Fine Arts

Elverhoj (Danish for “hill of the fairies,” pronounced “El-ver-hoy”) was an Arts and Crafts colony established on the picturesque west shore of the Hudson River in 1912 by Danish American artists and craftsmen led by Anders Andersen. Little known today, the colony achieved a national reputation before World War I and earned a gold medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. That same year a write-up in Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman magazine with photos of the rustic studios added to the colony’s growing fame.

From her start in the 1980s, Judith Schaechter (b. 1961) has stretched the medium of stained glass into an incisive art form for the twenty-first century, boldly paving her path in the diverse arena of contemporary art. With deep respect for history, a provocative rebelliousness, and a feminist sensibility, Schaechter has aptly been called a “post-punk stained-glass sorceress.” This catalog accompanies The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained-Glass Art, the first survey and major scholarly assessment of this groundbreaking artist’s 37-year career.

Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism calls upon craft, during an era of political disruption, as a creative force to voice dissent, express hope, critique the curtailment of civil rights, and to restore dignity to the human experience. The essays and artwork featured in this exhibition catalogue are framed within the context of American democracy and disclose how we, as individuals and as a culture, “craft democracy” and ultimately question what democracy means today.

Josephine Tota (1910 –1996) was a seamstress and amateur artist who lived a conventional life among the Italian immigrant community in Rochester, New York. In her seventies, she spent countless hours painting in the privacy of her home, where she imbued over ninety small jewel-like paintings with the richness of her strange imagination. Tota captured and condensed anxieties accumulated over a lifetime.