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You
set the scene: installation from Harrison’s Consider
the Lobster.
Photo:
Chris Kendall
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The
Year In Review 2009
Best
of 2009
Critic:
Nadine Wasserman
1.
Rachel Harrison: Consider the Lobster
The
Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College
The
New York Times critic Holland Cotter called this survey
“tough” and “haunting,” and I have to agree.
2.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned
With
Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art
Who else could tackle a Mies design with such ingenuity and
grace?
3.
“This Great Nation Will Endure” Photographs of the Great
Depression
New
York State Museum
A timely show of iconic images by greats such as Gordon Parks,
Ben Shahn, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.
4.
Amazement Park: Stan, Sara, & Johannes VanDerBeek
The
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and art Gallery
A yearlong experimental show that captures the avant-garde
spirit of the 1960s and 1970s by combining work of the father
with contemporary work by the up-and-coming children.
5.
MFA Thesis Exhibition
University
Art Museum, University at Albany
Despite the gloomy financial outlook of 2009, this year’s
show was notable because it was lively and carnivalesque.
The work looked good together and the show had the appearance
of different disciplines actually working concertedly.
6.
Melinda McDaniel
Carrie
Haddad Gallery
McDaniel’s experimentations with the photographic medium are
compelling and thought-provoking as well as captivating.
7.
Dynamic Equilibrium
Mandeville
Gallery, Union College
The League of Imaginary Scientists’ campaign to colonize space
doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
8.
Jason Middlebrook: Live With Less
University
Art Museum, University at Albany
Because a giant column of garbage reminds us why we have to
save the planet so we don’t have to colonize space.
9.
Sculpture in the Streets
Downtown
Albany
In the past, this show has been so astonishingly bad that
the curators this time deserve credit for producing a respectable
show.
10.
Jennifer Dalton: Is It Just Me?
The
Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College
The Collector-ibles downstairs and the Art Basel condolence
cards upstairs pretty much summed up the fluctuations of the
art market.
Best
of 2009
Critic:
Meisha Rosenberg
1.
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art
Technically, this three-floor exhibition—really less an exhibition
and more like an act of God—opened in 2008, but 2009 marked
its first full year in residence. If you haven’t seen it yet,
what are you waiting for? It’s only up for another 23 years.
2.
Prendergast in Italy
Williams
College Museum of Art
In dozens of exquisite watercolors and monotypes, shown for
the first time together at Williams (home to a Prendergast
archive and study center), American impressionist Maurice
Prendergast perfected a subtlety rare among artists of any
genre or period.
3.
Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History
Tang
Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
The original kids of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) have grown
up, but the collaboration continues. I imagine their riotous,
passionate and graffiti-inspired paintings (sometimes painted
on book pages from the likes of Moby Dick or The
Scarlet Letter) as cultural ambassadors, capable of representing
the best of American art to different times and places.
4.
Upstate Girls: Brenda Ann Kenneally
Sanctuary
for Independent Media
The gallery was just a downstairs hallway, but the “girls”—Troy
women and girls followed by photographer Kenneally for years—are
unforgettable. Some even added their own captions in handwriting
on the wall—it doesn’t get much more real.
5.
Photography Now 2009
Center
for Photography at Woodstock
I didn’t have time to review this show, curated by Charlotte
Cotton, but it blew me away. Photographs by Clint Baclawski,
Stacey Tyrell, and Betsy Lin Seder, from postmodern landscapes
to Yijun Liao’s Stills From Unseen Films were so good,
so precise and insightful, that I will have to drop everything
for next year’s selection.
6.
Soldier Williams, 396 Days in Iraq
Billboard
on Route 787, sponsored by Sanctuary for Independent Media
Suzanne Opton photographs the heads of soldiers while they
are lying down, and the resulting portraits—vulnerable, honest—bring
a much-needed note of grounding sobriety to a society that
seems perpetually at war.
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