Ghost Dance: Picture of a Madman

In February of 1916, Ralph Albert Blakelock’s haunting
landscape, “Brook by Moonlight”, was sold at auction for $20,000, a record
price for a painting by a living American artist. The sale made him famous,
newspapers called him America’s greatest artist, and thousands flocked to
exhibits of his work. Yet at the time of his triumph Blakelock had spent 15
years confined in a psychiatric hospital in Middletown, New York and his wife
and children were living in poverty in a ramshackle cabin in Leeds. While Blakelock’s
early works were heavily influenced by Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School
painters, the onset of schizophrenia pushed his paintings into ever more
controversial and radical areas.

This remarkable solo show, created and performed by
Blakelock’s own great-great granddaughter, explores the life, times, and
madness of one of America’s most celebrated and exploited painters whose
brooding, hallucinogenic landscapes anticipated Abstract Expressionism by more
than half a century.