Spring in the Hudson Valley brings a shift in scale—not just in the landscape, but in how artists choose to see it. This season’s exhibitions move between the intimate and the expansive: soil and weeds rendered monumental, domestic interiors unsettled by the natural world, grids that open into fields of perception, and light treated as both material and metaphor. Across galleries, museums, and alternative spaces, artists are rethinking what constitutes a subject—and where meaning resides. Whether rooted in history, identity, or abstraction, these shows share a common impulse: to slow the eye, complicate the frame, and reconsider the ground beneath our feet.
“Cristina De Gennaro: The Quiet Sublime” at Garrison Art Center in Garrison
April 11-May 3
De Gennaro’s “The Quiet Sublime” at the Garrison Art Center reframes landscape through a grounded, embodied lens. Working from walks in the Catskills and New Mexico, she turns away from sweeping vistas to focus on what lies underfoot—soil, weeds, and fragile plant life. These close studies, translated from iPhone panoramas into large-scale charcoal drawings, carry a tactile sense of time passing. Growth and decay unfold side by side, echoing the artist’s reflections on aging and lived experience. De Gennaro’s landscapes hold tension between order and entropy, finding beauty in overlooked spaces and rendering the sublime as something intimate, contingent, and deeply human.
“Four Painters” at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson
Through May 17
In “Four Painters” at Carrie Haddad Gallery, Joan Hanley’s figurative interiors hold their own amid a wide-ranging conversation that includes Julia Whitney Barnes’s florals, David Konigsberg’s landscapes, and James O’Shea’s abstraction. Hanley paints family, friends, and domestic scenes that feel both observed and imagined, built from collaged source material and pushed into heightened color and shifting composition. Her surfaces move between clarity and diffusion, realism and invention, giving ordinary moments a charged, almost cinematic presence. Influenced by Alice Neel, she approaches her subjects with empathy and directness, while allowing the work to evolve intuitively—like a dream taking shape on canvas.
“Becky Sellinger: All Best” at Roundabouts Now in Kingston
Through May 10
At Roundabouts Now, Becky Sellinger’s “All Best” turns the machinery of everyday life inside out. Across three interactive kinetic sculptures, she skewers convenience culture with deadpan wit and historical bite. A loaf of bread performs under theatrical lights; a toaster feeds out a looping text of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread; a bench supported by talking dogs recites Dale Carnegie back at its audience. The works are playful, even absurd, but their targets are clear: the hidden labor behind mass production, the creep of market logic into private life, the strange intimacy of objects designed to save time. Sellinger’s practice thrives on participation—viewers sit, listen, watch, and become implicated. Accompanied by lithographs that map the ideas at play, the exhibition balances humor with critique, asking what we trade away in the name of ease. (Pictured: Best Bread, Becky Sellinger.)
“Pansy Pack” at Hudson Valley Seed Company in Accord
Through July 26
“Pansy Pack” at Hudson Valley Seed Company traces the unlikely journey of a flower that has carried affection, insult, and defiance in equal measure. Through botanical art, historical ephemera, and objects that shimmer with camp and craft, the exhibition reclaims the pansy as a symbol of queer resilience. Highlights include Paul Harfleet’s documentation of The Pansy Project, Olly Costello’s intricate contemporary works, and a collaborative piece by K Greene and Jacinta Bunnell that transforms vintage pins into wearable acts of reclamation.
On April 11 at 1:30pm, Greene leads a gallery talk that opens up the show’s deeper roots, from Victorian floriography to emerging ideas like “Nonbinary Botany.” Set within the working seed company, the conversation grounds big questions of identity and language in the material, living world—where symbols, like seeds, are planted, carried, and transformed.
