Visiting the Hudson River School Art Trail, and North Carolina's blueberry beetle problem
Things I Saw This Week — Friday, June 12
Art
Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, has opened a 114,000-square-foot expansion.
The first big swing in the new temporary exhibition space is Keith Haring in 3D, also opening June 6. It’s the first show to focus exclusively on Haring’s three-dimensional output, pulling together sculptures, totems, masks, skateboards, boomboxes, clothing, paintings, drawings and a 1963 Buick Special courtesy of Cart Dept‘s Larry Warsh. The new space gives Crystal Bridges the capacity to run multiple temporary shows simultaneously which wasn’t really possible before.
The new Contemporary American Art Gallery features a diverse range of works by today’s leading artists across the global art sector. Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room” is in there. So is Teresita Fernández’s “Manigua (Mirror).” The two galleries connect via a bridge that doubles as display space for sculpture, pottery and glassware, with a 40-seat café called Quartz + Honey perched above the surrounding landscape, ponds, gardens and trails.
On the collection side, nearly every work in the museum was moved and reinstalled as part of the reimagining.
“Edward Hopper’s Distinctly American Solitude,” at Hyperallergic, is an excerpt of Ed Simon’s book “American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States.”
Whether a stand-alone building on a rural blacktop, a corner shop in a suburban strip mall, or the kind of big city lunch counter envisioned by Hopper, the diner is a universal American establishment. All the more so because of its 24-hour convenience. London and Paris close after the shows; even the bars in New York shutter at 4am, but diners offer the possibility of all-night sustenance. This is ostensibly for convenience’s sake, offering meals to shift workers and truckers, late-night drunks and insomniacs. But more than that, the diner in the hours before dawn is a third space between work and home, a respite from the monotony of ordinary time, a kind of refuge for the lonely.
Hopper is often configured as the great artist of loneliness — empty offices, abandoned apartments, solitary men and women at sundry hours of the night entrapped by their own selfhood.
Cities
Stories about place:
Chattanooga: “One City, Three Ways: Chattanooga, Tennessee”
Hudson River Valley: “What Did the Hudson River School Painters See?”
The American art scene changed indelibly when Thomas Cole took a sketching trip to the Hudson Valley in 1825. Cole’s finished paintings were unusual. His subjects weren’t the saw-toothed Alps, nor the Italian countryside decorated with ancient ruins. Suddenly, the Catskills’ stair-step skyline, its emerald forests, its silver-mirror creeks, its waterfalls and awesome clouds were art. This, finally, was American landscape art.
Frederic Church, who was born one year later — 200 years ago this month — and would later become Cole’s student, made his own name as a painter of dramatic, distant landscapes, but he always returned to the Catskills. When his monumental 10-foot-wide painting, “Heart of the Andes,” sold in 1859 for the record-breaking sum of $10,000, Church used the proceeds to purchase a farm in Hudson, N.Y. The grounds included a spot called Red Hill, where he had gone sketching as a young man. Eventually, he acquired a total 250 acres in the area and built an estate called Olana, all of which is now preserved as a historic site.
Lisbon: “The Sun Is Shining on Lisbon”
Los Angeles: “In Los Angeles, 70 Artists Transform a Vacant Hospital into a Sprawling Art Experience”
A few miles northwest of Downtown Los Angeles and Skid Row, St. Vincent Medical Center is considered one of the city’s most historical hospitals, having supported Angelenos since the 19th century. Vacant since 2020, the center is slated to become a full-service campus aimed at supporting people with addiction, mental health concerns, housing insecurity, and more. This transformation will begin in the next few months with a final target opening date in 2028 and a wholesale takeover in the meantime.
Through July 31, visitors experience an alternative vision for communal healing, all through the lens of 70 artists. Dubbed the Hospital of Emotions, the pop-up exhibition converts 80 rooms into temporary installations based on eight themes: joy, love, fear, anger, hope, sadness, compassion, and resilience. Among the participating artists are Lisa Waud, whose lush florals spill across an operating room, and Greg Corbino, who built a barren forest from cardboard.
Philadelphia: “Radical Reclamation at the First-Ever ArtPhilly Festival”
San Francisco: “In San Francisco, Students Become Transit Advocates to Fix ‘the City’s School Bus’”
Food (and Drink)
A roundup of food stories of note:
“A ‘mystery beetle’ is devouring North Carolina’s precious blueberries”
“Farmers, vegetarians mourned the loss of Clover. But the Boston eatery found a lifeline.”
Clover Food Lab, launched by Ayr Muir in 2008 as a food truck at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sought to change perceptions of vegetarian food from raw salads and tofu that left you hungry to a constantly evolving sandwich-and-soup menu made with in-season produce from local farms. Customers in nearby Cambridge and in Boston quickly became loyal to the fast-casual restaurant, which prided itself on a mission of discreet environmental activism to reduce meat consumption.
The company grew, eventually opening 12 locations and launching a meal-kit delivery service. But the pressures of the pandemic, the slow return of office workers, the ongoing rise in food prices, and a profit shortfall left the company unable to cover costs. Unfruitful efforts to secure a buyer over the past few months led the company to lay off its 170 employees and close up shop.
“The birria soup dumpling is here and it’s the most LA thing we’ve ever eaten”
“Haitian-French-Creole restaurant opens today with a chef-driven non-alcoholic bar”
Atlanta has a plethora of restaurants that fit neatly into a single category: Italian, Thai, and Chinese, to name a few. It offers mixology-forward bars, craft breweries, organic wine bars, and non-alcoholic beverage shops. What it hasn’t had, until now, is a non-alcoholic bar embedded within an ethnic restaurant rooted in the chef-owner’s upbringing and travels.
Alonetogether is a 35-seat Haitian, French, and Creole restaurant opening today in the former DaVinci’s space in Midtown. Created by chef Jonny Rhodes—the man behind Houston’s now-shuttered Indigo and Broham Fine Soulfood & Groceries—alonetogether serves “ancestral, wellness-focused food” and centrifuge-driven non-alcoholic drinks in an intimate setting.