This edition of the Mohawk Hudson Regional Art Exhibition probably differs from the others in that its juror is both a local and an out-of-towner at the same time. Having been born in Utica and grown up in Hudson Falls, it sometimes appears that I spent a lot of my post-adolescence trying to escape the North Country's pull, and a good chunk of my adulthood getting drawn back in! Growing up near Bolton Landing, I can still recall the visceral shock upon seeing David Smith's sculpture at an exhibition at the Hyde Collection while still in junior high school. My relation with the University at Albany is almost as mythic, in a sense, since the occasion for my first visit to the campus in 1972 was as a teenage attendee at a rock concert (one of my first) featuring
T. Rex. My return as an undergrad art student three years later was to proudly hang a drawing I'd made in the 1975 Mohawk Hudson Regional!

Naturally, this makes it a particular honor to be able, two decades later, to select and jury this year's Regional. As curator for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in lower Manhattan, I'm reminded on an all-too-frequent basis of the scarcity of venues for artists who live and work outside the two or three major art marketplaces in the U.S., which is why exhibitions like these are so important. Viewing the slides submitted for consideration enabled me to expose myself to a great deal of art from the region fairly quickly, and examining the work personally at the museum made discoveries possible that might not have taken place otherwise. What I learned from this process is that the Albany region has a startlingly high level of artists whose work is either very good or very interesting, and quite a few who satisfy both criteria. I would not be at all surprised to encounter some of them in the near future in an even more competitive situation, like Soho or Chelsea!

In comparison with these choices, Harold Lohner's installation of several dozen monoprints, each of which is a separate study of a male subject, asks viewers to fill in certain levels of information for themselves: are these men friends of the artist, homeless people, or imaginary people who the artist has invented? Regardless of their origin, Lohner's accumulation of faces draws on our capacity to empathize with people we have never met, and he does so with a surprisingly limited set of variations on his theme. In Sandra Scolnick's startling small paintings, the act of self-portraiture merges with various forms of genre representation derived from archetypal American sources: old high school yearbooks, newspaper society pages, etc. Although Scolnick's substitution of her face for those of her long-ago counterparts may not initially seem to be a visually subversive act, its effect on the viewer is both psychological and cultural, signalling that the idealized framework that circumscribed representation only a generation or two ago is utterly different from today's expectations. Finally, despite the fact the low lying, mixed-media sculpture by Anthony Cafritz brings in a number of stylistic referents from various schools, what seems to draw the viewer in most is his vivid and original use of materials. Combining found furniture with elements more commonly associated with abstraction - socklike forms arranged in a circle, ringlike supports made of beeswax - Cafritz also employs the structure of the base to partially conceal these elements, so that the end result seems to deny its own complexity.

In summary, if the viewing public responds anywhere near as positively about these choices as the juror, then the 1997 Mohawk Hudson Regional may even turn out to be the kind of popular success that contemporary art is always striving to attain. One thing is certain: if public recognition of these artists ever approached the caliber of their work, the Albany region would have a thriving art scene to equal any of those parts of the country that are more recognized as artistic centers.