TWO INSTALLATION SHOWS AT RAG
Two major Treadwell artists will open complementary exhibits at both RAG galleries on Saturday, September 8th . Josepth Kurhajec’s moving and fantastical sculpture and mask installation, “Homage to the Workhorse,” will flll the Walt Meade Gallery and hall, while Bertha Rogers’ “Stones and Bones of Delaware County,” will be at The Old Bank Gallery on Main St. Both exhibits use natural materials in mythic iconography to invoke and celebrate the essence of the life and land of Delaware County. Opening receptions for both exhibits will be held on September 8 from 4-6 pm.
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| mask by Joseph Kurhajec |
Czechoslovak –born Joseph Kurhajec emigrated with his family to Racine, Wisconsin . He received a BS in Art Education in 1961, and an MA in Fine Arts in 1962 from the University of Wisconsin. Moving to New York in 1963, he assisted Seymour Lipton in the Lincoln Center project, taught at Cornell University and was selected one of "Ten Independents" for a group show at the Guggenheim in 1972. He received a CAPS grant from the New York State Council of the Arts in 1974 and his sculptures have been exhibited at the Storm King Art Center, New York and widely throughout the United States and Europe, where he maintains a home in Paris. Kurhajec moved from NYC to Treadwell in 1971 and opened The Treadwell Museum of Fine Art.
In 1972, while teaching at New Paltz State University, he came across a work-horse graveyard. He gathered 37 work-horse skulls and bones. It took him 12 years to transform this collection of bones into stunning works of art. During the next 10 years, Kurhajec created the body of work that is being exhibited at The Walt Meade Gallery. The works were last shown in 2000 at the Delaware County Historical Association in Delhi. Kurhajec says, “ Long ago the work-horse disappeared and so has the Native American from this area. It is my intention to preserve a piece of history. “ This installation is intended as an homage to both the work-horse and the Native Americans who once lived and worked here. The pieces are haunting, brilliant and moving beyond words. This is an exhibit to be visited again and again. The exhibit will be on display through October 1.
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| Still Looking by Bertha Rogers |
Bertha Rogers’ interdisciplinary installation project, “The Stones and Bones of Delaware County” integrates stones, parts of trees and other natural objects found in the country with such visual elements as paintings and artist’s books and boxes. New poems and original and anthropological riddles and tales based on the Anglo-Saxon riddles from “The Exeter Book, “ all richly and imaginatively illustrated by Rogers, will be included. Bertha Rogers's paintings, illuminations, and artist´s books have been shown in more than 200 juried and solo shows throughout the US and abroad, and she has received several NYSCA Decentralization and NYFA SOS grants for her interdisciplinary work.
In 2002 she received a Ludwig Vogelstein grant for her visual art and poetry, and in 2006 she was the recipient of an A.E. Ventures Grant for excellence in visual arts and poetry and for her contribution to the arts. Rogers ha spublished her poetry in journals and anthologies, and in the interdisciplinary collection Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, Reliquaries; chapbooks The Fourth Beast; A House of Corners, and The Reason of Trees; and full-length poetry collection Sleeper, You Wake. Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000, and she is currently translating the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book. Her poem "Rhomboid" won PhiloPhonema´s Lyric Recovery Award in 2001, selected by Alfred Corn; and her poem "Truck Stand" was selected by John Ashbery for display in the Albany International Airport to celebrate the Millay Colony´s 3Oth anniversary. She has won residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, Caldera, Jentel, Hawthorne International Writers Retreat, and Hedgebrook. She is Delaware County´s first Poet Laureate.
In 2002 she founded, with her husband, Ernest M. Fishman, Bright Hill Press.Rogers has been a teaching artist for more than 30 years and this year received the Association of Teaching Artists Distinguished Service to the Field Award at the CommonGround Conference in Rochester. She teaches through the DCMO/ONC BOCES AIE programs and with arts organizations in upstate New York and is a CROP artist as well as a Teachers and Writers Collaborative artist. She has been a poet-in-residence at Hartwick College, SUNY Potsdam, NCCC, and Wells College, and has taught creative writing at Hartwick. Through Bright Hill she is leading a series of Museum Research, Writing, andVisual Arts programs in 2007.
This exhibit is partly funded with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program, administered in Delaware County by The Roxbury Arts Group. The installation will be on view at The Old Bank Gallery through October 14.
Gallery Hours ate Monday –Friday, 10- 4 ; Sat. 1-4; Sundays 10-2 and by appointment. (607) 326-7908.