When Newburgh Open Studios launched 15 years ago, the city was still better known for urban blight headlines than for its creative renaissance. That story has flipped. Now the two-day event is a kind of art world block party, equal parts cultural survey, civic pride, and scavenger hunt. Over the weekend of September 27 and 28, more than 100 artists will open their doors, joined by pop-up shows, galleries, and the city-wide Terrain Biennial.
The range is the point. Newburgh’s art scene is stitched together by established painters and sculptors, emerging experimenters, and design-minded makers, spread across old factories, storefronts, home studios, and the occasional backyard. Walking NOS is as much about discovering the city as it is about the art. Here are a handful of artists participating in this year’s tour:
Theresa Gooby
Gooby thrives on contradiction. Her resin-coated collages, drawings, and encaustic experiments splice together imagery that’s equal parts playful and unsettling. Series like Gun Girls and Mutant Creatures balance absurdity with menace, challenging viewers to sit with dissonance. Encountering her work in situ, surrounded by the ephemera of her process, underscores how improvisation and layering are central to her practice.
Hannah Vaughan
Furniture is rarely considered sculptural, but Vaughan insists otherwise. Working with charred wood, bent metal, and salvaged materials, she coaxes gesture and vulnerability from objects we usually dismiss as functional. Chairs sag, tables tilt, steel frames warp under pressure. It’s design pushed to the brink of collapse and remade into something beautiful. Her studio feels like a workshop mid-transformation—half lumberyard, half gallery.
Steven M. Strauss
Strauss’s Birds series lives in the tension between painterly realism and abstraction. Using alternating layers of oil and spray, he captures the shimmer of plumage and the dynamism of flight without falling into illustration. The effect is luminous, meditative—a field of color that resolves, almost miraculously, into avian form. In the context of NOS, his work offers a quiet counterpoint to the bustle outside the door.
Ashley Lyon
Lyon’s sculptures confront the body—especially the maternal body—in ways that are both intimate and monumental. Her figures fracture, expand, or contort, suggesting the psychic and physical realities of motherhood. The surfaces are tender and raw, with a realism that can veer into the uncanny. Lyon’s studio offers a glimpse at pieces mid-assembly, revealing the labor of shaping clay into presence.
Venues, Spaces, and Terrain
NOS is as much about context as content. Studios spill out of repurposed warehouses and historic row houses, while pop-ups animate underused storefronts. Galleries mount special shows to catch the flow of foot traffic. And this year, the Terrain Biennial overlays a parallel exhibition across Newburgh’s neighborhoods, turning porches, windows, and lawns into temporary galleries. The city itself becomes a canvas—art in places where people live, walk, and gather.
The genius of Newburgh Open Studios is that it resists curation in the conventional sense. Instead, it maps a community: its makers, its spaces, its collisions. Whether you start with a printed map or just follow the crowd, the experience is one of immersion—art not tucked away behind white walls, but out in the open, shaping and shaped by the city around it.
