You may have noticed that a photo of Sharon Bates, the director of the Art and Culture program at Albany International Airport, was featured on the cover of a recent Metroland devoted to “Local Heroes.”

The photo, by Joe Putrock (see it here) bears an eery resemblance to one we ran on the Sunday Gazette’s Arts & Entertainment cover of Dec. 7. That one was taken by Gazette staffer Peter Barber, and you can look at that here. For the accompanying article by Karen Bjornland, click here .

It’s great that Sharon is getting so much attention for the work she’s done at the airport — for 10 years now! The program she created and still runs has brought the riches of our region’s many museums, as well as numerous local artists, to the attention of countless travelers from all over the nation and the world, and has truly put Albany on the map in terms of public art. You can read all about it in Karen Bjornland’s article linked above; the bit in Metroland is also worth a read.

So Metroland is absolutely right to name Sharon a local hero, and I applaud them for doing that. I also am reminded of the legacy of a former Metroland local hero, Les Urbach, who created Albany Center Gallery more than 30 years ago with an Art in Public Places program as a major component of it — hence the original pluralized name, Albany Center Galleries.

At the time, I viewed Les as a sort of messiah, as did so many young artists around here in his day, but I didn’t always agree with his methods. Les was charismatic, charming, forceful — in other words, a great leader. But Les’ mission was somewhat evangelistic, and his zeal for bringing art to the public at any cost sometimes left the art itself — and the artists— feeling badly used.

Sharon has extended the purpose of making art available for free to the public but, as a significant artist herself, has not forgotten who and where it came from. The gallery she created, and many other spaces around the airport, most of them beyond the security checkpoint, provide clean, well-lit, comprehensively labeled exhibits that honor the art and the artists while entertaining and educating the masses of visitors to the airport.

Among those exhibits are commissioned installations, where the artist has submitted a proposal, or won a prize from the Mohawk-Hudson Regional, and then been paid a nice stipend to create and install an on-site piece. This kind of paying opportunity is rare for Capital Region artists.

And, as was noted in The Gazette article, people often buy from the exhibitions. I believe my own experience of showing at the airport is typical; a six-month showcase of my work in one of the concourses in 2007 brought interesting feedback from places near and far, and generated the sale of two fairly pricey prints, one of them to a professor from Montana. I still regularly hear references to that show from people I meet — it seems everybody saw it. And that kind of exposure just doesn’t happen anywhere else around here.

In the main gallery, which has the most user-friendly hours imaginable: 7 a.m. to 11 p.m daily, exhibitions that marry high concept with broad appeal are the norm. And the mission of showcasing the region’s museums (many of which are not art museums — for example the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown) is always ably met.

So, I totally concur with Metroland — Sharon Bates is a hero to Capital Region artists, museums, travelers and audiences; to public art presenters in other cities, who come here to see what she’s done as research for their own projects; and to uncountable airport visitors from everywhere.
My hat’s off to her!