This fall’s visual arts calendar takes some unexpected turns. At Kent Fine Art, “Cameron (1922–1995)” revisits the occultist artist’s mystical drawings, while Haegue Yang fills both floors of Dia:Beacon with bells, blinds, and light in “Through.” Emil Alzamora maps the body’s stranger territories in “Terra Incognita,” and Pixy Liao puts nearly two decades of partnership on display in “Relationship Material.” Elsewhere, “50 Years of PUNK” brings downtown New York’s unruly graphics to Hudson Hall, and “Of Paper and Plate” slips contemporary art into a Kingston deli. Across galleries, museums, and lunch counters, these shows invite a second look at familiar spaces.
“Cameron (1922–1995)”
Through November 14 at Kent Fine Art in Pine Plains
Artist, poet, actress, and occultist Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel worked under the mononym Cameron, creating drawings and paintings poised at the edge of surrealism, psychedelia, and the sacred. Guided by theosophy, astrology, and a fascination with cosmic mysteries, she pursued an underground path through postwar California’s avant-garde. Her notorious “Peyote Vision” helped prompt police to shut down Wallace Berman’s 1957 exhibition at Ferus Gallery, cementing her clandestine reputation. This survey revisits the work of an exacting draftsperson whose mystical images remained largely outside public view until late in her life.
“Haegue Yang: Through”
October 10-June 12, 2028 at Dia:Beacon in Beacon
South Korean artist Haegue Yang is the first artist to create a new body of work spanning both floors of Dia Beacon. Four large installations made with venetian blinds, bells, lights, and sculptural forms transform the former factory into an immersive landscape of sound, color, and movement. The exhibition draws on East Asian philosophy and the music of Isang Yun, a Korean composer whose life was shaped by exile and political violence. As visitors move between the museum’s sunlit upper floor and darker lower level, Yang connects ancient mythology, modern industry, and the experience of living between cultures.
“Becoming Earth, Becoming Cosmos”
Through November 1 at Garner Art Center in Garnerville
Four artists connected by the Hudson River and an attention to landscape, ancestral knowledge, and life cycles collaborate in “Becoming Earth, Becoming Cosmos.” Organized by Bel Falleiros, the exhibition joins her work with that of Jessica Maffia, Koyoltzintli, and Hanae Utamura in a large site-specific installation occupying Garner’s main gallery. Found and fabricated objects form a constellation across the floor, threaded together by a soundscape composed from breath and voice. Drawing on spirals, circles, and markings repeated across generations and oceans, the artists explore the charged spaces between soil and sky, decay and growth, individual bodies and deep collective memory.
“Emil Alzamora: Terra Incognita”
Through December 12 at Ethan Cohen Fine Art in Beacon
“Terra incognita” once labeled the unknown regions beyond a map’s borders. Emil Alzamora applies the term to a frontier closer at hand and no easier to chart: human consciousness. Working in clay, stone, cement, metal, and plaster, the Beacon sculptor transforms the body into an instrument of psychological inquiry. His figures stretch, bend, compress, and bulge, their anatomical precision giving even impossible forms a disturbing plausibility. Alzamora’s mastery of material keeps these distortions sensuous as well as alarming. The exhibition treats each body as undiscovered territory, revealing identity as unstable terrain shaped by pressure, vulnerability, imagination, and forces beyond comprehension.
“Oculus Obscura”
Through November 1 at Pictorial Foundation in Newburgh
Photography returns to first principles in “Oculus Obscura,” a group exhibition devoted to camera obscura and pinhole practices. Curated by Karen Ghostlaw, the show brings together 10 artists working with handmade cameras, cyanotypes, masked pinholes, panoramic devices, digital adaptations, and ceramic cameras formed from Hudson Valley silt and clay. A full-scale walk-in camera obscura turns the gallery itself into a photographic instrument, allowing visitors to watch light assemble the outside world into a luminous, inverted image. Meanwhile, three pinhole cameras remain active throughout the exhibition, accumulating slowly evolving long exposures that make passing time—and changing conditions—part of the work itself.
“Iain Machell: Second Nature”
Through October 24 at Jane St. Art Center in Saugerties
In “Second Nature,” Iain Machell examines the natural world as a field of pressure, erosion, growth, and human interference. The British-born, Hudson Valley-based artist pushes drawing toward sculpture, bending, stitching, gluing, and stressing paper until flat surfaces become tactile terrain. Organic marks and meticulous textures suggest rocks, roots, rivers, and geological forces without settling into literal representation. Machell’s works operate like fragments of a larger system: intimate maps of matter shaped by time and strain. Their beauty carries tension, registering nature’s restless energy alongside the damage humans impose upon it and the resilience with which it still continually answers back.
