Eight acclaimed contemporary artists with roots in the Hudson Valley have their works featured at the new Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts, The Heartwood at Vassar, a boutique hotel, and the farm-to-table restaurant, The Salt Line Hudson Valley, all in a new building adjacent to Vassar’s campus. The shared lobby, each of the hotel rooms, the restaurant, and the Institute feature more than 160 pieces of artwork in various mediums from an eclectic group of artists. Artists include Andrea Baldeck ’72, Laura Battle, Mark Dion, Nancy Graves ’61, Mara Held, Ransome, Amy Talluto, and Julia Whitney Barnes—all with Hudson Valley roots and who were inspired by their surroundings.

All of the building’s artwork—curated by staff from Vassar’s on-campus museum, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center—responds to the mission and rich history of collecting at Vassar, and creates a visual dialogue between art and science objects. “From professors and administrators to classes and individual students, the College benefits from prolonged engagements with contemporary artists, including those from local communities,” said the Loeb’s Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator. “The artwork on display at The Vassar Institute, The Heartwood, and The Salt Line provides an enriching, new visual experience that we expect visitors far and wide will enjoy.”

A new, commissioned work by artist Mark Dion, The Vassar Atheneum, was created specifically for the space. The work, which was three years in the making, delves deeply into the history, ideology, and methodologies of collecting practices at Vassar, resulting in a new installation that reflects the character of the institution and speaks to the College’s mission and its traditions.

A major component of the installation showcases two large-scale, custom-made cabinets featuring documents from Vassar’s vast holdings of material culture and archives. The cabinets create a semi-enclosed area of the facility’s lobby, which allows for conversation and exchange. The contents of the cabinets highlight not only the College’s deep commitment to excellence in the sciences and humanities, but also the rich history of student culture and interdisciplinary learning at the school.

“These projects demonstrate that historical objects and collections have a role to play, even at times for works of art created just yesterday, whose traces will be left for future generations to treasure and criticize, but, also, hopefully, to preserve,” said artist Mark Dion.

A work located in the second-floor snug, a cozy lounge at The Heartwood, brings nature indoors with The Botanist’s Mural, a room-sized wall mural by Julia Whitney Barnes, who often uses historical processes and plant collection as inspiration for her art. The mural draws inspiration from the Vassar College Herbarium, which dates back to when the school welcomed its first class of students in 1865. Vassar’s Herbarium holds over 15,000 specimens of vascular plants, bryophytes, and algae—and for this enormous piece, Whitney Barnes spent years pouring over hundreds of specimens and incorporated 63 plants from the extensive Herbarium collection as well as her own garden in Poughkeepsie.

Other works either commissioned by or pulled from The Loeb’s collection for the building include: Hudson Valley artist Laura Battle’s How long is your past, how far is your future, a painting inspired by astronomer and Vassar College alumna Vera Rubin, that was made for the 2016 Loeb exhibition Touch the Sky: Art and Astronomy; artist Ransome’s Quilter Rosie, a painting that honors his African American heritage and depicts his grandmother, Rosie, a matriarch and a quilter from the American South; and located in The Salt Line, Nancy Graves’s Bendigo, a work that layers boldly colored motifs suggesting plants, cast shadows traced from the artist’s own sculptures, prehistoric drawings, and early pictographic language. Another of her works, Five Fans, Lampshades, and Lotus is located on the first floor of the building.

The Artists

Andrea Baldeck ’72 began photographing with a simple brownie camera at age eight, imagining herself a Life photographer canoeing through the jungle to meet Albert Schweitzer. Since 1996 she has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, and her images are found in museums and private collections.

Laura Battle has spent several decades as an artist exploring the potential of geometry to offer an optically charged mental space in which to explore universal visual language. Her work is informed by diagrams of the universe, mathematical configurations, codes and symbols, maps and charts of all kinds, esoteric manuscripts, Arabic geometries, forces in nature like the ebb and flow of water, and by the work of innumerable artists.

Mark Dion currently lives and works in Copake, New York. For over two decades, Dion has worked in the public realm across a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Dion has extensive experience working in higher education. In 2012, he installed more than 700 objects gathered from around the Johns Hopkins University campus in the Brody Learning Commons for his project An Archaeology of Knowledge.

Nancy Graves (1939–1995) was an American artist of international renown. She is a graduate of Vassar’s class of ’61 who became an accomplished sculptor, painter, printmaker, and video artist and is considered one of Vassar’s most recognized artist alums. Graves experimented with the intersections between art and science. She is best known for her brightly colored, abstract compositions in various media.

Mara Held is known for energetic yet delicate paintings on linen and paper depicting lyrical organic forms in vibrant colors. Her intricate line work and patterning evoke varied sources from plant life growing on ancient forest floors or pelagic forms found in coral reefs to Japanese woodcuts and Psychedelic posters. Her work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions in New York City and abroad and included in group shows nation- and world-wide.

Amy Talluto was born in New Orleans and earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2018 she was awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship in Painting and was an Artforum Critics Pick for her solo exhibition at Black & White Gallery (Brooklyn). She has recently shown her work at Jeff Bailey Gallery, the Berkshire Botanical Garden, the Samuel Dorsky Museum, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and Wave Hill Gardens.

Ransome is a contemporary artist whose practice is both personal and universal. His work focuses on images that center on his African American lineage, traced to formerly enslaved Africans of the American South who migrated to northern cities along the East Coast. The pictorial narratives are personal, yet the symbols used are universal and interplay with larger social, racial, ancestral, economic, and political history that speaks to current issues.

Julia Whitney Barnes is an artist living in Poughkeepsie, NY who works in a variety of media including cyanotypes, watercolor, gouache, oil paintings, stained glass, murals, and site-specific installations. She spent two decades in Brooklyn before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015. Whitney Barnes was recently awarded a glass commission for NYC Public Art for Public Schools/Percent for Art that is slated to be unveiled Fall 2024. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally.

Visit The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts, The Heartwood at Vassar, and The Salt Line Hudson Valley for more information.

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, comprised of 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 vassar.edu/theloeb or follow @theloeb.

Commitment to DEAI

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, 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.