11 Art Shows to See in the Hudson Valley in May 2026

May’s exhibitions share a preoccupation with what holds—and what doesn’t. Across the region, artists test the limits of structure, whether in textile and thread, systems of authorship, or the fragile architectures of memory and identity. Materials carry meaning: hair that catches light, fabric that encodes contradiction, photographs that fix fleeting moments, paintings that refuse resolution. Even the act of looking gets unsettled, slipping into touch, taste, and immersion. If there’s a throughline, it’s a resistance to singular narratives—toward something more distributed, more unstable, and closer to lived experience, where meaning is layered, negotiated, and always in flux.

“Surface, Structure, String” at Hudson Hall in Hudson

May 8-June 12

“Surface, Structure, String” surveys the region’s thriving textile scene, from intricate embroidery to large-scale fiber installations. Curated by Richard Saja, the group show with notable regional artists like Portia Munson and Laleh Khoramian treats textiles as both material and language—exploring tension, repetition, and memory—while highlighting artists who are pushing the medium into conceptual, socially engaged terrain.

“Jose Picayo: 35 Years in Photographs” at Robin Rice Gallery in Hudson

Through June 15

“35 Years in Photographs” marks Jose Picayo’s 10th solo show at the Robin Rice Gallery, surveying work from 1991 to 2025. Known for fashion and still life, Picayo pairs formal rigor with a sly, offbeat sensibility. Working exclusively in film—often large-format and Polaroid—his images feel timeless, tactile, and slightly uncanny, resisting easy categorization while maintaining meticulous craft. 

“The Linda McCartney Retrospective: From the Light” at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown

May 23-September 7

“From the Light” at Fenimore Art Museum reframes a figure too often reduced to proximity—wife, bandmate, icon-adjacent—and restores Linda McCartney as a photographer of instinctive clarity. The exhibition gathers decades of work that move fluidly between the rarefied and the domestic: portraits of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix alongside images of family life, animals, and unguarded, in-between moments. McCartney had a gift for collapsing the distance between subject and viewer; even her celebrity portraits feel unvarnished, almost incidental, as if fame were just another texture in the frame.

The show also traces the breadth of her life—her parallel career in music, her advocacy for animal rights, her eye for the everyday as something worth dignifying. If the retrospective has a thesis, it’s in the title: the light isn’t staged, it’s found—caught in motion, in intimacy, in the fleeting expressions that resist mythmaking even as they document it.

“Carol Seitz: Growth in Difficult Places” at Convey/er/or in Poughkeepsie

May 2-June 27

Carol Seitz’s photographs find resilience in unlikely places—plants pushing through cracks, thriving against odds. What begins as close observation opens into metaphor: who gets the conditions to flourish, and who doesn’t? Seitz’s images suggest that growth is universal, but equity is not, inviting viewers to consider care, intervention, and community responsibility. At Convey/er/or in Poughkeepsie.

“Stephen Olivier: Hazmat” at ASK in Kingston

May 2-31

At Art Society of Kingston’s Spotlight Gallery, “Hazmat” finds Stephen Olivier working through the charged material of his own history. Painting and sculpture intersect in a body of work shaped by Catholic upbringing, queer identity, and an unresolved paternal legacy, each piece carrying a sense of excavation—what’s buried, what lingers, what refuses to settle. Olivier’s forms veer between the symbolic and the visceral, where belief systems and personal memory collide without easy resolution. The result is less confession than confrontation, a practice of sorting through inherited narratives and the emotional residue they leave behind.

“Jenny Snider: Beyond the Pale” at Time and Space Limited in Hudson

Through May 17

“Beyond the Pale” at Time and Space Limited draws on Jenny Snider’s long engagement with Soviet Constructivism and the artists caught in its orbit, tracing the collision of artistic ambition and Stalinist repression. A third thread, the Pale of Settlement, brings in family history and Jewish displacement. The result is a historically charged body of work that links avant-garde art, political violence, and lived inheritance.

“Because, Now Is the Time of Monsters” at Wassaic Project in Wassaic

May 16-September 12

At Wassaic Project, the summer exhibition “Because, Now Is the Time of Monsters” takes its title from Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s writing on the “interregnum”—that unsettled space between a dying order and whatever comes next. Featuring nearly 40 artists across the cavernous floors of Maxon Mills, the show leans into that instability, where the familiar starts to slip. Motel rooms stage moral allegories, galaxies swirl inside coffee cups, and oversized teeth hover somewhere between cartoon and threat. Playful, ominous, and occasionally absurd, the work resists easy reading, building toward something like a collective fever dream of the present moment.

“Millicent Young: Holding Light Sutra” at Ritz Theater Stagehouse in Newburgh

May 9-July 12

“Holding Light Sutra” transforms the long-closed Ritz Theater Stagehouse into an immersive meditation on fracture and repair. In collaboration with Safe Harbors of the Hudson, Strongroom presents Millicent Young’s multimedia installation, centered on a suspended cube of white horsehair that catches and scatters projected light. Video, sound, and field recordings—drawn from Ulster County and the Atlantic coast—layer into a work that moves between intimacy and vastness. Set within a space marked by decay and revival, the installation considers displacement, memory, and the fragile conditions of belonging.

“Alighiero Boetti: Tutto Boetti 1966-1993” at Magazzino in Cold Spring

Through April 26, 2028

At Magazzino Italian Art, “Tutto Boetti 1966–1993” reframes Alighiero Boetti as a prophet of distributed creativity. By signing his work “Alighiero e Boetti,” the artist split authorship at its source, opening the door to a practice built on collaboration, delegation, and exchange. Textiles produced with Afghan artisans and systems-driven works alike dissolve the idea of the lone maker, replacing it with a network of contributors and processes. Decades on, the exhibition reads less as retrospective than blueprint—an early model for a world where authorship is shared, unstable, and inseparable from the systems that produce it.

“Speakeasy Happy Hour” at Utopia in Kingston

May 2-30

At Utopia, “Speakeasy Happy Hour” blurs the line between exhibition and sensory experiment. Curated by Luke Whittaker, the group show pairs paintings by six emerging artists with cocktails designed to echo their visual language—inviting viewers to taste, smell, and physically register what’s on the wall. The premise is simple but disarming: can a painting extend beyond sight into the body? As color, narrative, and atmosphere translate into flavor, the gallery becomes a space of cross-sensory interpretation, where looking gives way to a more immersive, and slightly disorienting, form of engagement.

“byCONTRAST: Apparent Contradictions” at Kleinert/James Center for the Arts

Through May 10

At Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, “byCONTRAST: Apparent Contradictions” turns the language of quilts into something wry and contemporary. Organized with Studio Art Quilt Associates, the exhibition gathers 30 fiber artists working at the intersection of craft and concept, using stitched, layered textiles to explore the contradictions embedded in everyday speech—phrases that mean two things at once, or collapse under their own logic. Curated by fiber artist Ann Johnston, the show highlights the medium’s range, from meticulous patterning to painterly abstraction, all grounded in the tactile intimacy of cloth.

This article appears in May 2026.