“Homunculus: Psychology of the Body”
October 10-December 12 at Edition Gallery in Hyde Park
“Homunculus: Psychology of the Body” places the work of mother and son Barbara Pearlman and Alexander Yulish in an uncanny cross-generational conversation. Pearlman, a celebrated 1960s Paris fashion illustrator, spent subsequent decades privately producing thousands of drawings and sculptures that stretch, divide, and transform anatomy into psychic terrain. Yulish, who grew up in her studio, makes gestural paintings in which bodies and faces emerge from abstraction, fragment, and reform. Although created independently, their works share an interest in how the psyche inhabits the body, how memory alters physical form, and what creative knowledge passes between generations without being consciously taught.
“Pixy Liao: Relationship Material”
October 3-January 17 at CPW in Kingston
Since 2007, Chinese American artist Pixy Liao has collaborated with her Japanese-born partner, artist and musician Takahiro Morooka, on staged self-portraits that treat their relationship as creative material. “Relationship Material” gathers approximately 45 photographs, soft sculptures, music videos, and elements from PIMO, the offbeat musical duo they formed together. With deadpan humor and meticulously arranged poses, Liao reverses familiar gender dynamics, complicating the roles of artist and muse while examining intimacy, desire, identity, and partnership. Nearly two decades into the ongoing project, its central question remains provocative: How might a couple continually renegotiate power without exhausting either affection or play?
“Photo-Design: Persuasion, Critique, Fantasy”
October 3-January 31 at Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie
Photography may appear to show the world as it is, but “Photo-Design: Persuasion, Critique, Fantasy” examines its power to propose what might come next. Spanning the 1920s to the present, the exhibition traces how artists, architects, and graphic designers have combined photography with collage, montage, and experimental printing to imagine new ways of living amid uncertain futures. Works by the Guerrilla Girls, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Eduardo Paolozzi, Grete Stern, Marshall Brown, and many others reveal how photography’s reputation for truth can lend persuasive cultural force to radical visions, political critiques, and speculative worlds not yet fully realized or understood.
“50 Years of PUNK”
October 17-November 29 at Hudson Hall in Hudson
Before punk became a genre, it was a magazine. Founded in 1976 by John Holmstrom, Ged Dunn, and Legs McNeil, PUNK chronicled the unruly downtown scene taking shape around CBGB, championing the Ramones, Blondie, and other emerging acts through interviews, comics, photography, hand-drawn graphics, and satire. Curated by Holmstrom and Ki Smith, this 50th-anniversary exhibition gathers five decades of covers and artwork by Chris Stein, Roberta Bayley, R. Crumb, Shepard Fairey, Joey Ramone, Godlis, and others who helped turn rock ’n’ roll rebellion into a cultural movement.
“Of Paper and Plate”
October 9-11 at Market Basket Deli in Kingston
Contemporary art joins the lunch rush in “Of Paper and Plate,” a 14-artist exhibition installed inside Kingston’s Market Basket Delicatessen during the O+ Festival. Organized by Site Seen, which stages exhibitions in overlooked and transitional spaces, the project allows artwork and everyday commerce to coexist: The deli keeps serving sandwiches while customers encounter paintings and other works among its familiar rhythms and fixtures. The setting turns ordering lunch into an exercise in attention, asking how context shapes perception and where culture belongs. Responding to O+’s “MO+NUMENTS” theme, the exhibition considers what communities place on the table—and choose to notice anew.
“Inscape/Outscape: Works on Paper”
October 17-November 22 at Garrison Art Center in Garrison
Drawn from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation’s collection, “Inscape/Outscape: Works on Paper” examines how interior and exterior spaces shape perception. The nearly monochromatic exhibition emphasizes verticality, architectural structure, and the play of shadow and light, finding poetry in doorways, windows, walls, and partially glimpsed views. Works by James Castle, Tara Geer, Stanley Lewis, Luis Marsans, Catherine Murphy, Eleanor Ray, Leopold Strobl, and others reflect Louis-Dreyfus’s independent approach to collecting. Guided by studio visits, relationships with artists, and his own eye instead of prevailing market tastes, he prized sustained observation and figurative work when many collectors had turned entirely away from it.
