Taking his cues from the rich ornamentation of Glyndor House, Alan Michelson created a plaster frieze below the wainscot that is both pristine and ghostly. Conceived as a belt, the work suggests the Two Row Wampum belt that is also referenced in the works by G. Peter Jemison and Maria Hupfield on display in this room. The work has a panoramic quality, an approach that Michelson has taken with his video work as well. The frieze features beaver skulls, squash, corncobs, and oyster shells, all of which suggest the bounty and plenty provided by the river, but that were also new to Henry Hudson. The beaver was a key element in the trading system exploited by the Dutch West India Company and the squash and corn were essential new world foods introduced to Europeans. There is irony and humor in the juxtaposition of eaten and whole corn, damaged and whole squash, and the frieze introduces the larger issues of environmental stewardship into the house. With Colony, Michelson returns to the imagery of his 1990 site-specific installation, Earth’s Eye, which denoted the location of Collect Pond, an essential fresh water source that settlers failed to protect from pollution produced by the tanneries and encroaching urban life.

Concepts of landscape, memory and identity figure in the work of Alan Michelson, a Mohawk born in Buffalo, NY. He earned a BFA from Tufts University, Medford, MA and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and Columbia College, New York, NY. He has lived in New York City since 1989. He recently completed a General Services Administration Art-in-Architecture commission for the U.S. Port of Entry, in Massena, NY, designed by Smith Miller + Hawkinson Architects. Solo exhibitions include New Tribe: New York, the National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY; NATIVity, Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, Ontario; and Ganohonyohk, Art in General, New York, NY. Other works that relate specifically to the Hudson River were featured in Lives of the Hudson, on view at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, and Imaging the River at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY. He created A Closer View for Thoreau Reconsidered at Wave Hill in 2007. He has received grants from the New York Community Trust, the Peter S. Reed Foundation and a Visual Artists’ Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.