This series of four paintings juxtaposes the beauty of the Hudson Valley, perhaps as Henry Hudson first saw it, with the environmental damage the river has endured. To create this suite of paintings, Hope revisited the works of Cole, Durand, Doughty and Church at the Albany Institute of History and Art, then collaged newspapers that she has collected over the years, while exploring vistas of the river in her environs, including the view from her apartment. By painting contemporary views of the Hudson Valley near her home, Printup Hope blends the reverential approach to landscape expressed by the Hudson River School painters with her own experiences. Each painting is a distinct view of Troy, Menands, Rensselaer, and North Albany. Panoramic vistas and expressive skies do not mask the newsprint background - General Electric advertisements from 2001 and Times Union newspaper articles that take opposing sides on the issue of cleaning up polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the river.

Melanie Printup Hope is of Tuscarora descent and was raised on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in western New York State. Her video, multimedia and installation work has been shown throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. She received a Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship in 1996 and has received awards and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund. She earned her BFA in graphic design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY and her MFA in electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. She is currently associate professor of graphic design at The Sage Colleges, Albany, NY.

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