Penguins in jester hats, a deer’s slow decomposition, and Beacon’s unacknowledged history of enslavement: November’s exhibitions cover considerable ground. Across the region, artists turn familiar materials and places into invitations to look harder. A chapel becomes a vessel for colored light; early paintings emerge from storage; a new gallery opens with Indigenous artists tracing connections across generations. Beauty figures prominently, though it rarely arrives alone. Grief, absurdity, memory, and political unease keep it interesting company.
“Melissa Stern: Some Assembly Required” at 68 Prince Street Gallery in Kingston
Through November 8
Getting through the day upright is an engineering feat. Melissa Stern’s “Some Assembly Required” takes that predicament as its starting point, assembling figures from clay, resin, wood, metal, fabric, and found objects. At 68 Prince Street Gallery, her sculptures turn the precarious business of being human into miniature narratives, balancing awkwardness with grace and humor with vulnerability. Stern approaches construction like a handyman, joining unlikely materials until they seem inevitable companions. The resulting characters suggest that keeping ourselves together requires improvisation—and that absurdity comes with the territory.
“Armchair Traveler: The Pictorial Maps of Michael R. Stone at Tremaine Gallery at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT
November 3-January 24
Before satellite navigation flattened travel into a blue dot and a destination, pictorial maps made geography an occasion for storytelling. “Armchair Traveler” gathers examples created between 1910 and 1965 from the collection of Hotchkiss graduate Michael R. Stone, who has amassed more than 500 maps. Illustration, bird’s-eye views, and satire convey the personality of places, with selections including Jo Mora’s whimsical visions of the American West, Ernest Dudley Chase’s maps of Boston and the United Kingdom, and John Groth’s 1937 Hollywood map. These artists offer plenty of reasons to linger over the territory before deciding where you want to go.
“Joe Concra: Polar” at Time and Space Limited in Hudson
November 14-December 13
Penguins in three-pompom hats make unlikely protagonists for grand adventures, which is part of their appeal. In “Polar,” Joe Concra’s first solo exhibition since 2008, the Kingston painter sends his birds through icy landscapes, into airborne baskets, and across the Delaware in a composition borrowed from Washington’s famous crossing. Their headgear nods to Tiepolo’s mischievous Punchinello figures, lending these scenes a court jester’s permission to needle power. Political allegory and climate anxiety hover, but Concra leaves interpretation open. “They’re kind of ridiculous and funny,” he says, “and also, who knows what they’re thinking?” The absurdity opens onto something stranger, darker, beautiful.
“Tanya Marcuse: Woven | Deer: an Ecological Tapestry” at CPW in Kingston
Through January 17
Beauty gets tangled up with decomposition in Tanya Marcuse’s meticulously staged photographs. Working over weeks or months, the Hudson Valley artist assembles flowers, animals, and other organic materials into dense tableaux where seasons collide and abundance shades into ecological dread. Eight photographs from “Woven” accompany “Frame,” a sprawling installation whose natural materials will deteriorate throughout the exhibition. The new series “Deer” follows a roadkill carcass over 19 months, with Marcuse introducing devotional gestures, including gilding the body. Photographs and a film made with Ben Stechshulte turn an encounter with death into a sustained examination of grief, transformation, and the environment.
“Liz Neilsen: Crystalline Resonance” at Gridley Chapel at Wassaic Project
Ongoing
Stained glass gets a photographic reinvention in Liz Nielsen’s “Crystalline Resonance,” which fills Gridley Chapel’s historic windows with 12 transparent photograms. Made without a camera, the images emerge from layers of colored light applied to photosensitive material, then mounted to acrylic. Circles, triangles, and squares assemble into luminous characters: possible guardians, visiting extraterrestrials, perhaps an apostle sporting a baseball cap. Sunlight activates the panels, spilling color through the chapel and changing the installation throughout the day. Drawing on traditions of abstract photography and sacred architecture, Nielsen creates a space for contemplation whose pleasures require no particular faith beyond trust in color.
“Line Break” at Branchline in Katonah
November 6-January 31
A line can mark a border, trace a journey, or connect generations. “Line Break,” the inaugural exhibition at Branchline, explores those possibilities through painting, sculpture, textiles, drawing, and mixed media by 18 artists. Drawn from the Gochman Family Collection, works spanning the 1950s to today bring together Jeffrey Gibson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, Marie Watt, and others. Organizers Moonoka Begay and Nicole van Brugge consider how lines carry histories, challenge boundaries, and transmit knowledge. The new venue for contemporary Native art occupies historic buildings beside Katonah’s Metro-North station, giving the collection a permanent public home.
“Francie Lyshak: Dreamscapes” at Mad Rose Gallery in Millerton
November 7-January 31
Before turning to monochrome abstraction, Francie Lyshak populated her canvases with dolls, animals, toys, and human figures caught in psychological dramas. “Dreamscapes” brings newly unearthed, large-scale oils from that earlier period into view. Vivid color and surreal imagery give solitude, relationships, and vulnerability the charged atmosphere of myth. A rebellious feminist perspective informs these allegories, while Lyshak’s training as an art therapist lends emotional weight to their symbolic cast. She describes the paintings as stories about “inner states that are common to many, but unspoken by most of us.” Their theatrical strangeness gives those submerged feelings bodies, settings, and unruly lives.
“Regarding the Slavery Matter” at Beacon Artists Union
November 13-December 6
Beacon’s street signs commemorate enslaving families; its historic sites often leave enslaved people unmentioned. Elvira Clayton and George Kimmerling confront that imbalance through sculpture, photography, and historical texts. Clayton’s handwoven works honor three people enslaved at the Brett Homestead, incorporating glass beads and osnaburg, a fabric historically used to clothe enslaved people. Another piece traces Northern industry’s dependence on Southern cotton and forced labor. Kimmerling photographs woods surrounding the homestead and intersections bearing enslavers’ names, then supplies what public memory omits: cast-aluminum roadside markers detailing local connections to enslavement. Together, the works make historical erasure visible within the city’s everyday landscape at BAU.
“Threads” at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck
Through December 13
Thousands of fine colored threads stretch across ‘T’ Space’s Archive Gallery, gathering into luminous clouds that shift with the daylight. On the walls, poet H. L. Hix offers a provocative proposition: “The laws of nature did not culminate in life: they culminate in color. Look at a dead sparrow or river stone.” In “Threads,” artist Anne Lindberg’s suspended sculptures meet Hix’s poems, rendered in reflective Plexiglas. Words and fibers catch and release light as visitors move beneath and around the work, making reading a physical experience. Curated by Susan Wides for the Steven Holl-designed gallery, the installation grows from more than three decades of exchange between the collaborators. Each poem measures 30 syllables, a verbal counterpart to the strands spanning the room. The architecture becomes a third participant, its windows admitting the changing light that continually revises the encounter. A shift in perspective can change what you see—and what you read.
