Ten Upstate Art Weekend Exhibitions That Justify the Drive
From barn-side group shows to forest installations and long-awaited museum retrospectives, these ten shows make the journey north a must for city-dwellers chasing fresh air and sharper cultural programming.
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As New York lurches into full-blown swamp mode—teetering between torrid heat, high humidity and sudden, moody summer storms—city dwellers resume their annual search for cooler air and greener pastures. As ever, pastoral upstate destinations offer the promise of both respite and a tightly curated slate of exhibitions across museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and an increasingly robust network of biennials.
One of the best ways to experience the full sweep of this programming is by visiting Upstate Art Weekend, which returns from Thursday, July 17 and runs through July 21 with a densely packed lineup of cultural initiatives in the Hudson Valley and beyond. Launched in 2020 with just twenty-three participants, the event has ballooned to include more than 155 exhibitors.
Still, Helen Toomer—the brains behind Upstate Art Weekend—asserts that keeping your itinerary simple is key: you can’t see it all, and that’s okay because you can always come back later in the season.
“This event isn’t about rushing,” she tells Observer. “It’s about slowing down, soaking in the journey between stops, and experiencing the natural beauty of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley along the way.” At its heart, Upstate Art Weekend is a celebration of community, collaboration, art and the outdoors—four elements Toomer considers essential to our collective well-being. “It was created to spotlight the incredible organizations, artists and cultural spaces that make this region so special, and to help forge lasting connections between visitors and locals alike.”
We combed through the official lineup and the programming of some of our favorite independent spaces to put together a curated guide to this season’s must-see upstate art shows.
"Kishio Suga" at Dia
- Dia Beacon
- Opening July 19, 2025
One of the undeniable highlights of Upstate Art Weekend is the extensive survey of experimental Japanese artist Kishio Suga at Dia Beacon. This presentation gathers a representative selection of the artist’s sculptural installations from the 1960s through the mid-’90s, many of which are being shown in the U.S. for the first time. A central figure of Mono-Ha (the School of Things)—often considered in parallel with American Postminimalism—Suga focused on the interplay between space, material and perception. For him, sculpture was never an autonomous object but part of an existential, relational field, continuously shaped by its surroundings. He avoided the terms “sculpture” or “installation,” instead describing his works as “situations.” As he put it: “A situation is rooted in the breakdown of the already present system... it excludes all traits that can be imitated or duplicated.” Suga’s practice unfolds as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality itself, rejecting the permanence of fixed form in favor of perceptual instability and the subtle paradoxes that emerge at the edge of sensory awareness. His work resists passive viewing, demanding a more active, contemplative encounter. The result is a body of work that remains conceptually rigorous, materially resonant and philosophically vital.
Sky High Farm's First Biennial
- Sky High Farm
- 11 Main Street, Germantown, NY
- Through the fall
This summer marks the debut of a new upstate biennial—TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END—organized by Sky High Farm, a mission-driven organization focused on community-centered research and action at the intersection of climate, agriculture, food access and education. As its most ambitious initiative to date, the exhibition takes over a raw, untouched apple warehouse and transforms it into a full-scale art event featuring work by more than fifty artists, including Anne Imhof, Tschabalala Self and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Blending art, land, farming and activism, the biennial probes the relationships between local ecology, historical legacy and regional industry through works that reflect and expand on Sky High Farm’s mission. In an effort to reimagine how art can generate direct community benefit, participating artists have pledged a portion of any sale proceeds to the organization in a working model where cultural production fuels justice-driven outcomes. The event also marks a major milestone for Sky High Farm, aligning with its expansion to a new 560-acre site and underscoring its evolution from a grassroots initiative to a catalytic cultural force in the region.
"SCHOOL'S OUT"
- Macedonia Institute
- Through July 20, 2025
One of the most dynamic organizations supporting emerging talent in upstate New York, The Macedonia Institute (TMI)—a family-run artist residency in Chatham—has hosted more than 130 artists over the past eight years, offering residents studio space in its adjacent barn and basement print shop. For the second time, TMI is partnering with Ten Barn Farm in Ghent, New York, to present a group exhibition featuring residency alumni. The show includes works by Caroline Absher, Abby Lloyd, Brittany Adeline, Eli Thorne, Todd Bienvenu, Rei Xiao, Dante Canatella, Sam Crohn, Heather Day, Aaron Feltman, Oji Haynes, John DeSousa, Jin Mateo Kim, Elizabeth Flood, Alina Perez, Arel Lisette, Emily Manwaring, Chris Retsina, Milly Skellington, Grear Patterson, Jairo Serna, James Ulmer, Annika Tucksmith, Sydney Vernon, Kemar Keanu Wynter, Nicholas Zepeda and others. Anchored in the exuberance of early summer and the nostalgia it leaves in its wake, the exhibition captures that fleeting, electric moment when school ends and the world suddenly expands, full of freedom, possibility and sun-soaked adventure. Fittingly, the show unfolds in a beautiful barn where chickens and goats roam among the artworks. Set on a creekside farm, the venue offers a bucolic escape from the city’s heat and noise, inviting visitors into quiet communion with nature. Ten Barn Farm also serves an excellent breakfast and brunch, making the experience a restorative pairing of farm-to-table nourishment and vibrant and unfiltered young art.
"Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!"
- Storm King Art Center
- May 7 – November 10, 2025
This May, the beloved 500-acre open-air museum unveiled its $53 million capital project: a striking new welcome pavilion, introduced alongside temporary commissions by Kevin Beasley, Sonia Gomes and Dionne Lee. Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes is currently the focus of a solo exhibition in Storm King’s indoor galleries, “Ó Abre Alas!,” which complements her newly commissioned permanent installation on Museum Hill. Known for her biomorphic sculptural assemblages, Gomes integrates found objects, textiles and organic materials into evocative forms rooted in Afro-Brazilian traditions and personal memory. Her works often suggest bodies in motion, caught in states of tension and transformation, narrating stories of resilience while uncovering beauty in the ephemeral and the everyday. Her new outdoor commission—her first in the U.S.—expands these intimate, hand-stitched gestures to an environmental scale. Entering into a resonant dialogue with the landscape, her soft fabric interventions seem to emerge from the trees themselves, clinging to branches or suspended like cocoons and evoking cycles of germination, renewal and rebirth. Their vivid colors channel the lush, fertile energy of Brazil’s tropical flora.
"General Conditions"
- The School | Jack Shainman Gallery
- Through November 29, 2025
As Jack Shainman explained in a recent interview with Observer, his more institutional upstate outpost, The School, typically alternates major solo exhibitions with critically curated group shows. This summer, the space presents an ambitious multi-artist exhibition conceived by the veteran dealer himself to address one of the most pressing dilemmas of our time: the complex, often blurred boundary between the personal and the political. At its core, the exhibition explores how we respond, both individually and collectively, to political events and systemic conditions. Featuring work by more than two dozen artists across a wide range of media and scales, the show takes on questions of control, surveillance, racial injustice and bureaucratic violence. Many of the artists confront these systems directly, illuminating the tensions between personal responsibility, resistance and collective solidarity. The exhibition ultimately resists closure or singular interpretation. Its breadth and complexity insist that no single strategy can fully capture our historical present—only a multiplicity of voices and approaches can provoke the kind of critical reflection needed to interpret, represent and, perhaps, reclaim some measure of agency over the forces that govern our lives.
The Campus Summer Show
- The Campus
- Through October 26, 2025
Following its inaugural exhibition last year, The Campus returns for summer 2025 with a sweeping presentation that takes over all thirty-five rooms and the surrounding grounds of the former Ockawamick School in Claverack, New York, now revived as a dynamic venue for contemporary art through the joint initiative of Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps and kurimanzutto. Curated by Timo Kappeller, the exhibition is anchored by thirty solo and duo room-scale installations, accompanied by thoughtful juxtapositions and visual dialogues across a series of group presentations. Over the past year, participating artists attuned their practices to the building’s rhythms and spatial presence, producing new works or reconfiguring existing ones in direct conversation with the site.
Highlights include Vivian Suter’s unstretched canvases, weathered by the elements of her open-air Guatemalan studio and here suspended like storm clouds in the gym, and Liz Magor’s tender reliquaries of forgotten objects. Nearby, Katharina Grosse saturates two silk-draped rooms in radiant color, setting up a vivid exchange with Daniel Buren’s minimal mirrored panels and Arlene Shechet’s improvisational sculptures. In one former classroom, Naudline Pierre unveils a suite of works on paper that open portals into her mythic, devotional worlds, while Kiki Smith’s dreamlike photographs, sculptures and textiles trace how light and sight shape the fragile contours of being. Threading through these distinct yet intersecting narratives, The Campus invites an open-ended inquiry that dissolves geographic, temporal and imaginative boundaries.
