JAZZ, IMPROVISATION AT HEART OF HUDSON EXHIBIT
Hudson Hall’s “Art & Soul” collection evokes music, unity
“Art & Soul,” at Hudson Hall through Dec. 20, was first conceived as an exhibition accompanied by a concert series. In the age of COVID, it evolved into what is now a rare commodity—a safe community space for inspiration and connection.
Curated by Hudson artist Reginald Madison, the show is an homage to the spirit and style of jazz, and in particular to musicians and composers John and Alice Coltrane. The gallery downstairs features a selection of work by eight artists, most of them local. Upstairs in the performance hall, where the Hudson Jazz Festival was to have taken place this fall before its postponement due to the pandemic, is an “intentional listening installation.” With a recorded score and physically distanced furniture groupings, it provides a haven where visitors can relax, contemplate and socialize.
“The concept of this show turned out to be something almost medicinal, in that it emphasizes unity, peace, love, all those things that we welcome during such a crazy time,” Madison said in a recent interview.
Growing up in Chicago’s South Side, Madison was exposed to jazz from an early age — he remembers his parents going out to the legendary Club Delisa to see Herman Blount, who later morphed into the experimental musician Sun Ra. The music of the Coltranes, Cecil Taylor, Duke Ellington, Lee Morgan and many others has been an integral theme in Madison’s life and work, influencing his methodology over five decades of art-making.
“What I draw from all those people is an element of spontaneity and improvisation,” he reflected. “It’s about taking your journey but also being able to change course, and the journey is the destination.”
The show includes his abstract oil paintings, bursting with color and movement, and a three-dimensional assemblage that captures the layered complexities of rhythm and flow. Mounted upstairs is his tribute to Sun Ra—four piec
es from an “orchestra” of eight-foot-tall wooden sculptures he created with found chair parts from Hudson’s L&B factory.
The other works Madison chose for the show aren’t directly inspired by music or specific musicians, but rather by their creators’ “spiritual and artistic relationships to their influence,” he said. “Alice and John Coltrane made music together, a family, a life together. These artists are people that have committed themselves to making art—it’s their life. I know them all personally, and it was also something of a nod to my community and my neighbors.”
Varied in both medium and tone, the selection ranges from Marlene Marshall’s mixed-media self-portrait, to black-andwhite images by street photographer Richard Sandler, to an organically curv
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