Beacon: A City Reborn as a Haven for Art
Susan Stava for The New York
Times
OLD IS
NEW Beacon offers antiques along Main
Street.
Published: March 26, 2009
BEACON, N.Y.
Dia:Beacon, the
contemporary art museum that opened six years ago and
has attracted artists and galleries to the
city.
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EVEN before it opened
six years ago in a former Nabisco cracker box factory,
Dia:Beacon, the
largest museum of contemporary art in the country, had set
in motion a cultural makeover in this once-forlorn river
city. The mere anticipation of its arrival turned empty
storefronts into gleaming galleries and coaxed residents of
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other artistic enclaves in New
York City to relocate here.
In the years
since, Beacon has
solidified its reputation as a destination for art in much
the way that Hudson, N.Y., transformed itself into a mecca
for antiques.
The sudden bloom of
spare white spaces, in which art is front and center, has been
joined by cafes and shops, making Beacon an attractive place to
contemplate the creative process and while away an afternoon or
evening. In fact, Beacon has followed the lead of other towns
in the Hudson Valley by
designating one Saturday a month — in its case, the second —
as a day when galleries stay open late amid live
entertainment.
To appreciate how a
single institution can jump-start a whole town, start your
visit at Dia:Beacon. The installations, by modern giants
like
Andy Warhol,
Richard
Serra,
Donald Judd and
Dan Flavin, sprawl across vast galleries, which total more than
a quarter of a million square feet. With the arrival of spring,
the museum stays open later since it relies on rows and rows of
skylights to illuminate the galleries — until 6 p.m. starting
in mid-April, as opposed to 4 p.m. in winter.
Children especially
seem to appreciate the playfulness and strangeness of some of
the works, like “North, East, South, West,” by Michael Heizer,
which comprises four giant depressions in the floor of one
gallery, their simple geometric voids plunging 20 feet. Serra’s
“Torqued Ellipses” are lofty walls of rust-hued steel that curl
inward, tilting this way and that. The ones that invite the
viewer along a narrow path to the center are particularly
disorienting, but pleasantly so.
The museum’s excellent
bookstore — long on books and short on gifts — is a nice way to
end your museum tour before going gallery-hopping.
It is a short drive,
or a half-mile walk, to Beacon’s mile-long Main Street, which
runs from Route 9D, not far from the Hudson River,
toward
Mount Beacon, whose gentle dome can be seen in the distance. The
two ends of Main Street clearly pulse with the most creative
energy, flanking a still-gritty, rather dull stretch that gives
a sense of Beacon, pre-Dia.
On the western end of
Main is a collection of noteworthy galleries, among them
Fovea Exhibitions, Van Brunt Gallery and Hudson Beach Glass.
Housed in an
understated gray brick building, Fovea is a nonprofit education
organization dedicated to photojournalism. It gives the
dictionary definition of the name right on its door: “a small
depression in the retina, constituting the point where vision
is most clear.” On view through May 3 is an exhibition called
“Hard Rain (From Memory to History)” by Anthony Suau, the
veteran
Time magazine photographer and
Pulitzer Prize
winner, showing some of his images
of conflict from the past 25 years.
A few doors down is
the Van Brunt Gallery, which in December relocated from the
other end of town to 137 Main Street. A recent show included a
luminescent landscape bordering on abstraction and a painted
assemblage incorporating bits of wood evocative of a picket
fence. In the current exhibition, the owner, Carl Van Brunt,
invited six artists — four photographers and two painters — to
contribute works that relate loosely to the quadricentennial of
Henry Hudson’s historic voyage.
The “Quad Show,” which Mr. Van Brunt described as a
“postmodern vision of the Hudson Valley,” will be on view
through April 27.
Across the street,
Hudson Beach Glass, which occupies a beautifully renovated
former firehouse, features handmade art glass, both sculptural
and functional — from undulating bowls and elaborate light
fixtures to jewelry and mobiles. Among the more beguiling
objects recently on display were intricate glass pumpkins in
unusual colors (purple was my favorite), each topped with a
sinuous green stem. An adjoining studio frequently offers
glass-blowing demonstrations.
Before venturing to
the other end of Main Street, stop in at the
Muddy Cup coffeehouse, with its Victorian-inspired chairs in
brushed gold and red velvet, for a cup of hot “white”
chocolate and a lemon square. Or try the Chill Wine Bar, a
new restaurant with a light menu.
More galleries, gift
shops and restaurants await in the shadow of Mount Beacon. In a
weathered brick building covered with vines,
Go North: A Space for Contemporary Art
recently featured the work of an
Estonian multimedia artist, Marko Mäetamm, whose show,
“Another Day With My Family,” explored the relationship
between the artist and his family, the family and society,
and public versus private through a mix of photographs,
sculpture and video.
If you are inclined to
linger — perhaps it is the second Saturday of the month — visit
the Piggy Bank Restaurant, a lively barbecue restaurant in a former bank
building. It is one of the few businesses that strutted into
town well before Dia:Beacon opened its
doors.
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