Subliminal Horizons: Part 2, curated by Alvin Hall

I always envisioned a horizontal, floor-based work of art at the opening of Subliminal Horizons. The exhibition's focus, BIPOC artists living and working in the Hudson Valley today, necessarily asks viewers to engage with the unconsidered, the overlooked, and the historically disregarded. Thus, it was natural for the exhibition to lead with works like Huma Bhabha's Road to Balkh, (2015) in New York, and Kianja Strobert's flotilla of metal lathe, papier mâché, and acrylic vessel-like sculpture in Germantown. These works evoke thoughts about how people traveled through the Hudson Valley by land and water; but they also prompt thoughts about what was carved out, built, altered, and expanded as migration, industrialization and natural shifts transformed the majestic landscapes portrayed in Hudson River School paintings into an economy. Many of the people who lived and worked there-indigenous, Black, brown, Asian, waves of immigrants from Europe-were not included until recently in the historical narrative about the area. The content of their labor is ever-present but, more often than not, taken for granted. The thematic threads running through Subliminal Horizons reveal or foreground multiple facets and implications of landscape, migration, and history.

The natural world figures strongly in many of the works on view. Xaviera Simmons' Thundersnow Road (2010)and If We Believe in Theory 1 (2009) reference both the ground-level density of the landscape and the forward-looking drive of those traversing it. Diana Al-Hadid's works, especially Styx and Stones (2021) and Untitled (2020), offer a visual rumination on the raw, confronting energy of the waterways, the ever-present closeness of multiple-layered Nature that has its own beauty-mysterious of course but also surprisingly abstract when considered from afar. Lisa Corinne Davis's map-like abstract paintings, Psychotropic Turf, 2015 and Congruous Fantasy, 2017, suggest a similar consideration of estuaries, land, people, and other elements from different, equally thought-provoking visual perspectives.

Carlos Vega (Morebat et Dolebat I, 2020) and Melvin Edwards (Accord, 2017) evoke thoughts about the deliberate suppression and violence that was also a part of the history of the Hudson Valley. This truth and the facts of the specific incidents were, for years, out of sight and out of mind-deliberately overlooked in a narrative that highlighted the sublime landscapes and the architectural palaces of robber barons and successful artists.

The same is true of the memory of a place-a landscape, a road, a room. Henri Paul Broyard's painting of interiors (TFFSD, 2016 and GTPS, 2019) use vernacular photographs as their source material. Broyard focuses on a section of the photograph in which there are no people. In his artworks, the arrangement of the furniture, the vases, the lamps, the decorative objects, the paintings on the walls are the references and stimuli for the viewer's recollections. The interiors could be in a home in Anywhere America, but his small, often quirky inventions added to the scenes prompts us to rethink exactly what we are looking at, especially its relationship to real memory and emotional memory.

I selected the art works in Subliminal Horizons partly to leave the viewer with resonating thoughts about cultures, histories, erasure, resilience, and rebirth in the Hudson River Valley. They were also chosen for the distinct individuality of each voice, each artistic practice, and each intent. To paraphrase the title of Jeffery Gibson's tapestry: The power of these artists comes from their difference.

– Alvin Hall