Press

The New York State Museum will open Hudson Valley Ruins, a photography and architecture exhibition, on August 20. On display through December 31, 2017, the exhibition features over 80 photographs by Robert Yasinsac and Thomas Rinaldi documenting forgotten historic sites and cultural treasures in the Hudson River Valley. 

“Hudson Valley Ruins is a powerful visual convergence of place and history,” said State Museum Director Mark Schaming. “Yasinsac and Rinaldi’s masterful photographs richly echo the past and invite viewers to better understand the history of the Hudson Valley through its forgotten cultural treasures. The State Museum is pleased to host this exhibition and hope visitors leave with an understanding of how these historic sites shaped the landscape of the Hudson Valley.”

The exhibition is based on Yasinsac and Rinaldi’s 2006 book, Hudson Valley Ruins: Forgotten Landmarks of an American Landscape. In addition to great river estates, the book and exhibition profiles sites meaningful to everyday life in the Valley: churches, hotels, commercial and civic buildings, mills, and train stations. The exhibition explores many of these abandoned places and also revisits several sites that have changed in the past ten years since the book’s publication.

Working together since meeting in 1999, Yasinsac and Rinaldi have photographed more than 500 sites throughout the region. First photographing sites around their childhood homes, they gradually worked farther afield, eventually expanding their scope to cover the entire region between Yonkers and the Capital District.  Driven by a sense of urgency to document sites of architectural or cultural significance that seemed poised to disappear, the pair also found beauty in the picturesque decay of these places.

Photos from the exhibition are available here: http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/about/press/kits/hudson-valley-ruins.

The State Museum is a program of the New York State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education. Located at 222 Madison Avenue in Albany, the Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.  It is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. Admission is free. Further information about programs and events can be obtained by calling (518) 474-5877 or visiting the Museum website at www.nysm.nysed.gov.

###