Gochman Family Collection’s Branchline Aims to Be Accessible and In Flux

Less than two blocks from the Katonah train station stands a nondescript, gray two-story building on one of the main drags of this Hudson Valley town. Emblazoned in a kerned-out serif font, its name, Branchline, belies what awaits inside: a public-facing exhibition space for the Gochman Family Collection (GFC).

Established just five years ago, the GFC has already become one of the world’s leading collections of contemporary Indigenous art, with more than 850 works. Until now, works from the GFC have primarily hung in the New York apartment of Becky Gochman, the collection’s founder and custodian, and her family, though some 200 works are typically on loan to institutions around the world at any given time. The GFC has generously opened the home to museum groups, schools, and artists for tours and events as a way to bring more attention to Native artists, but the organization’s ambition has always been to make its holdings as accessible as possible.

“It’s one thing to articulate a mission, but what matters to me,” GFC creative director and curator Rachel Martin (Tlingít) said Thursday during a press preview, “is if I’m putting that language out into the world [then] I’m making sure that our organization is following that with action.” She added that she sees Branchline as a place for “bringing community together, which means making the Native community feel like they are very much a part of what the decision-making parts of this are, and then also inviting the community of Katonah to come in and learn about new artists that they might not have heard of.”

Anticipating that many visitors will arrive via Metro-North, the GFC named the space after the rail term “branch line,” or the place “where paths diverge and new paths begin,” as GFC director Laura Pipps put it. “We were excited about all the sort of ideas that ‘branch line’ conjures—both thinking about the metaphor of the train and the metaphor of trees—and what we can do to experiment and grow in this space.”

Free to the public, Branchline is taking its time to grow into its new digs, which will eventually total 10,000 square feet across four buildings. Friday evening’s inauguration will show off the first completed space, as well as plans for expansion in the coming months across an L-shaped plot that runs from the main building’s entrance on the Parkway to Katonah Avenue. The building houses a three-room gallery on the ground floor, two bedrooms for its informal artist-in-residence program upstairs, and a nearly operational ceramics studio downstairs.

Architectural renderings on view Thursday afternoon show that the building’s back door will open onto a small sculpture deck leading to a yet-to-be-built barn, where large-scale works will go on view. (The original barn was in such bad shape that it had to be torn down to make way for an exhibition space.) The barn will in turn lead to the Annex, which will take a more experimental approach (more on that later). From there, visitors will turn left onto a patio and eventually reach the back entrance of Twig, a retail store and café.

For now, visitors will get a taste of Branchline’s ambitions through a more traditional offering. Inaugurating the modest, nearly 2,000-square-foot gallery is “Line Break,” curated by GFC assistant curator Moonoka Begay (Ndee + Diné) with collection associate Nicola van Brugge. “Lines are a core facet of all visual language,” the exhibition’s introductory wall text begins, but Begay and van Brugge look past the formal qualities that a line and its breaks contribute to a work. Instead, they treat the line as a metaphor for lineage and bloodlines, borders and cartographic marks, horizons and sound barriers.

A tight show of 28 works by 18 Indigenous artists, “Line Break” offers visually compelling juxtapositions of artists from different generations working in a range of mediums and styles. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s The Spaniard (1988), a semi-abstract aerial view of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, hangs next to Sara Flores’s Untitled (Shao Pei Maya Kené), 2024, a painting rendered in the geometric abstract visual language of the Shipibo-Conibo people, whose designs, according to an exhibition brochure, “map the community’s local worldview, environmental understanding, and cosmology.” Farther along are Teresa Baker’s Echoes (2024) and George Morrison’s Night Shadows. Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape (1994). Both are brightly colored abstract meditations on landscape made in very different mediums: acrylic, yarn, willow, and artificial sinew on AstroTurf for Baker; acrylic on canvas on board for Morrison.

Even the most seemingly formal works reveal their secrets as you delve deeper into how these artists use lines to make meaning. Across from the Quick-to-See Smith and Flores works are two pieces from Nadia Myre’s “Code of Construction” series, in which the artist arranges strung ceramic cylinders into squares depicting the ground-to-air distress signals for “Require Map and Compass” and “Not Understood.” Myre’s choice of medium draws on the tradition of wampum belts, used by Indigenous communities of the Northeast Woodlands to communicate political relationships. Myre’s work finds an analog in Faye HeavyShield’s the red line II (2025), a strand of red beads that the artist strung by hand. Here it is displayed in a coil, though its configuration is flexible—perhaps a metaphor countering the seeming immutability of shape, form, and even time.

The exhibition reaches its crescendo at its center with Raven Chacon’s Storm Pattern (2021–24), a handwoven wool textile accompanied by a multichannel sound piece whose low hum visitors have been hearing since entering the gallery. In 2016, Chacon noticed the sounds made by drones flying over the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock, where protesters had gathered to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline. Ranging from loud and piercing to soft and soothing, the sounds of police surveillance drones mingled and merged with those of the protesters’ countersurveillance drones. In that harmonious dissonance, Chacon saw a score, which he recorded and also translated into the woven textile, charting the drones’ erratic flight patterns in a traditional Diné weaving style and structure.

Rounding out “Line Break” are two elements that will likely look drastically different in a few months. The GFC commissioned Matthew Kirk to make a site-specific work for an exterior wall of the building along an alleyway. Across three plywood panels, Kirk has collaged painted tar paper in various abstract forms and shapes. The work was already showing its ephemeral quality on Thursday morning, the paper having warped in the light rain.

A few steps down the alleyway is the Annex, which is still under construction: the plywood is exposed, and power cords run to jerry-rigged lightbulbs that illuminate its two floors. Rather than hide this rawness, the GFC team has decided to embrace it. For now, the Annex is home to a small show of drawings by Shuvinai Ashoona, who maps imagined scenes—ones that could perhaps one day come true—onto the Arctic landscape where she lives in Nunavut, Canada. The team acknowledged that it hasn’t quite figured out how the space will look in the near term, even once the build-out is complete. That will depend on how artists interpret a prompt that gives them the autonomy to do what they want.

“What GFC is doing is not trying to become an institution,” Martin said. “It’s trying to just meet where things are needed, and a space is definitely needed for art that is outside of the white box that you’re used to seeing, so that’s what we’re offering.”