"Imaging the River" presents the Hudson River as a natural wonder and as an inspiration for artists from the nineteenth century to the present. The exhibition at the Hudson River Museum will be on view from October 4, 2003 through May 23, 2004.

Employing maps, paintings and drawings from the museum's permanent collection, the exhibition contrasts the nineteenth-century romantic view of the river. Man and nature living harmoniously with works of contemporary artists who capture, in many media, the ever-changing river.

Painters of the Hudson River School such as John Bunyon Bristol, Samuel Coleman, Jr., James Renwick Brevoort, Gifford Beal and Julian O. Davidson, were drawn to the Hudson's beauty and its path to the sea, framed by the Adirondacks and the Palisades. As evident in their works in Imaging, these post-Civil War painters departed from Dutch and English landscape traditions to define the river's aesthetics with atmosphere and light. Their vision still resonates.

Contemporary artists see this same river changed, in the twentieth century, by the nation's explosive growth. The once bountiful Hudson landscape is for them a cautionary image of conflict between industry and nature. The works of 23 living artists using video, site-specific installations, photography, painting, and sculpture complete the contrasting picture in "Imaging the River." While presenting the Hudson's contemplative beauty, they also capture its degradation and its more recent reclamation.

Artists include: Colin Barclay, Bob Braine, Jaime Davidovich, Dan Ford, Larry Frankel, Sandy Gellis, Helen and Newton Harrison, Maxine Henryson, Basia Irland, Susan Jennings, Alan Michelson, Alison Moritsugu, Raquel Rabinovich, Renata Rainer, Aviva Rahmani, Alexis Rockman, Ann Rosenthal and Steffi Domike, Rosalind Schneider, Buster Simpson, Roy Staab, Jason Walz and Timothy White.

"Imaging the River's" contemporary artists are motivated by environmental and social concerns.

Bob Braine, voyager of waterways from the Bronx River to Guyana's Mazaruni, builds his own boats to see and record post-industrial landscapes. For Mid Hudson Formation, Braine traveled to Hudson locations to take infrared aerial photographs of sites that inspired Hudson River School artists before the sites underwent industrialization.

To produce her art, Aviva Rahmani focuses on landscape trigger points where attention can have a restorative ripple effect on adjacent ecology. Rahmani's installation, "Through a Glass Darkly," is a series of paintings and a PowerPoint presentation that shows river views from The Hudson River Museum building. Rahmani seeks new ways in the built environment to bring healing to the natural scene that has been violated by barrier architecture.

Alison Moritsugu is a native of Hawaii, the exploited island "paradise." She turns her interest in environmental themes into her use of raw wood, taking classic romantic landscapes out of familiar context and painting them on decaying logs, to question our own ideas about nature and artifice.

Some of Imaging the River's artists took inspiration from the museum's collections and its river location.

Alan Michelson's installation recasts a Hudson River School painting as the video projection of a real-time river view, set against Indian Point.

Ann Rosenthal and Steffi Domike mine the museum's postcard collection to profile the Saw Mill River, a Hudson tributary. Going to the postcard sites, the artists created river paintings by saturating and staining cloth in the Saw Mill, and then produced new postcards showing the sites as they are today.

Taking another approach, Susan Jennings created an abstract of the river's surface - its streams of changing light, color, and movement. Her work on a plasma screen questions the relationship between painting and video.

Jaime Davidovich also blurs the distinction between painting and video by creating a three-screen, rear-projection Hudson River video in which he paints and edits video frames to imagine the river as Red Sea.

Husband and wife Helen and Newton Harrison have created four computer-generated map drawings of today's Hudson River Basin and show its possible future.

Roy Staab makes site-specific installations from river reeds found in the Hudson. For Imaging, he creates a river-inspired geometric reed form in the Museum Courtyard.

"Imaging the River" has been organized by the Hudson River Museum. Amy Lipton is the guest curator of the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a gallery brochure.

Located at 511 Warburton Avenue, the Hudson River Museum is a nonprofit, cultural institution that houses galleries, a planetarium and the 1876 Glenview Mansion. Open Wednesday-Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. all year and on Fridays, noon - 8 p.m. $5 adults, $3 senior citizens age 62 and older and children 4 - 12. Under 4, free. (914) 963-4550.