The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum is focusing the second main-gallery exhibition of its second century on still-life painting, using a painting from its permanent collection by the rakish “abstract realist” Romanian-American painter and police reporter De Hirsh Margules as a springboard. The show is called Fish and Dish: A Fresh Take on Still Life.
Ever read Wallace Stevens’ poem “Anecdote of the Jar?”
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Fish and Dish, the first of WAAM’s focus exhibits of 2020, brings together the work of ten enterprising regional artists around a theme juried by a regional-arts professional. It opens Saturday, March 7 alongside a number of small solo works and student shows, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 14. It will stay on view through April 5.
Jason Andrew, the juror behind Fish and Dish, is something of a Brooklyn arts legend. A co-founder and director of Norte Maar, a non-profit now celebrating its 15th anniversary “encouraging, promoting, and presenting collaborative projects in the arts,” is noted for his work with several contemporary artists’ estates. He sees has take on the still-life genre as “a non-traditional look at this very traditional form by selecting contemporary work across all genres to stand in conversation with a painting pulled directly from WAAM’s permanent collection.” Andrew “will select work that expands upon, toys with, or stretches the idea of what makes a still life a still life.”
The pieces are exquisite in their quirkiness and ties to the Woodstock arts colony.
As a genre of painting, still life stretches back into Greek and Egyptian funereal art, as well as the blossoming of Netherlandish and other great Renaissance painting. In the early twentieth century, still life and landscape were elevated in a revision that helped cement Woodstock’s legacy as an arts mecca.
DeHirsh Margules, whose work will be the jar centering this anecdotal take on a classic genre of art, was known for much of his life as the Baron of Greenwich Village, known not only for his capes, berets and classically bohemian sense of style, but also for his friendships with major arts figures of New York (and hence Woodstock) from the 1920s into the mid-1960s, when the man born as Isaac Edward Cecil De Hirsh De Tannerier Gilmont Margules finally passed.
Add in the ten artists in this exhibit – Herb Silander, Joan Barker, Linda Stillman, Wendy Williams, Sascha Mallon, Rob Penner, Jeff Starr, Jenny Nelson, Mimi Young and Fern Apfel – and something special emerges. I found the show a step beyond the usual mixing of the theoretical and historical. It features some of our region’s top artists, many of whom aren’t showing in town as regularly as they once did.
Also opening at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum galleries this weekend, with an artists’ reception March 14 from 4 to 6 p.m., are Eleni Smolen: Girl by the Sea/Guardians, by a “biophilia” artist exploring connections to the natural world, and based in Beacon, in WAAM’s solo gallery, a small-works show juried by Robert Tomlinson of the Catskill Mountain Foundation Gallery, and an exhibition of works by Onteora High School students.
For more information, visit woodstockart.org, stop by the WAAM galleries just off the village green in the center of Woodstock, or call 679-2940.
Join the family! 
