Upstate Art Weekend Offers a Year’s Worth of Art in Four Days

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 Association, 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).

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

On your way back down from Beacon (or continuing north from Tarrytown), get off at Peekskill, where a five-minute cab ride will take you to the KinoSaito Arts Center, in Verplanck, N.Y., a tastefully renovated former Catholic school that hosts a rotating display of work by the downtown painter and set designer Kikuo Saito (1939-2016). These elegant, florally colored abstractions star alongside exhibitions and performances by younger artists. (Currently Chie Fueki is taking Saito’s colors in a multimedia direction, and Kathy Battista curates a show of abstract work by women.) Maiko Kikuchi, working through the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, will perform two Saturday matinees of her vignettes, “Note From a Sheep I Met at the Dawn,” exploring the boundary between reality and dreams.

While you’re there, take my advice — pick up a chocolate smoothie at the coffee bar and bring it along on a little walk to the end of Seventh Street to smell the breeze that rolls in over Lake Meahagh. It’s hot, the world is falling apart, and the most important part of the festival, whichever attractions you land on, is getting out of the city and face to face with some verdant grass and trees.

Upstate Art Weekend
Details are available at upstateartweekend.org, with a customizable Google map — and please, double check hours and locations before you go!