At first glance, “Leather and Plastic” might seem like a materials show, a rumination on texture and tactility. But linger awhile in the Zadock Pratt Museum’s newly restored Carriage House and a more provocative thesis emerges—an interrogation of America’s extractive past and petrochemical present, told through the lens of two materials that have shaped economies, bodies, and landscapes.
Curated by Tony Bluestone, “Leather and Plastic” assembles a smart, surprising group of contemporary artists who grapple with the legacies of production and the cultural imprint of materials. That this show is staged in Prattsville—home to the once-largest tannery in the world—is no small thing. The ghost of Zadock Pratt, the 19th-century entrepreneur, Congressman, and namesake of this Catskills hamlet, hovers over every room. His fortune, and the town’s very layout, were built on leather: thousands of hides processed with bark from decimated hemlock forests, stitched into a booming capitalist vision. What remains is a museum, a carriage house, and a complicated inheritance.
Against this backdrop, the show opens with a literal and conceptual punch. Hugo Montoya’s transformed 19th-century carriage—its surfaces sheathed in plastic decals and synthetic gleam—acts as a collision point between centuries. It’s a freighted object, freighted still: once a symbol of industrial might, now retrofitted with the visual language of late-capitalist consumption.
The show doesn’t stop at spectacle. Amanda Pohan’s installation, scented with synthetic “new car smell,” is a chemical chorus that hovers at the edge of consciousness. This olfactory trick destabilizes nostalgia; instead of evoking the artisanal leather of yesteryear, it invokes the prefab sterility of mass production. Her work literalizes the shift from organic to synthetic, from handcrafted saddle to factory-sealed steering wheel.
Elsewhere, the show slows down. Em Rooney, Linnea Gad, and Catherine Telford-Keogh offer meditative, materially complex works—leather stitched to steel, plastic oozing into clay, marble countertops embedded with synthetic detritus. Telford-Keogh’s work in particular suggests archaeological ruin and product recall in equal measure. The pieces don’t just sit in the space—they question the space. What does it mean to install petrochemical critique inside a building built by and for the extractive economy of the 1800s?
The historical resonance is what gives “Leather and Plastic” its bite. The Zadock Pratt Museum is no neutral white cube. Built in 1828 and expanded in the 1850s, the house and carriage barn were manifestations of industrial confidence. Pratt didn’t just process leather—he processed empire: raw materials in, manufactured power out. That the same site now hosts an exhibition interrogating the costs of that legacy is a kind of quiet revenge.
Ultimately, “Leather and Plastic” doesn’t moralize. It observes. It places leather and plastic in conversation—two materials once heralded as miracles, now freighted with ethical and ecological baggage. It asks what progress costs, and who pays the price. And it does so in a place that knows the answer all too well.
This article appears in July 2025.
