LOOK! THERE ARE THE SHADOWS!

One of my Bill Stewart pieces, circa 1995

Bill Stewart is leaving town.  I will miss him.

I can’t pinpoint my introduction to Bill’s outrageous clay sculpture.  Maybe it was a 1970s Finger Lakes Exhibition at Memorial Art Gallery. 

Rochester was an art version of Alice’s Wonderland in those days. Chip and I, dragging our young daughters along, discovered Shop One on Troupe Street in the Corn Hill district of the City. Shop One began as the whim of faculty superstars from the School for American Crafts. It provided a place for them, their students and their friends to exhibit and sell what became history-making art pieces.

Three Crowns, nestled between the Erie Canal and factory buildings in Pittsford, was such an exquisite building that I wanted to live there — with or without its contents. Years later, I went searching for that building. It was gone — or so changed that I couldn’t recognize it — another sad day!

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, as many as two dozen independently owned art spaces existed in Rochester. Oxford Gallery on Park Avenue is the lone survivor. 

A recent essayist wrote that galleries “are the beating heart of the art world.”  They provide a mechanism through which artists’ works find routes into great collections, and along with marketing art, they nearly always serve an educational function. Gallerists research art markets, and publish books and often write essays for trade magazines.  Art galleries  provide a place to exchange ideas and in doing that, they automatically become builders of community. 

It’s dangerous to spend much time walking down memory lane — no side rails to keep you from falling off into the abyss! But there’s no denying: the giants that lived in Rochester and carved new territory in decorative arts  have died, retired, moved away, or closed studios. A significant era has ended  as surely as our industrial giants— Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb — now gasp on life support. 

A case might be made that artists’ studios and social media have replaced galleries in this era of self-promotion. But clinging to its glory days as an “art capital” is over-stating Rochester’s present status. We might as easily point to the growth of micro-breweries as proof of manufacturing health. 

I wish the best for Bill Stewart and his family. His unique art informed and delighted us. Now that he and his contemporaries have left the stage, we wait for the next act. 

But where is the stage?