To the Editor:

It’s very nice to be able to share photos from the outdoor art shows of long ago. Most all of the original slides were taken by a professional associated with the University at Albany.

I don’t recall his name now — but that’s why they are so good, lighting, composition. etc. And all art “signs” were freshly painted with great color.

I found and rescued about 300 of those slides, cleaned a lot of them, and had them digitized so they can be shared after going through like 10,000 slides to find them. I was bleary-eyed for days looking at all the slides on a small viewer to see images of bulldozers in the Pine Bush and endless examples of “poor” architecture, etc.

Dad used a lot of slides in his very popular introductory “Dimensions of Art” classes held in larger auditoriums. I also saved a collection of a dozen or so “artistic” nude slides of various attractive women, which he included now and then (but sparingly) in his presentations to ensure everyone’s attention.

He was a very popular professor. While on campus, fellow students would ask me if he was my father and then tell me how cool he was. One fellow told me the class gave my father a standing ovation afterwards.  How ’bout that?

It was an amazing and exciting time as the art department was also in the vanguard of environmental activism. After Kent State, my dad was nearly fired for unilaterally cancelling classes and closing down the art building.

During budget cutbacks for UAlbany circa 1970, I did a unique study of the labor “cost” of the art department to challenge the administration for its indiscriminate budget cuts. I presented a paper that detailed the productive comparison between the aggregate labor cost of the teaching staffs of all departments at the university versus the tuition revenue generated by total class hours.

By that metric, the Art Department staff produced enough tuition revenue in theory to pay 98 percent of its salaries and was the best of all the departments by substantial margins. The Physics Department was the worst at 33 percent.

My dad was chairman of the Art Department but he still taught classes as opposed to “the others.” The cuts to the Art Department were restored.

Researching my dad’s papers, I found correspondence with Life magazine. They had contacted Ed, interested in doing a feature and to “reconstruct the show.”  He explained that would be “rather difficult” as “many of the paintings have been sold and carted off by their proud new owners.”

Others were recycled into various projects including a tool shed and a small shelter “my daughters use for protection while waiting for the school bus” for which he received a citation from “the town building inspector.”  The Life magazine representative was invited to a Nov. 6, 1970 gathering at the house “to celebrate the new waiting room” and the fact it was not “approved.”

In his letter to Life, my father mentioned he has a ”rather extensive collection of colored slides from each of the years ….”  My project to find and preserve those slides has been very satisfying as I have located and found nearly 100 percent of the original 200 or so paintings and their respective titles.

Sadly, Life magazine is no more but collection of and history of the Altamont outdoor art shows has survived  

Ed Cowley

Altamont

Editor’s note: The letter writer’s father, also named Ed Cowley, held outdoor shows of his work, displaying his art on trees in the yard of his Altamont home. He died in 2014