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Tom Lewis on the Tang exhibition, "Lives of the Hudson"
When it comes to Hudson River lore, Skidmore professor of English Tom Lewis wrote the book—literally. His 2005 volume, The Hudson: A History, inspired the new Tang Museum exhibition, Lives of the Hudson, which Lewis co-curated. Here he shares his thoughts on river, book, and show.
Lives of the Hudson, on view from July 18, 2009, to March 14, 2010, is the second Tang experience for Lewis, who worked closely with Ian Berry, Malloy Curator of the Tang Museum, on both the Hudson show and the 2001 exhibition Work: Shaker Design and Recent Art. Among Lewis’s earlier projects are Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, and Divided Highways: The Interstate Highway System and the Transformation of American Life, books that became award-winning documentary films. His most recent book, The Hudson: A History (2005), inspired the new exhibition, which will feature the Tang’s signature array of artworks old and new, along with historical artifacts and a treasure trove of cultural objects ranging from postcards and tourist items to the eight-foot-wide wooden wheel from an old river steamboat.
Q: What works are you most pleased to present in the show?
What gives me the most pleasure with Lives of the Hudson is the opportunity to present a broad array of artists whose work from the 19th century to the present has been inspired by the river. We feature paintings by the great 19th-century American Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Alfred Bierstadt, along with watercolors and drawings by superb modernists, including Reginald Marsh and John Marin. We even placed a number of them in a 19th-century parlor setting that we have built for the occasion. And then we combined them with contemporary works—a painting by Yvonne Jacquette of the view across the river from lower Manhattan, or one by Bradley Castellanos, a Skidmore alumnus, of a winter scene, as well as remarkable photographs by An My-Le of a trap rock quarry beside the river, and contemporary films by the artists Matthew Buckingham and Alan Michelson.
The exhibition gave me a chance to help gather these works—and many others—and present them in an interdisciplinary way. The Tang encourages a cross-fertilization of ideas and periods, and a subject like this one is a natural for an exhibition. Viewers will see that the Hudson has many “lives” and is a living river.
Q: Why is the Hudson so important to early American history?
The Hudson was one of the first great rivers that explorers came upon when they arrived in the New World. Its banks already supported a rich indigenous culture that had been here for centuries. The Hudson led into the uncharted interior. For the Dutch in the 17th century, it led to the riches of the fur trade. It was the first line of defense in the American Revolution—about a third of the battles of the war were fought in the Hudson Valley. It was the great gateway to the west, especially after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. It was the river of America’s first writers, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving and as this show demonstrates, it inspired America’s first great landscape painters. Everyone who encountered it was inspired by its ineffable beauty.
Q: And isn’t the Hudson still a history-maker?
In the late 20th century, the river became a battleground for environmentalists, starting in 1964 when public opposition arose against plans to build a hydroelectric facility at Storm King Mountain. Citizens in the valley awoke to the fact that they had allowed their river to become an open sewer. When I lived in New York City in the mid-1960s, I’d walk in Riverside Park and think about the river, but not in good ways—you could smell it. Hudson River pollution cases were the seed of the federal Clean Water Act of 1970.
The latest battle, starting in the 1970s, is over PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, the toxic organic compounds used in transformers and capacitors, which were dumped into the Hudson from General Electric plants). It wasn’t settled until the first administration of George W. Bush, which let stand the legal determination that PCBs had to be dredged.
Q: What possesses you to research and write about such monumental subjects? The history of the Hudson, the early development of radio, the construction of the interstate highway system—Don’t you find this kind of topic a bit daunting?
These topics do daunt me—at first. At the beginning, I do what I call ‘walking around them,’ trying to think how to make them work, trying to find the proper approach to a huge subject, and to find my voice. When writing the Hudson history, I’d write a really good story—maybe 10 or 15 pages—and have to cut it out. It was a good story, but it didn’t fit the pattern I was creating. I wanted to convey that the Hudson is not just a river. It’s much bigger. It’s more than a maritime highway—it changed the way we live and act. We all come out of that history, although we don’t always know how and why. Part of my job as a writer—and co-curator of this exhibition—is to peel back the layers of history and figure out the how and why.
Q: You’ve mentioned the concept of Hudson River “stories,” and the Tang exhibition will feature actual stories, in text displayed in the gallery cases and walls.
History is stories—individual stories that all add up to something bigger. Henry Hudson sailing up the river and stopping a little south of Troy, feasting with the American Indians on pigeons and “a fat dog”; Thomas Cole sketching the mountains and river in the summer of 1825; a whale swimming up the Hudson and beaching at Cohoes in the 1620s; the Schuyler family keeping slaves, supposedly treating them so well, giving them a Pinksterfest—a holiday of merrymaking—but keeping them in check by the continual threat of being sold to the south.
You have to leave out 10 stories for every one you put in. Shaping a book or an exhibition is like working a Rubik’s cube. You have to get all the colors in all the right places. You switch the sides of the cube until they line up correctly.
Organizing a show like this is like being a kid in a candy store—so many great works but only so many square feet of exhibition space. We might have found three works illustrating one idea, so we had to make difficult choices. The Tang has a scale model of the Wachenheim Gallery, and for months we worked with miniature pictures and “hung” the show. In some ways, organizing an exhibition is like writing a book. The decisions a curator makes are much like those of a writer—deciding what to include and what to leave out—and always acting with respect. ~Interview by Barbara Melville, Office of Communications
Tags: tang museum, tom lewis
