The New York Time
Upstate Art Weekend Offers a Year’s Worth of Art in Four Days
By Will Heinrich
The list of official participants in this year’s fifth edition of Upstate Art Weekend, a sprawling festival that embraces nearly every art event or exhibition happening north of New York City over the next four days, has reached 145. It’s a dramatic rise from an informal band of some two dozen arts centers and galleries just four years ago, and it now spans 10 counties in New York State.
While the participants include perpetually open historical sites like Boscobel and Olana, and also a few aesthetically inclined specialty grocers and clothing designers, most of the exhibits really are up just for the occasion, and many include one-off performances, like Audra Wolowiec’s choral performance on a boat crossing the Hudson.
Some events spill over from last year, but there are many new developments. The New Art Dealers Alliance, which put on a small fair last year at the Foreland complex in Catskill, N.Y., is taking the year off, but Foreland is hosting its own youth arts fund-raiser, with auctions, ceramics, food and a conceptual sound installation. At the Zero Art Fair in Elizaville, nearby, visitors are welcome to take home one available work per day for free under an innovative contract that vests ownership over five years, after which time title will pass to the new owner. The contract was developed for the artist William Powhida (who founded that fair with the artist Jennifer Dalton).
The Campus (Columbia County)
If what you really yearn for is that overwhelming art fair feeling, and scene, be sure to visit The Campus, in Claverack, outside Hudson, N.Y. There, in a 78,000-square-foot former school building unused for decades, six New York galleries have combined forces with the curator Timo Kappeller to mount an 80-plus-artist show that fills classroom after unrenovated classroom and spreads out onto 22 acres. (The six galleries — Bortolami, James Cohan, Kaufmann Repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps and Kurimanzutto — pooled their resources to buy the place, which they’re also using for storage.)
As with any art fair, the best strategy is to identify and focus on a theme or strand that interests you. For me, it was narrow, sculptural lines, and I followed them from a vertically striped Alice Trumbull Mason painting in Room 28 past a pair of trippy, hula-hoop-like sculptures by Madeline Hollander in the hallways, out to a line of hollow, oversize steel “vessels” by Maren Hassinger, and back to a space-age, stove-like construction by Diane Simpson in Room 12.
The Gallery Corridor: Kinderhook to Germantown
In Germantown, N.Y., Mendes Wood DM Archipelago shows Edgar Calel’s drawings made with the Maya-Kaqchikel community of Guatemala. Center on wall: “Q’ojom Ab’ej (musica de piedra),” charcoal on unbleached canvas. On floor: “Retain Balalh (el peso de mi ser),” wax candle on clay.Credit...Alon Koppel
Galleries tend to cluster from Kinderhook, in northern Columbia County, to Germantown, about 24 miles southwest. In Kinderhook, Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School is hosting an enormous quasi-retrospective of almost incandescently bright paintings by Nina Chanel Abney, but you’ll also find, in the same town, aleatoric wooden sculptures by Taylor Davis and gestural abstract paintings by Annie Bielski at September Gallery, as well as a group show of landscapes at Bill Arning Exhibitions nearby. In Germantown, Alexander Gray has a lush group show, “Groundswell,” which brings together historical and contemporary works from an intergenerational group of artists who use landscape to suggest alternate but familiar worlds (along with one terrifying carnivorous elephant). In the same town, Mendes Wood DM Archipelago — the upstate branch of the TriBeCa and São Paulo gallery — is showing dreamy paintings and enormous drawings made by the young artist Edgar Calel with his family and the Maya-Kaqchikel community of central Guatemala. Here, too, Mother-in-law’s, a spinoff of a gallery in Hudson, has both assemblage and video indoors and a group show of works that “examine different methods of living with and parallel from nature,” appropriately enough, out back.
One Busy Route Through the Hudson Valley
Artists at the Stoneleaf Retreat in Kingston, N.Y. From left: Joiri Minaya, Adrienne Elise Tarver, Stoneleaf’s co-founder Helen Toomer, and Moko Fukuyama.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
For a hectic straight line that will take you back toward the city, start at “Upstate Gnarly,” a group show of work by two painters and two sculptors, all of it color-driven, intuitive, and complicated — or “gnarly” — held in the shared studio of Brian Wood and Ashley Garrett. Continue on to visit several artist residencies: Macedonia Institute, in Chatham, and Interlude Residency, in Livingston, are both mounting alumni group shows for the weekend. (I’m particularly piqued by Interlude’s three-person show: It joins the visceral colors of the abstract painter Annette Wehrhan with work by Saul Chernick and Shanti Grumbine, who are more systematic and abstemious, respectively.)
