A delightful new exhibition opened on September 29 at the James Cox Gallery at Woodstock and runs through October 29. “Mushrooms Exposed” showcases the work of Woodstock-based photographer/author Frank Spinelli, who also has a new book out of the same name (Litlethorn Publishing, Canada, 2023).
Spinelli’s current collection celebrates the beauty and fascination of fungi, shot in their natural habitat but framed against black velvet backdrops for contrast. The gorgeous archival prints – mostly about two-by-three-feet in size – go for $1,000 each, and would look amazing in any upscale kitchen. A few are on display in frames, under glass, but most hang from clips, and gallerist Jim Cox says that he’s encouraging buyers to hang them that way as well. The texture of the high-quality paper brings the earthy quality of the mushrooms to vivid life. You can view thumbnails of the images at www.jamescoxgallery.com/frank-spinelli-mushrooms-exposed/nggallery/page/1, but a live visit to see them in situ is recommended.
Despite its name, the James Cox Gallery at Woodstock is actually located about seven miles outside of town, in Willow. (Its original iteration, founded in 1990 and lasting six years, was in a rented three-story red barn in the middle of Woodstock, more recently home to the Hawthorne Gallery antique shop.) The current exhibition space is a former garage that’s part of a six-acre compound that Cox and his wife, artist/teacher Mary Anna Goetz, bought to make their permanent home in 1993. It’s bounded on three sides by the Little Beaverkill, creating a peaceful little haven for viewing art in a bucolic setting, including sculpture gardens that include many works from the estate of Woodstock artist Tomas Penning.
It took a lot of wandering around the country and the world for Cox and Goetz to settle here, however. Born in South Bend, Indiana in 1945, Cox struggled with dyslexia in school, but found his creative niche early on as an “art class star” who “designed stage sets, Valentine boxes, posters and costumes.” On to college, he says he “started at Drake University as an art major, partied too much and flunked out. Enrolled at Indiana University, licked my wounds and prepared for three months of travel throughout Europe. With traveling companions, secured work at an Opel dealership in Germany to help pay travel expenses. Upon return applied to University of Mexico.”
But en route to Mexico, he paused to visit a friend in Oklahoma City and “ended up staying there. My friend’s father owned a printing company.” Cox accepted a “good job” offered by the printer and enrolled in Oklahoma City University, where he met his future wife. “I stopped him in his tracks,” says Mary Anna.
It being the late 1960s when he got his art degree, the Vietnam War was still raging, so Cox signed up to be a VISTA volunteer and taught art classes in an inner-city school in Newark, New Jersey “until I was too old to be drafted.” Mary Anna, trained as a journalist, became the PR director of the Urban League in Newark, “one year after the riots.” The young couple attended the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 and had a “hippie wedding along the Hudson River” in 1970, after which they traveled in Europe for a few months.
Upon their return to the States, they opened their first art gallery in an old gristmill in Allentown, New Jersey. “I flew by the seat of my pants for about three years, met some artists, started networking in the art world,” he recalls. “I joined the National Arts Club and the Salmagundi Club. When you travel in the right alleyways, you meet lots of artists. I developed a stable.” During this period, he also began taking the PATH train into Manhattan, forging connections with the broader art community there and keeping abreast of what was happening in the field of painting especially.
The oil embargo of 1973-’74 sidetracked Cox, however, putting a dent in visitation to his small-town gallery. “No one traveled, so we closed the gallery and moved back to South Bend.” He continued to conduct private art sales, and in 1975 Cox and Goetz “just started traveling.” They spent six months touring South America, “buying things to sell when we got back,” Goetz recalls. We went out West and bought Indian rugs. We learned to be traders.”
Their next big move was to New York in 1976. Cox cultivated a relationship with auction house Parke-Bernet Galleries, “bringing them things to sell. I got an education in how the New York City system of buying and selling worked.” He took a break to attend the Repperts School of Auctioneering in Decatur, Indiana, hoping to break into a career at Sotheby’s.
Meanwhile, the Grand Central Art Galleries were repping Mary Anna’s father, artist Richard Goetz. That’s how Jim, at age 30, found out that the venerable institution – founded in 1922 by John Singer Sargent, and at the time the “biggest art gallery in the world” – was looking for a new director to replace Irwin Barry, who had held the post for 56 years and was ready to retire. “I got hired. It was a big, big deal,” Jim Cox reminisces.
The couple moved to Park Slope in Brooklyn, where they raised their two kids; Mary Anna was able to develop her career as a landscape painter. Cox managed a staff of ten for 14 years, mounting 110 exhibits, publishing four books and sponsoring traveling shows. The Galleries’ commissions during this period included documentation of the building and launch of the first Space Shuttle and portraits of Princess Diana and Kurt Waldheim. Cox organized the first Soviet American Art Conference in Moscow in 1989.
But by then, he’d had enough of moving in such lofty circles, and the couple was ready to resettle in the country and open their own little gallery once more. “I immersed myself in Woodstock,” Jim says. “Woodstock was not being looked at with a serious scholarly eye… There was so much here, and there’s so much history.” He organized traveling shows of previously overlooked local artists and began to specialize in buying up estates. His “discoveries” included Joseph Garlock and Elaine Wesley.
That’s not to say that Jim Cox entirely unplugged his business from the high-visibility international art scene once he moved upstate. In the early 1990s he was a key partner in the group organized by Allentown art collector Charles Dent to create a full-scale replica of Il Cavallo, Leonardo DaVinci’s lost 24-foot bronze horse, after the artist’s original drawings were rediscovered. Cox became marketing director for the project and brokered the deal with Michigan-based collector Frederik Meijer to create a second copy for his own sculpture park, which enabled the first copy to be gifted to the city of Milan, Italy as Dent (who died in 1994) had intended. The horse was cast and assembled at Tallix Art Foundry in Beacon. “We had 50,000 people come to the unveiling,” Cox recalls. “It was on the front page of The New York Times, twice, in color.”
These days, Jim and Mary Anna are in their late 70s, living a quieter life, traveling when they can. Because he had the expertise and experience to do appraisals and conduct auctions, the James Cox Gallery has become the region’s preeminent full-service gallery. You can even get connected with experts who can restore that family heirloom painting in your attic.
The Gallery’s much-anticipated twice-annual auctions regularly include works by top-shelf artists, and the one coming up this December will feature not one but two Albert Bierstadt works. There’s one hanging in the studio adjacent to the Gallery already. If you ask nicely when you do to see Frank Spinelli’s splendid mushroom photography, you might just get to take a peek.
The James Cox Gallery is located at 4666 Route 212 in Willow and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. To learn more, call (845) 679-7608, e-mail info@jamescoxgallery.com or visit www.jamescoxgallery.com or www.facebook.com/jamescoxgallery.
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