July 18th 2009 - March 14th 2010
Lives of the Hudson explores the long history of one of America’s greatest rivers. Four themes have guided the organization of this exhibition: the natural river, the imagined river, the human river, and the working river. Along with important works by Hudson River School painters, Lives of the Hudson presents objects of material culture, science, and recent art by Bob Braine and Leslie Reed, Matthew Buckingham, Margaret Cogswell, Maxine Henryson,...
Margaret Cogswell, a student in 1968 at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennesee, has just been to hear Martin Luther King speak in support of the sanitation workers’ strike: she’s elated by King’s oratory, his passionate conviction that he’s “been to the mountaintop”—and though he understands that “I may not get there with you,” he knows “that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.” The next day she is climbing the steps to her dorm, her foot “raised in mid-air like a freeze-frame in my...
Art review: Exhibition takes us to the river
'Fugue' captures sounds and sights of the Mississippi
By Andria Lisle
Friday, September 19, 2008
Walking into the Art Museum of the University of Memphis now is like stepping into the pages of John M. Barry's "Rising Tide," which documents the Army Corps of Engineers' attempts to stem the after-effects of the 1927 flood that devastated this region.
Memphis-born, New York-based artist Margaret Cogswell's current mixed...
Margaret Cogswell: Buffalo River Fugues
Catalogue Essay: HALLWALLS CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER
Margaret Cogswell’s site-specific installation Buffalo River Fugues belies its own reality of hard, emphatic industrial materials with a lyrical eloquence that is almost tender in its application. It is as though the remnants of industrial ghosts past to which Cogswell is alluding surface as lines of melody realized in a gallery space. Ductwork and conduit are drawn three-dimensionally...
Artists Rethink Our Interaction with Nature
Arts & Life, The Plain Dealer, Friday, June 6, 2003, Section E, p.E8
".......Cuyahoga Fugues, a site-specific installation by Margaret Cogswell, is the most accomplished work. The New York-based artist has transformed her section of the gallery into an eerie industrial chamber that explores the complex interdependence of man, industry and the Cuyahoga River.
Two enormous galvanized steel pipes divide the space. Through the...
Making the Wind, Elements @ SPACES
angle A JOURNAL OF ARTS+CULTURE, VO. 1 No. 4 June 2003, page 17
".......A fugue is an interweaving of repetitive themes and structural features, a catís cradle of sound suspended between two or more musical thoughts. Cuyahoga Fugues is a deceptively simple installation of large duct work and video projections by New Yorker and SPACES World Artist Program resident Margaret Cogswell. In the always factory-like gallery at the rear of SPACES...
Margaret Cogswell: Cuyahoga Fugues
Catalogue Essay: SPACES WORLD ARTISTS PROGRAM
ISBN # 9667008-6-4
"The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscapes." -Robert Smithson
It is rare for an artist today to dwell on images of industry. From the perspective of contemporary art, it is as if the factory, the steel mill and the oil refinery do not exist, or have been relegated to that portion of consciousness where unwelcome...