Head on to “Start Making Sense” at the Hessel Museum at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, where you’ll find a posse of puppets made by Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija staring at text paintings by Glenn Ligon and Christopher Wool. Stop in Kingston, where Noise for Now — a national initiative that connects artists with grass-roots groups — is once again staging an auction to support abortion rights, or gape at Michael Royce’s painting of fingers that terminate in goose heads at Headstone Gallery, also in Kingston. Next door, in the town of Port Ewen, you’ll find a mysterious group show of artists influenced by photography (the gallery is called The Post Office). By the time you reach Stoneleaf Retreat, another residency presenting work by alumnae, you’ll be only two hours from Times Square.
Adventures in the Catskills
At Assembly, in Monticello, N.Y., “Untitled,” three wall works in oil and wax on burlap by Johnny Abrahams. On the floor, Alma Allen’s “Not Yet Titled,” in marble, 2021.Credit...via Assembly
If you’re willing to put in just a little more driving, head west to the Catskill Art Space to see work by a video art pioneer, Mary Lucier, with a glowing blue rectangle by James Turrell and wall drawings by Sol LeWitt. Then check out the lush, minimalist paintings of Johnny Abrahams at Assembly, a two-year-old contemporary art space in a former Buick dealership in Monticello, N.Y. (Sullivan County), or travel north to the open artist studios at Bird Room in the hamlet of Cooks Falls (Delaware County), where they once sold Pontiacs.
When Bigger Is Better
Arlene Shechet’s sculpture “Midnight,” from her installation, “Girl Group,” at Storm King Art Center.Credit...via Arlene Shechet and Pace Gallery; Photo by David Schulz
If you want a single-stop destination, you might want to choose the depth and reach of a larger institution, like the Hessel Museum at Bard College. About an hour south, just across the Hudson River, in New Windsor, the 500-acre sculpture park at Storm King Art Center is always good for a wonderful afternoon when the weather’s nice; it currently has the added bonus of six vibrant new commissions by Arlene Shechet, along with a whole indoor show. Nearby, outside Cold Spring (but worth its own visit), there’s Magazzino Italian Art, a private museum focused on Arte Povera, which recently added a beautiful new wing, the Robert Olnick Pavilion, in which you can see a small but very thoughtfully arranged exhibition of gorgeous Murano glass by Carlo Scarpa and a much larger show of paintings by Mario Schifano.
In the 1960s, Schifano made his name with a series of unusual monochromes — painted with enamel on paper and mounted on canvas, with visible seams, buckles, brushwork and drips, as well as differently-colored borders with rounded edges that evoked TV screens, they were less like monochromes than romantic portraits of monochromes. Later he revisited Futurism and incorporated numbers, letters and the Coca-Cola logo into stylish paintings that still have their cool factor.
Tarrytown and Beacon: Art Tourism for Traingoers
Take a trip to Beacon and check out small commercial galleries like Hudson Beach Glass, at the Beacon Open Studios.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
For anyone without a car, the best plan is to take Metro-North either to Tarrytown, where you can bag the fine art and enjoy the Sleepy Hollow Mermaid Festival in Kingsland Point Park, on Saturday, with family-friendly activities and a costume contest, or continue by train directly to the majestic Riggio Galleries of Dia Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., where you can catch the Robert Irwin and Blinky Palermo shows, both closing soon. Serene but vividly colored works from the German-born painter Palermo’s mid-1970s “Times of Day” series meet the ethereal sensation of daylight filtered through Irwin’s piece — a large section of scrim stretched across the room.
From Dia, you can continue by foot into Beacon proper to find some small commercial galleries like Analog Diary and Distortion Society, which will be offering both winsome watercolors and tattoos, and on to an open studios event that includes more than 100 artists in nearly 40 venues. (Atlas Studios, a beautiful old factory building, will be holding open artist studios, too, right across the river in Newburgh.) Wind up at an exciting show of paintings and mixed media works by 11 African and African-diaspora artists, presented by Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center (for Kunsthalle Beacon).
Maren Hassinger’s outdoor installation at The Campus, in Claverack, N.Y., near Hudson. In a 78,000-square-foot former school building, six New York galleries have combined forces with an 80-plus-artist show. Credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The sprawling property of The Campus, including a former school building where the curator Timo Kappeller is mounting an 80-plus-artist show that fills classrooms.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
