Director’s Choice: The Responsive Eye
Woodstock Artists Association & Museum
Feb. 6, 2024 - May. 1, 2016
Director’s Choice: The Responsive Eye is a survey of over twenty-eight artworks drawn from the museum’s collection of over 2,000 objects, as selected by the WAAM’s Executive Director, Janice La Motta. Represented through paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and crafts are works that span the early years of the association, including a 1912 plein air painting by Cecil Chichester, an intriguing oil on board that served as a study for WWII camouflage by Louis Bouche, as well as examples of works by the founding members of the association, John F. Carlsen, Andrew Dasburg, Carl Eric Lindin, Frank Swift Chase and Henry Lee McFee.
The director has chosen works that both reflect her personal aesthetic in addition to works that express the atmosphere of the early Woodstock art colony as illustrated in pieces such as Eugenie Gershoy’s, Maverick Sketch Class, c. 1935, Eugene Ludins’ Maverick Festival, 1925, Eistein Olaf Drogseth’s Woodstock Farm, c. 1939 and the 1929 portrait of the artist Hannah Small by Austin Mecklem. Examples of works by mid-to-late 20tcentury artists Philip Guston, Ernest Frazier, Mary Frank and Reginald Wilson highlight WAAM’s continued dedication to collecting and representing the distinct and evolving voice that is the tradition of Woodstock artists.