ArtBeat: 2015 Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region [Get Visual]

Review by David Brickman

Every year, the annual Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region offers a good opportunity to take the pulse of the Local 518 art scene in one time and place, and this year’s edition at the University at Albany Art Museum is a prime example of how that works.

Though the vagaries of who submits work each year and especially the taste of the juror will have a distinct impact on what’s seen, there’s usually a broad enough coverage to be reasonably representative of what artists in the orbit of Albany are doing. And because these artists are also in the orbit of New York City, one can also get a sense of what’s current there and, by extension, in the art world as a whole. This year’s juror, Rachel Uffner, owns a New York City gallery, so the sensibility of the show is most likely that much more imbued with the bigger art world point of view.

If so, then the current art world, whether regional or global, is still very much about painting, especially painterly abstraction, with a strong side interest in the figurative and the decoratively patterned, and flirting a bit with representation on the Pop side of things. There are 44 artists included (out of a daunting 367 who entered the competition), which is a good number – neither too many to get a grip on in one viewing, nor too few to hold the space – and about three-quarters are represented by multiple works, which is always desirable in large group shows.

Click to read the rest at Get Visual.

NOTE: Saturday (September 5) is the final day to view the exhibition…