Upstate Art Weekend: 5 Shows to See

Address: 1405 Co Rte 22, Ghent, NY 12075

While the Storm King Art Center tends to get the attention from day-trippers (and Charli XCX), Art Omi in Ghent is a sculpture center equally worth a visit. The 120-acre site has outdoor sculptures and installations from major heavy-hitters and rising stars, including Pippa Garner, Alicja Kwade, Kiyan Williams, Nancy Dwyer, Robert Grosvenor, Mary Ann Unger, and more. This year features new works from Tschabalala Self—fresh off a monumental commission for the New Museum’s new facade—and Nayland Blake, who will be presenting his first outdoor commission, “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre (2026), which is set to be accompanied by performances, activations, and workshops this weekend and throughout its run. Blake, who has long challenged the relationship between artist, institution, and audience, will continue that interrogation in “Haunt,” which Omi describes as “Part classroom, part lounge, part farm stand, part abandoned amusement park ride.”

Address: 80 Smith Ave, Kingston, NY 12401

Back for its second edition, Stay Frosty returns to ArtPort Kingston, again blurring the lines between a site-specific exhibition, an art fair, and a trunk show. Its a weird and wild event, playful and boundary-pushing in the way that the upstate scene has the freedom to be. For this year’s edition, 50 participants will set up show in Artport’s parking lots, transforming their vehicles or the parking spots into mini-exhibitions, immersive experiences, sculptural installations, and more.

Among the participants are the artist duo Baloney—Z Behl and Kim Maloney—who are presenting Car Pile Pyre, a satisfyingly tactile sculpture of automobile bodies and tractor tires built around an outstretched hand that recalls the iconography of protests. The duo have presented large-scale sculptures at Mother-in-Law’s Gallery, an experimental sculpture space in Germantown, during the previous two editions of Upstate Art Weekend, as well as solo exhibition at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson in 2025. For that last show, the duo built a monumental lace-clad harlequin that stretched three stories, from floor to ceiling of Salisbury’s Carriage House, that acted as a kind of portrait of the artist.

Address: 33 Garden Rd, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504

Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and its associated Hessel Museum of Art are reliable hotbeds for forward-thinking curation. This year is no different, as the school opens three exhibitions for the season.

The first at the CCS Galleries, “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World,” traces the artistic career of Parsons, who is better known as the dealer responsible for showing the “Four Horsemen” of Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still). This show, curated by Kelly Taxter and artist Amy Sillman, both Bard alums, centers Parsons’s artistic output from 1922 to 1982, spanning early watercolors, her multicolored sculptures from the ’60s and ’70s, and finally her late career paintings. The show also tells the story of Betty Parsons Gallery, largely through a newly commissioned film that features reflections from Parsons and the artists she exhibited. The exhibition shows that the line between artist and dealer blurrier than most think.

“Uman: In Between,” curated by Hessel artistic director Lauren Cornell, acts a kind of mid-career survey that aims to shift attention from Uman’s biography, which many critics have used to box her in as a “self-taught” or “outsider” artist. The Hessel show focuses instead on her use of color, her technique of eschewing the paintbrush for her fingers, and the materiality of her works, which included found fabrics and scavenged junk.

The last show opening at Bard is “Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz,” which surveys the practice of Schultz, an acclaimed Navajo/Diné weaver and mathematics educator. While Schultz’s weavings display expert skill, her practice has renewed relevance as she uses it to reflect on contemporary digital technologies and culture. In 1994, Schultz was commissioned by Intel to create a woven replica of its Pentium chip, and there are numerous recent works that extend that motif, allowing her to interrogate the aesthetics of computer chips, and its resonance with older forms of patterning.

Throughout the weekend, Bard will be hosting a series of talks with the artists and curators.

TroutbeckAddress: 515 Leedsville Rd, Amenia, NY 12501

Wassaic Project Address: 37 Furnace Bank Rd, Wassaic, NY 12592

One could drive to Amenia for the views alone. The bucolic farming community, which has seen a renaissance in recent years, sits on the Connecticut border with stunning views of the Taconic Mountains. But head to the historic estate hotel Troutbeck for “Echoes in the Margin,” a new exhibition of works by artist Delano Dunn, presented by nearby Wassaic Project through an ongoing partnership. The show has been curated by Mickalene Thomas, with whom Dunn studied at the School of Visual Arts.

While the show features work across Dunn’s practice, a new series of large-scale experimental portraits interrogate and complicate our understanding of Black identity. In one typical example, Clarence X (2025), Dunn paints Clarence Thomas in a dandy-ish suit, and then obscures his face and hands with a mix of shoe polish and resin melted and burned into the portrait. At a talk on Wednesday at Wassaic Project, who is presenting the exhibition through a partnership, Dunn explained that he “veils” his subjects in the hopes of forcing the viewer into a confrontation with the portrait, pushing them to interrogate their own assocations with the figure in question.

For the show, paintings are hung in-situ around the hotel, which hosted the the Amenia Conferences of 1916 and 1933, important early NAACP gatherings, as well as serving as a meeting point for major black figures like Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. That history, lovingly restored by owners Anthony and Charlie Champalimaud over the last decade, shines in the juxtaposition with Dunn’s paintings.

While you’re in the area, head to Wassaic for their summer exhibition, the group show “Because, now is the time of monsters” at Maxon Mills, the organization’s 8,000-square-foot, seven-floor-grain-elevator turned exhibition space. Several works by Dunn are also in the show, like a set of incisive but playful collages of American presidents.

Address: 25 Dederick St, Kingston, NY 12401

Want to get a flavor for the practices of wide range of artists working in the Hudson Valley? This year, the Center for Photography at Woodstock—which, perhaps confusingly, is located in Kingston—is hosting the first Upstate Photography Biennial. 39 artists are presented in the show, all local to the Hudson Valley and many selected through an open call for submissions. There are well-known practicitioners in the bunch, including Lyle Ashton Harris, An-My Lê, and Stephen Shore, among others. In a statement, Brian Wallis, CPW executive director, argued that Upstate New York “has become the central node” of photography in the country. The Biennial certainly supports his case. While the show opened in May, CPW is hosting a launch of the Biennial catalogue on Saturday, accompanied by an exhibition tour and launch party.