Our Go-To Guide to New York’s Upstate Art Weekend

New York’s Upstate Art Weekend has grown in leaps and bounds since its founding by Helen Toomer in 2020. The sixth edition, running July 17 through July 21, features 158 participating art organizations—up from just 23 that first year—scattered across the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. It’s also the perfect excuse to escape the city and see some art this weekend. You can tour the offering via Google Maps, but we’ve also put together a list of the shows we’re most excited about. Enjoy!

“Kishio Suga” at Dia Beacon
Opening July 19

Dia Beacon branches out from Minimalism to the related Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, with this solo show of one of its leading practitioners, Japanese sculptor and installation artist Kishio Suga. The 81-year-old artist called his works—made with industrial materials such as motor oil, concrete, and paraffin wax—“situations.” Unlike traditional sculptures, these were often ephemeral arrangements, with a precarious and unstable nature. The exhibition features four major pieces from the Dia collection, as well as significant loans. —

“Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!” at Storm King Art Center
May7–November 10

Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes’s Ó Abre Alas! (Or Open Your Wings!) is her first outdoor installation in the U.S., in which sculptures crafted from durable materials like paracord, fishing nets, and nautical ropes hang from a massive tree. The brightly hued materials recall a Carnival parade, a site of celebration. “My work has a lot to do with nature, with trees, with the movement of trunks, with branches,” said the artist. “I like that my work has this conversation with nature.” In the galleries, a selection of works spans her career.

“Presence” at Upbringing
June 6–July 21

Serving as the headquarters of this week’s Upstate Art Weekend is Toomer’s new project space, which she describes not as a gallery but “a place to raise ideas.” (It’s hosting a Friday-night dance party upstairs.) The summer exhibition features seven women artists—Zoë Buckman, Tamar Ettun, Qiana Mestrich, Cheryl Mukherji, Rebecca Reeve, Keisha Scarville, and the great Nona Faustine, who died suddenly in March—with works dealing with themes of nostalgia, motherhood, and ancestry.

“Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun” at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center
June 20–October 5

Tomokazu Matsuyama’s joyously colored works, layered with a sense of stillness and solitude, make him a compelling artist to pay tribute Hopper, the master of the isolated figure. Here, Hopper’s 1952 masterpiece Morning Sun takes the spotlight, as does Matsuyama’s meditative response, titled Morning Sun Dance, a large, densely detailed painting that captures a contemporary form of introspection. Process drawings and smaller paintings included in the show further show how the Japanese artist has engaged with Hopper’s treatment of light, space, and figuration—a quality, said Matsuyama, that “continues to influence my own thinking about isolation as well as my approach to painting.”

“On Trees: Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Cole” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site
June 21–December 14

More than a century separates Thomas Cole and Georgia O’Keeffe’s careers, but, as this exhibition argues, their practices blossomed on similar ground. Specifically, they imbued their paintings of trees and natural forms with deep, allegorical meaning. The show is anchored by two key paintings: Cole’s Hunters in a Landscape (1824–25), created after his transformative visit to the Catskills in 1825, and O’Keeffe’s Dead Tree Bear Lake Taos (1929), painted upon her first visit to New Mexico. Set in dialogue, the works on view—including other paintings and drawings by Cole—surface intriguing parallels between how the Hudson River School icon and 20th-century modernist regarded and reflected nature. (The museum is also hosting an exhibition featuring Cole’s daughter, the little-known china painter Emily Cole.)

“What’s Missing” at the Olana State Historic Site
June 14–November 2

The historic home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church hosts immersive, site-specific works by New York artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar that reflect on history, loss, ice, and climate change. Church himself famously sailed to treacherous waters to observe icebergs and paint them; those works partly inspired Harvey and Salazar’s new projects, as did some mysterious structures from the artist’s son’s blueprint for the estate. Harvey’s Winter in the Summer House reimagines Church’s long-lost summer house, with her own engraved panels of a glacial landscape, while Salazar’s A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) explores humankind’s relationship with ice in a warming world.

“So It Goes” at Wassaic Projects
May 17–September 13

This show’s title echoes a refrain from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five to study the ways we cope with recurring horrors—a slumber from which some 43 artists hope to arouse us. John Brendan Guinan shows sculptures inspired by his Catholic anarchist upbringing. Yomi Orimoloye’s portraits explore the gulf between our identities and our identifying documents. Saberah Malik’s tapestries show aerial views of megafloods in Pakistan in 2022. Rosabel Rosalind depicts the San Fernando Valley as the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. May we all wake up.

“General Conditions” at the School: Jack Shainman Gallery
May 17–November 29

A group show at Jack Shainman’s Kinderhook outpost sees more than two dozen artists reflecting on the current social and political climate, and how we respond—both collectively and as individuals. The concept of general conditions, as noted by exhibition artist Alisa Tenser, “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague.” But there’s more than one way of approaching both general crises and conditions, as the artists in the show demonstrate. They include El Anatsui, Diedrick Brackens, Jesse Krimes, Gordon Parks, Rose B. Simpson, Becky Suss, and Elizabeth Zvonar.

“Stan Douglas: Ghostlight” at the Hessell Museum of Art at Bard College
June 21–November 30

This marks the first survey of multimedia artist Stan Douglas in the U.S. in over two decades and will trace his influence and innovation across 40 works from the 1990s to the present. It will include the premiere of an immersive, multi-channel video installation that revisits D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film with a selection of works that explore issues ranging from colonialism in the Americas and the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern movements for liberation in Africa and Europe. Douglas’s deep research provides an a comprehensive view of the present, helping us understand the moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval.

“Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy” at Art Omi
June 28–October 26

Art Omi, the 120-acre sculpture and architecture park located in Ghent, N.Y., is hosting a exhibition dedicated to the work of Harold Stevenson at its Newmark Gallery. This marks the first institutional solo show in New York for the artist, covering four decades of his exploration of the human body in paintings, drawings and writing. Stevenson’s embrace of the male nude, in the pre-Stonewall era no less, led to challenges including a 1962 jail sentence for his gallerist Iris Clert and, in 1963, removal of one of his works from New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

“Arlene Schechet” at Catskill Art Space
July 5–August 23

Hot off her major presentation at Storm King Art Center, sculptor Arlene Shechet is turning inward for this new show. On view here are intimate creations that bear out her explorations of material and geometry, her otherworldly forms—crafted with diverse elements such as clay, wood, and steel—surfacing a complex interiority. Wall works will be joined by her new series, “Pleat Seats,” made up of carved marble seating originally developed for Storm King, as well as her rarely exhibited textiles. The sculptor has even recreated a wall of her studio with plywood and shelving housing various wood and ceramic objects, making visible her intuitive approach to sketching in three dimensions.

“Repair” at Shadow Walls
July 17–27

Artist Anna Cone founded Shadow Walls last year, with the goal of revitalizing an old family resort, Eva’s Farm, as a bed-and-breakfast and artist residency. Anne-Laure Lemaitre has curated an intriguing, experimental group show for the space’s second Upstate Art Weekend outing, with works by artists including Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Kat Chamberlin, Raul De Nieves, Joiri Minaya, and Portia Munson installed both in the property’s stately Victorian home, and across the grounds. —

“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian Art
November 15, 2024–July 21, 2025

Collectors and Magazzino cofounders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu have long been champions of Maria Lai, an under-sung Italian artist known for incorporating the weaving traditions of her native Sardinia into her practice. Her first North American museum show ranges from early paintings to three-dimensional “Telai” or “loom” works to documentation of her pioneering relational art projects exploring the relationships between people and nature through interactive performances. —

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com