“The 50th Anniversary Show” at Mark Gruber Gallery in New Paltz
April 4-May 30
For 50 years, Mark Gruber has been doing something stubborn and radical: keeping faith with the Hudson Valley’s light. Since 1976, his New Paltz gallery—first upstairs on Main Street, then in a strip mall—has championed artists who never abandoned landscape, when the art world did. Painters, photographers, and pastelists chasing the slant of sun that drew Cole and Church have found a home here for five decades. The result is less a gallery than a throughline: a continuation of the Hudson River School, sustained by persistence, access, and an unbroken belief in beauty.
“Supernal Light” at Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in Wappingers Falls
Through March 7, 2027
The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors launched its new exhibition “Supernal Light” on the Vernal Equinox, March 21, with a full day of talks, art, and ritual celebration inside Entheon’s All One Gallery. The group exhibition—on view through March 7, 2027 in the front of the Museum dedicated to the work of Artists Alex Grey and Allyson Grey—brings together a wide-ranging roster of “visionary” artists exploring the recurring archetype of spiritual illumination: the “light body,” a symbol that appears across mystical traditions, sacred art, and psychedelic imagery.
The show includes work by M.C. Escher, Fred Tomaselli, Aleah Chapin, Miles Johnston, Rebecca Leveille-Guay, Vibrata Chromadoris, Andrew A. Gonzalez, Isaac Abrams, and Domenico Zindato. Moving between meticulous drawing, psychedelic patterning, figurative painting, and mixed-media experimentation, the artists approach the idea of transcendental light from many different angles—from Escher’s well known explorations of infinity and metamorphosis to Tomaselli’s densely layered resin collages and Abrams’s cosmic abstractions shaped by the psychedelic art movement of the 1960s.
“Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings” at Dia:Beacon
On long-term view, opens April 4
At Dia:Beacon, “Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings” revisits one of Minimalism’s most singular figures with a focused look at her evolution from the late 1950s onward. Drawn largely from Dia’s own holdings, the exhibition traces Martin’s shift into the spare grids and luminous fields that defined her practice—works that read less as objects than as invitations to perception. For Martin, painting was “a development of awareness,” not production, and these quiet, exacting canvases reward sustained looking. The show returns her work to Beacon’s light-filled galleries for the first time in nearly a decade.
“Thomas Broadbent: Shared Territory” at Front Room Gallery in Hudson
Through April 26
At Front Room Gallery, Thomas Broadbent’s “Shared Territory” stages a subtle, unsettling negotiation between the natural world and the spaces humans build. His meticulously rendered paintings place animals inside domestic interiors—birds perched on furniture, ecosystems creeping into constructed environments—blurring boundaries that once felt fixed. Drawing on the compositional drama of Dutch still life and contemporary ecological thought, the work resists spectacle in favor of tension and slow realization. There’s no collapse here, no overt warning—just a sense that the overlap between human and natural systems is already underway, and still unfolding.
“Hudson Talbott: Shining Objects” at Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill
April 11-May 24
At the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, “Hudson Talbott: Shining Objects” gathers more than 75 works by the late Catskill-based artist, offering a full view of a career that bridged illustration, storytelling, and fine art. Best known for his children’s books, Talbott brought a painter’s sensibility to narrative, infusing historical and literary subjects with vivid, accessible imagery. The exhibition includes original paintings, sketches, and artifacts from his studio, situating his work in dialogue with Cole’s legacy. It’s a reminder that the Hudson Valley’s artistic lineage extends not just through landscape painting, but through the stories we tell about it.
“Garth Evans: Watercolors” at Hudson Hall
April 11-May 3
At Hudson Hall, “Garth Evans: Watercolors” offers a rare look at a sculptor working in a different key. Known for his large-scale public works, Evans turns to paper here, producing a series of luminous watercolors made over a single week in Vermont. What begins as landscape gradually loosens, dissolving into fields of color that hover between observation and abstraction. The show pairs with a documentary screening tracing his six-decade career, but the watercolors stand on their own—intimate, searching works that suggest another way of seeing from an artist long associated with mass and permanence.
