The Tremaine Art Gallery at The Hotchkiss School is pleased to present Dialogue: Art in Conversation featuring works by Nathaniel (Tate) Klacsmann and Valerie Hammond from April 2, 2024 through June 2, 2024.

An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 6 from 4 to 6 p.m. and an artist talk will occur on Thursday, April 11 at 7 p.m.

The exhibition explores the creative processes of two artists whose work reverberates around questions of social inequity, magic, myth, and the environment. Together, their pieces begin a conversation filled with reflective echoes, offering opportunity for intersection around creativity and process. Curated by Joan Baldwin and Terri Moore, Dialogue also includes video and photography by Colleen Macmillan, Ann Villano, and Hotchkiss film students.

The Tremaine Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. It is closed on Monday.

About Valerie Hammond

Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguishable for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. In all of her work, there is play between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual: the dichotomy between what is seen and the sensation it provokes. The works inhabit a space she is constantly searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. Her artwork becomes emblematic not only of the people whose hands she has traced or the subjects she is drawing but of her own evolving artist process-testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory. Her work can be found in both private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, The Fine Arts Museum Houston, The Progressive Art Collection, the Fidelity Collection, the New York Public Library’s print and drawing collection, The Chazen Museum, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Grand Palais Museum, Paris and the Getty Museum. She is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally.

About Nathaniel (Tate) Klacsmann

Nathaniel (Tate) Klacsmann offers an alternative perspective to viewpoints that see animals and the environment primarily in terms of their usefulness to human-kind, by capturing the consciousness of animals as they exist independently from, but intermingled with humanity. Using marbled paper to create variable and unique surfaces, he then transforms the paper into landscapes and adds linocut prints of animals. Every scene includes evidence of human habitation such as vehicles, trash, or architecture to show how land and animals are inextricably linked to human consumption and also exist independently from human’s ability to extract use from them. Within the work, Klacsmann balances beauty with the ominous forces encountered in the world.

Klacsmann is a former council member for the Society of American Graphic Artists, and his work is included in the permanent collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art, The Smith College Museum of Art, the flat files and archives of Zea Mays Printmaking, and the Miriam Shapiro Archives at Rutgers University. He completed certificates in Green Printmaking at Zea Mays Printmaking, and Graphics and Animation at University of North Georgia; an MFA at Vermont State University; a Masters of Art History at the University of Glasgow, and a BA at Yale University. He has been teaching art and art history for more than ten years at schools including: Vermont State University, Augusta University, SUNY Columbia Greene, and Bard Early College – Hudson Valley and has been a visiting artist or lecturer at the Hotchkiss School, Springfield College, and New River Community College.