Celebrating the launch of a new exhibition—Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues—that explores the art and myths of the Hudson Valley, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar is hosting a panel discussion (2:00 p.m.) and opening reception (3:30 p.m.) on Saturday, February 22, featuring Hudson Valley artists Tanya Marcuse, Qiana Mestrich, and Lisa Sanditz. The panel will be moderated by Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of the Loeb. The exhibition runs until August 17 and is part of a legacy that began two hundred years ago as landscape painter Thomas Cole traveled up the Hudson River to paint the Catskill Mountains—a voyage that marked the mythical origin of the so-called Hudson River School of American landscape painting.

Across two centuries, artists have portrayed the Hudson Valley as an earthly paradise remote from the modern world. Though close to New York City, the region came to represent its idyllic opposite: a promised land of pristine beauty, pre-industrial lifeways, and utopian enclaves. In the wry words of one New York journalist, the Hudson Valley became a “great green hope” for the “urban blues.” At the same time, this enduring pastoral myth cloaks the region’s active ties to urban tourism and trade while obscuring histories of violent settlement, enslaved labor, and resource extraction. Gathering historic and contemporary art in various media, the exhibition invites viewers to explore how the Hudson Valley has been pictured as a place both proximate to the city and its opposite—a “great green hope” as much myth as reality.

Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues kickstarts a Loeb initiative, generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, to reinterpret and reinstall the museum’s significant collection of art from the Hudson River School. “The exhibition is helping us to develop new strategies for displaying and interpreting this core collection,” said Bart Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Loeb, “in ways that serve the Loeb’s teaching mission and commitment to a positive impact in our communities.”

Themes and Artworks

The works included in Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues span more than 200 years and encompass a variety of media: print, painting, photography, and sculpture. Starting with The Hudson River Port-Folio, dating to the 1820s, the show moves through the centuries to explore the development of landscape traditions in the Hudson Valley. This rough chronology aims to reveal how the rise of arts and artist communities in the region relied on (and encouraged) a simultaneous growth in suburbanization, industrialization, and romantic myth-making.

To better understand this narrative, historic paintings by artists of the Hudson River School are placed alongside contemporary works like Lisa Sanditz’s Kaaterskill Falls, which depicts the famous Catskills landmark inundated by selfie-taking tourists. Works from the Loeb’s collection are supplemented by loans from nearby institutions, such as the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and Woodstock Artists Association and Museum. These additions offer a more complete vision of artistic migrations to the Hudson Valley in the early twentieth century. In the fascinating 1926 Map of Woodstock,for example, visitors will see the constellation of artists’ studios and homes that had come to dot the upstate hamlet.

Bringing the exhibition’s narrative to the present, the curators have included works by contemporary artists living in or inspired by the Hudson Valley. A relatively recent arrival in the region, Qiana Mestrich created her zine (up)rooted in collaboration with her children, illustrating how they explore the outdoors in their new environment. Meanwhile, the Chinese artist Yan Shanchun made his Hudson Valley–inspired series, Memory and Fantasy, without ever stepping foot in it—transforming the region from a physical geography into a mythic ideal.

In conjunction with Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues, the Loeb has commissioned Tamara Aupaumut, an artist of Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican, Oneida, and Brothertown descent, to create two papier-mâché sculptures responding to the exhibition’s themes. “Dispelling the myth of the so-called Hudson River School paintings in this region is important in recognizing the truth and the destruction that comes along with lies, greed, and genocide,” writes Aupaumut. “I hope my work will inspire viewers to engage with the world as a relationship. A relationship that is reciprocal, nurturing, and loving. One that needs to be reconciled through honesty, accountability, and action in order to restore harmony and balance for all life.”

Two complementary exhibitions are also being showcased at the Loeb. The first is an installation related to Great Green Hope by Vassar student Harrison Brisbon-McKinnon ’26, titled Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Black Space-Making from Harlem to the Hudson Valley (February 8–August 17); and the second, Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman (February 22–August 17).

“On view concurrently in adjacent galleries, Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues and Water/Bodies differ in format and approach, yet they complement each other in concept and theme,” said Lombino. “Each exhibition presents artist responses to the relationship between the urban and the rural, industrialization and environmental preservation, and the effects of that exchange across time and space.”

Additional programs will be announced.

Organizers

John P. Murphy, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings

Ian Shelley, Loeb Collections Curatorial Fellow

Support

Support for the exhibition is provided by the Evelyn B. Metzger Exhibition Fund.

Publication

Accompanying the exhibition is a free full-color brochure with an essay by co-curators Ian Shelley and John P. Murphy and a map of Hudson Valley landmarks relevant to the exhibition.

About the Loeb Art Center

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is a teaching and learning museum, free and open to all, supporting Vassar College’s educational mission and communities. Formerly the Vassar College Art Gallery, the Loeb is the first art museum at a college or university that was part of the institution’s original plan. Today, the permanent collection includes over 22,000 works, comprising paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and glass and ceramic wares. The Loeb strives to be a catalyst for scholarly, creative, and social justice work by Vassar students and others. It aims to reflect a commitment to broaden, and amplify, the voices represented in the museum setting, and to ensure that the Loeb’s programs and practices have a positive impact on campus and beyond. To learn more, please visit The Loeb website or follow @theloeb.

Commitment to DEAI

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College commits to Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion (DEAI) as core values across its culture, systems, and practices. We pledge to allocate resources (human and financial) to create and sustain a museum culture in which difference is celebrated. The Loeb staff is dedicated to integrating DEAI priorities into gallery installations, programming, interpretation, collections management, acquisitions, and internal processes. Our ongoing work is guided by an intention to care for all people engaged with the Loeb while welcoming the exchange of ideas, enriching experiences, and diverse perspectives through art.

Admission to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is free and all galleries are wheelchair accessible. The Loeb is now open to the public every day (except Monday) from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The Loeb is located at 124 Raymond Avenue near the entrance to the Vassar College campus. Parking is available on Raymond Avenue. Directions to the Vassar campus in Poughkeepsie, NY, are available at https://www.vassar.edu/visit/tour#directions.

The Art Center is also accessible via the Dutchess County Public Transit, Bus Route L. For additional information, the public may call (845) 437-5632 or visit https://www.vassar.edu/theloeb.

Land Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that Vassar stands upon the homelands of the Munsee Lenape, Indigenous peoples who have an enduring connection to this place despite being forcibly displaced by European colonization. Munsee Lenape peoples continue today as the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario. This acknowledgment, however, is insufficient without our reckoning with the reality that every member of the Vassar community since 1861 has benefited from these Native peoples’ displacement, and it is hollow without our efforts to counter the effects of structures that have long enabled—and that still perpetuate—injustice against Indigenous Americans. To that end, we commit to build and sustain relationships with Native communities; to expand opportunities at Vassar for Native students, as well as Native faculty and other employees; and to collaborate with Native nations to know better the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who care for this land.

Vassar College is a coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.