David Opdyke, New York, New York. "The Entrepreneurial Spirit, #122". Gouache on postcard, 2020. Opdyke was introduced to the local audience with his installation "Mixed Messages" in the Artists and War exhibition in 2008. This installation consists of paper airplanes made from thousands of folded pages from an Arabic-English, English-Arabic dictionary. Opdyke returned in 2019 with another installation titled This Land. With This Land, Opdyke melds art and environmental activism, hoping to inspire urgent changes in vision, one postcard and viewer at a time. The installation looks like some sort of mosaic. A grid-work array of colorful tiles (parts of which appear to be falling away toward the bottom), portrays a panoramic bird’s-eye view down both sides of a V-shaped valley, the sun rising in the pristine distance. A crisp, lush pastoral expanse. A bit closer up, and the individual tiles reveal themselves to be vintage postcards from the first third of the twentieth century — black and white photographs with stylized tinted colors, each one (and there are over 500) portraying a distinct slice of idealized Americana. Town squares, mountain highways, recently completed dams, main streets and county seats, lakes and rivers, forests and farmsteads: intimations of a prodigiously gifted country positively breasting its way into a confident future. This work was highly praised by Lawrence Weschler in the New York Times on January 18, 2019.

6 x 4 in