’re slugging it out every day. The romance of what you find on the wall of the museum is a different perspective.” Part of the fun for the viewer will be deciphering the often-oblique connections between the 19th-century painters and the contemporary artists, who represent a variety of media and approaches.
Environmental concerns, though “nowhere near as dramatic in the 19th century as they are now,” are one of the connecting links. For example, a piece by renowned environmental artist Maya Lin that hangs on the wall of Olana next to a painting by Church of a church at Petra, in Jordan, makes that connection explicit, noted Hannock. Lin’s sculpture – a relief consisting of recycled silver that was poured into a mold representing the geological trench created by the Hudson River and Long Island Sound – echoes the Church composition, he said.
Some of the artists created site-specific work especially for the exhibition. For example, Elyn Zimmerman designed “sculpted platforms that look over the points of interest to give the viewer specific views that Church had in mind” when he landscaped the grounds of his estate, said Hannock. The platforms are made out of inlaid slate, and “the shapes and colors echo the patterns in the house,” further integrating the pieces with the site.
Artists Angie Keefer, working with Kara Hamilton and Kianja Strobert, and Charles LeDray both are designing installations, Keefer for the interior of the Cole House – it will incorporate daguerreotypes from the Cole archives, as well as videos – and LeDray for the capacious porch at Olana. A room will be devoted to photographs by Lynn Davis taken from the sites at which Church painted.
Hannock said that the “anchor of the show” is his painting of the Oxbow, which was recently acquired by Yale Art Gallery. The stories embedded in that work also relate to the memory of Frank Moore, the nephew of Hannock’s first art teacher, who died of AIDS. Moore himself is represented by a painting that serves as a homage to the AIDS epidemic.
“My initial motivation was that if I was sitting on Cole’s back porch 150 years ago while a punk student, the young F.E. Church, was looking at what to paint, my response would be to tell him about the work on the walls in the third millennium” – in essence, the artworks of the “River Crossings” exhibition. Besides AIDS, the other “clusters of cultural appreciation we felt we had to include” included Harlem in the post-Civil War years, presumably represented by the Bearden work. “I don’t think either of these [19th-century] artists could have imagined the strength and power generated by the black community on American and world culture.”
“River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home” opens at Olana and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site on May 3 and runs through November 1. Shuttles will pick people up in Hudson and convey them from Olana to the Cole house. On April 12, Stephen Hannock will speak about his art at the Cole house in Catskill; on May 17, he and co-curator Jason Rosenfeld will speak about the exhibition at the Arts Center at Columbia-Greene Community College at 4400 Route 23 in Hudson. Both lectures begin at 2 p.m. and cost $9, general admission, $7 for members of the Thomas Cole site or Olana.
Stephen Hannock lecture, Sunday, April 12, 2 p.m., $9/$7, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street, Catskill; “River Crossings” opening, Sunday, May 3, Thomas Cole/Olana National Historic Sites; www.thomascole.org, www.olana.org.
