64th Art of the Northeast "delivers"!

May 31 - July 26
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7 6pm

Unless you’re an artist, you’re on the sidelines. Critics, curators, dealers, art fans, academics and aficionados can hope and pray to come across great work, and they can try to hunt it down, looking closely and thinking hard, but at the end of the day, they take what they’re given. We’re all dependent on the artists, and we’re rooting for them. The late art critic, painter and poète maudit Rene Ricard succinctly summed up that brutal fact about 30 years ago: “I want my soldiers, I mean artists, to be young and strong, with tireless energy performing impossible feats of cunning and bravura,” he wrote.

The artists who submitted work to the 64th edition of “Art of the Northeast” delivered. It was a pleasure to examine the work that some 500 people contributed, and it was painful to make selections. (I often wished that Silvermine’s art galleries were two or three times as large.) What was perhaps most heartening and inspiring was the unrelenting diversity of the work, which ranged from irreverent, energetic paintings that blurred the boundaries of abstraction and figuration to extended, experimental photographic practices, from curious, quirky sculptures to lovingly detailed miniature architectural models.  

It was an honor to be able to help organize the show. I hope that visitors will all find a few pieces that absolutely bowl them over, that make them view art in new ways, that give provide that rare thrill of seeing something that you haven’t quite ever seen before. That was my experience organizing the show. I’m looking forward to returning to Silvermine in coming years and having that exhilarating feeling again and again and again.  

—Andrew Russeth, Curator, 64th Art of the Northeast
—May 2014

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