“Art Reimagined: Tomokazu Matsuyama and Edward Hopper”
- Edward Hopper House and Museum
- Through October 5, 2025
Here, Japanese-American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama (Matsu) engages in a thoughtful dialogue with the enduring legacy of Hopper’s psychologically charged imagery, centering his exhibition on the iconic 1952 painting Morning Sun. Themes of solitude and life in a globalized, consumer-driven world—long central to Matsu’s work—resonate with Hopper’s sense of psychological stillness and urban isolation, often expressed through the quiet detachment of the individual in the American everyday. At the heart of the show is Matsu’s new large-scale painting Morning Sun Dance, which depicts a solitary woman caught in a moment of introspective stillness, echoing the quiet gravity of Hopper’s original figure. Yet in Matsu’s version, the subject is immersed in a vibrant, layered field of cultural references—his signature visual language—underscoring the tension between solitude and the overwhelming saturation of contemporary life. In a world awash with data, images and colliding geographies, these layers can forge connections but also evoke a dislocation from any rooted sense of self.
Within this framework, Matsu’s invocation of Hopper’s use of light takes on added complexity. As in Hopper’s work, light isolates the subject, heightening her emotional distance from the surrounding cascade of products, advertisements and aesthetic traditions. “What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house,” Hopper once said. Yet in that sunlight, he captured the anxious stillness of twentieth-century American life. Through this visual and conceptual exchange, Matsu draws out the continued urgency of Hopper’s psychological and formal investigations, reminding us how powerfully his work still speaks to the human condition in today’s global, media-saturated world.
“Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua”
- Magazzino Italian Art
- Through January 21, 2025
Upstate Art Weekend is the final opportunity to visit Maria Lai's first U.S. retrospective and, with it, experience a captivating collaborative installation born from the resonant dialogue between fashion designer and multidisciplinary creative Antonio Marras and the late Maria Lai, on view in the U.S. for the first time. This gallery-sized work intertwines the two artists in a shared poetics of fabric and thread, used as vessels for both personal and collective memory and as tools for preserving tradition and fostering community. Titled Llèncols de Aigua—Catalan for "sheets of Water"—the installation comprises long, hand-stitched white sheets adorned with antique nightgowns embroidered with phrases gathered by Lai during an educational project with children. Drawing from a rural sensibility and an ethic of material economy, labor and communal exchange, the work revives the emotional solidarity of village life as a counterpoint to the alienation of urban modernity. Part of Marras’ private collection, the piece is installed in the isotropic room at the Robert Olnick Pavilion—the symbolic heart of the museum—and shown in dialogue with “Maria Lai. A Journey to America.” Featuring more than 100 works, this survey traces Lai’s six-decade practice, from her early 1950s landscapes to her later, boundary-pushing creations—many of which are being shown in the United States for the first time.
"REPAIR"
- Shadow Walls
- July 17 - July 21, 2025
Shadow Walls is a compelling new addition to the upstate art scene, having launched in the region just last year. Located on the grounds of the former Eva Farm in Purling, New York, the site was thoughtfully reimagined by artist Anna Cone after years of neglect. She transformed the Victorian space into what she describes as a “place of transition”—a site for nourishment, restoration and healing, nestled in the natural beauty of the Catskill Mountains. Plans for the property continue to evolve, with forthcoming additions including an art-filled bed and breakfast, a barn for events, dedicated gallery spaces and a constellation of multipurpose bungalow cabin rentals, guest accommodations and live-work studios for artists-in-residence. Tapping into this ethos of care and transformation, this year’s exhibition, “Repair,” focuses on acts of mending, restoring and piecing back together as deliberate practices of care for objects, individuals and communities. Curated by independent curator Anne-Laure Lemaitre, the exhibition gathers more than twenty works and site-responsive gestures that center healing and regeneration as powerful forms of resistance and renewal, offering a quiet, restorative counterpoint to cycles of consumption and disposability.
"Line Load"
- Mother Gallery
- July 17 - August 16, 2025
Not officially in the program, but worth visiting. MOTHER GALLERY is one of the most active and consistent spaces to have operated upstate, there well before the pandemic-era influx of satellite galleries. Housed in a converted industrial space in Beacon, the gallery has maintained a steady rhythm of sharp, conceptually rigorous programming outside the city's gravitational pull. This summer, the gallery presents “LINE LOAD,” a curated group show that brings together five artists whose practices approach abstraction through systems of tension, calibration and relay. Works by Kerri Ammirata, Trudy Benson, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Meg Lipke and Paola Oxoa explore the friction between containment and improvisation—between structural constraint and scripted choreography on one hand, and fractured, intuitive gesture on the other, where resolution remains elusive but evolution is always in play. For these artists, abstraction becomes a tool for navigating formal and conceptual pressure points—a way of testing the limits of structure, form and expression while charting alternate visual logics layered like palimpsests of color, line and disrupted geometries.
