Arts

Area Artists That Inspire CiviCure

Ammi Phillips (1788 – 1865)
Ammi Phillips was one of nineteenth-century America’s most prolific and important native portraitists. He moved to Troy, New York, near Hoosick, in about 1817. There are six known portraits of Hoosick residents among his work executed before moving south to paint the residents of Rhinebeck and environs in 1829.

Grandma Moses (1860 – 1961)

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses is the iconic self-taught artist of American farm and countryside. She worked in Eagle Bridge, New York, a village in the town of Hoosick. She exhibited her work in local venues, and was first discovered by New York City art collector Louis Caldor in a 1938 Thomas’ Drug Store window display in Hoosick Falls. At her death President John F. Kennedy wrote “The directness and vividness of her paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of the American scene. Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall its roots in the countryside and on the frontier.”

José De Creeft (1884 – 1982)
De Creeft’s Alice in Wonderland fountain in New York City’s Central Park has been enjoyed by millions. Alice illustrates De Creeft’s traditional training in modeling and casting learned in his native Spain and during his studies in Paris. But De Creeft is also revered for bringing direct carving in stone and wood to the fore in modern sculpture. Works created in his studios in both New York City and Hoosick Falls such as Nude in Wood and Guardian in Hoosick Falls’ Wood Park demonstrate the strength of this technique in his skilled hands.

Harriet Hoctor (1905-1977)

Dancer Harriet Hoctor became a featured dancer for the Ziegfeld Follies, starring in several Broadway productions before playing herself in the film “The Great Ziegfeld” in 1936. Other films include the Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers vehicle “Shall We Dance”.

Bob Eberle (1916 – 1981)
Ray Eberle (1919 – 1979)
These brothers, born in Hoosick Falls, were nationally-known singers of the big-band era ranked in popularity surveys with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Bob sang for Jimmy Dorsey’s band and Ray for Glenn Miller and later Tex Beneke and the Modernaires.

Jenny Holzer b. 1950
Holzer, a Hoosick resident, is a conceptual artist best known for her textual “Truisms” – aphorisms that come to us by way of popular media including posters, tee shirts, and, most famously, LED signs. In 2009 a 15-year survey of her work exhibited at New York’s Whitney Museum was summarized by New York Times critic Roberta Smith as “singular, consistent and relevant. It has developed and has also been influential. It regularly succeeds in taking us deep into the machinations of human frailty and power.”