J. C. Hopkins and Linh Luu are looking to make some magic happen in a small storefront on Partition Street in Saugerties. This month, the couple is opening Rohmer Gallery, a space whose mission is inspired by the New York School of the ’50s and ’60s in which poets, painters, and musicians like Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollack, and John Cage collided, prompting experimentation within their own work. “It was an artistic conversation,” says Luu. “We’re trying to make something like that happen in just 500 square feet.”
The duo are no strangers to creative cross-pollination. Hopkins is a Grammy-nominated producer, songwriter, musician, and jazz big band leader, as well as an abstract expressionist painter and writer. Luu, an alumna of Columbia’s MFA program, is a novelist with experience in the London art gallery scene. “Art has always been something that follows us,” Luu says.
Though the two met in New York City, it was Hopkins’s connection with the Catskills music scene that prompted them to seek out a creative refuge of their own upstate. He worked with Levon Helm and fellow Band member Garth Hudson to record his 2018 album, It’s a Sad and Beautiful World—one of the few musicians outside of The Band and Bob Dylan who had the honor to record with both. While living in Woodstock, he also helped Helm launch the Midnight Rambles at The Barn.
The two moved to Saugerties last fall, and soon after, they discovered the vacant storefront in the village waiting for its next act. The space was small, but it had high ceilings and enough room to add a vintage Steinway piano for performances. “It all started to come together pretty quickly,” says Hopkins.
In addition to visual art, Rohmer Gallery (named in honor of the couple’s love of French New Wave director Eric Rohmer) will feature weekly acoustic performances from emerging and well-known musicians and monthly poetry and literary readings whose themes dialogue with the art exhibited in the space.
On Saturday, June 14, the gallery opens to the public with its debut exhibition “Look Again.” The show, which will be on view through August 13, features paintings by Andrea Olivia, Rina Kim, Oneslutriot, and Hopkins himself, as well as ceramic sculptures by Robbie Ginsberg. From Olivia’s intimate portraiture that explores her Black trans identity to queer anonymous artist Oneslutriot’s fierce paintings that span body politics and LGBTQ issues, “Look Again” asks viewers to move beyond the surface to explore the artists’ own process of experimentation. “We’re especially excited to champion emerging voices,” says Luu.
That evening, the gallery will kick off its weekly acoustic music series, curated by Brooklyn singer songwriter Kyle Morgan, featuring a performance by folk musician Lily Talmers at 7pm.
On Sunday, June 15, the gallery will be open again for a classical music performance by flautist Liliana Szokol from 2-4pm, followed at 7pm with the debut of its monthly poetry reading, “Not My First Rodeo,” featuring Bibbe Hansen, Phillip X Levine, Martina Salisbury, Jonas Kyle, and Hopkins.
In addition to poetry, the gallery will host readings by authors of Hopkins’s and Luu’s literary imprint, Eponymous Books, which they founded last year as another outlet for their creativity. Coinciding with the gallery opening, Hopkins’s next novel, The Children See Everything, will be released on June 13. The imprint’s current bestseller, Luu’s The Napper, follows the Parisian journey of a young Vietnamese woman who also happens to be an art historian. “I wrote it before we even imagined opening the gallery,” Luu explains. “But it was kind of prophetic, in a way.”
Rohmer Gallery
A Dynamic Dialogue
This article appears in June 2025.
