4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
New York's Best Summer Art Shows Are Upstate
Summer in the city is group-show season — but some of this summer's best are beyond the five boroughs, in Upstate Art Weekend, a five-day festival of more than 150 participants that sprawls across 10 counties in the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. The festival, which begins Thursday, July 17, and continues through Monday, July 21, brims with museum shows, live performances and opportunities to visit artists at work in their studios. And while some of the shows are ongoing, for many, this weekend is your only chance to visit.
I've gone through the entire list and visited several shows in advance. Listed below, under the heading 'Highlights,' are nine of my favorites, destinations that I'd recommend organizing a day around. But I'd consider visiting an open art studio, too, one of more than 200 listed by the Foreland art center in Catskill, the Millbrook Arts Group and Upstate Open Studios.
You can also be part of a conversation and studio viewing with the collector Jack Shear (the widower of the great American painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly) in Spencertown, in Columbia County. And at the Spencertown Academy Arts Center, a show of second- and third-generation Gee's Bend quilters is worth a visit.
Glasshouse, in New Paltz, has a dedicated performance art series. At Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre outdoor museum in New Windsor, the artist Kevin Beasley will be staging music and dancing in front of his 100-foot-long work titled 'Proscenium.' And just like last year there will be a dance party fund-raiser for Noise for Now, a health care and reproductive rights nonprofit, at Assembly in Kingston.
One of the loveliest sites for a visit is the KinoSaito foundation in Verplanck, a converted former school building set up by the Japanese American Color Field painter Kikuo Saito before his death. There, in addition to a show of Saito's own paintings, you'll find an alluring collection of cross-cultural abstractions in the group show 'The Unknown and Its Poetics.' Other venues with interesting shows include the River Valley Arts Collective; 'Upstate Gnarly,' an annual group show in an artists' studio, with work by Judith Linhares, Carolee Schneemann and Nicola Tyson; Athens Cultural Center, with Polly Apfelbaum and other abstract artists; and 'So It Goes,' a colorful group show in the grand old wooden grain elevator of the Wassaic Project, an artists' residency center in Wassaic.
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