Wangechi Mutu at Storm King Art Center
(Through November 7)
While it’s always a delight to visit the permanent collection of large-scale sculptures by the likes of Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, and Louise Nevelson at Storm King, the sculpture park is always adding something new to ponder on its 500 acres in New Windsor. (Still reeling from Sarah Sze’s installation of mirroring wonder Fallen Sky from 2021.) This year, the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu installs eight large-scale cast bronze works, which seek to break down hierarchies among living things and assert the relevance of myth, fable, and the history of African art making.
“Couple of” by Arlene Shechet at T Space
(July 17-August 28)
Shechet, a Woodstock resident who maintains a studio in Kingston, has shown at blue chip galleries like Pace and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, as well as at museums like the Frick and the Phillips in her 30-year career. “Couple of” will be Shechet’s first show in the Hudson Valley, showcasing sculptures that seem to dodge stasis in their sinuous lines, as if change was imminent. The architectural nature of the wood and ceramic constructions will play interestingly against the Rhinebeck gallery’s distinctive structure, itself a piece of art designed by renowned architect Steven Holl.
“52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
(June 6-January 8)
In 1971, Lucy R. Lippard curated the exhibition “Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists” at the Aldrich. The historic show featured emerging women artists (Howardena Pindell and Alice Aycock among them), all of whom had never had a solo show in New York City. Fifty-one years later, “52 Artists” showcases the original artists from the 1971 show alongside a new roster of 26 female identifying or nonbinary emerging artists born after 1980 who live and work in New York City, tracking the evolution of feminist art practices over the past five decades. The younger artists include Emile L. Gossiaux, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Stella Zhong, and Phoebe Berglund.
“Secret Project Robot Country Club” at ArtPort Kingston
(July 16-September 11)
Located in the Cornell Steamboat Building on the Rondout Creek, ArtPort Kingston is a massive space where a conventional art gallery takes a stab at unconventional interactions with non-art audiences. This approach is on full view this summer with “Secret Project Robot Country Club,” a site-specific art installation and interactive miniature golf course by Rachel Nelson and Erik Zajaceskowski that’s a cheeky play on country club life. The holes will be fully interactive and playable, with trophy paintings and trophy prints available to all golfers.
“The Material, The Thing” at the Dorsky Museum
(June 22-November 6)
For the past 14 years, the Dorsky has mounted an annual exhibition of regional artists that serves as a snapshot of the Hudson Valley’s artistic zeitgeist and a launching pad for emerging talent. This year’s artists include familiar names: Daniel Giordano, Laetitia Hussain, Sydney Cash, and Millicent Young among two dozen others. “The Material, The Thing” considers how artists understand and reimagine the material culture we live in and invites them to perform alchemy on everyday items, turning them into art. Or, as Arthur Danto put it, “the transfiguration of the commonplace.” The exhibit is curated by Nicole Hayes, a curator at Art Omi.
“Rodin in the United States” at the Clark Art Institute
(June 18—September 18)
Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculptures are widely revered around the world now, but this French artist didn’t always enjoy a burnished reputation here. This potential blockbuster show includes roughly 50 sculptures and 25 drawings (The Thinker among them), and charts the influences on the course of an artist’s reputation by various forces, including collectors, museums, and art historians. The nearly 1,300 works by Rodin held in American museums and private collections today testify to his lasting power.
“Black Melancholia” at CCS Bard Galleries
(June 25-October 16)
Search images for “melancholy” and “art history” and up pops a page full of white women, nearly all holding their heads in despair. Fast forward to “Black Melancholia,” curated by Nana Adusei-Poku, a show which gives voice to 28 artists of African descent. It ranges from the 19th century to contemporary work, and comprises a wide variety of media. The show at CCS aims to transcend the typical imagery of melancholy in art history and refract traditionally racialized content which has often depicted radical emotional states—despair, loss, longing—through a primarily white lens.
Upstate Art Weekend
(July 22-24)
Founded during the first summer of the pandemic by art world veteran Helen Toomer to bring exposure to Hudson Valley art and artists and escape to quarantine-fatigued city dwellers, the first year featured 23 arts venues. In 2021, the number of participating sites numbered over 60. This year’s Upstate Art Weekend has over 145 participants, from museums (Dia:Beacon, Lehman Loeb, Dorsky) to lesser known art destinations (Bradford Graves Sculpture Park), and artists’ open studios (three quick recommendations: Philippe Halaburda, Helen Prior, Julia von Eichel). The smorgasbord art event of the season.
“Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura” at Magazzino Italian Art
(Through January 9, 2023)
The house that Arte Povera built, Magazzino has brought influential Italian artists of that influential art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s to its modernist museum in Cold Spring since it opened in 2017. This summer, there are the fascinating “nature carpets” (tappet-natura) of Pietro Gilardi, one of the main protagonists of Arte Povera. Carving natural scenes into artificial materials like polyurethane foam and then saturating them with synthetic pigment, Gilardi sought to recreate nature in an uncontaminated form. Some of the pieces, especially a couple depicting sea birds flying low over water, are breathtaking.
“A Tournament of Lies”at Wassaic Project
(Through September 17)
Wassaic Project’s big summer show takes a line from the whimsical doomsaying of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” as its point of departure. Curated by Eve Biddle, Bowie Zunino, Jeff Barnett-Winsby, and Will Hutnick, “A Tournament of Lies” gathers 46 artists in Wassaic in hopes of harnessing the infinite energy of the life-imitates-art-imitates-life-imitates-art dynamo. Among them, Heidi Johnson’s realist/surrealist paintings of domestic existence with animals (human ones included); Amy Vazquez combines rituals old and new to bridge the everyday and the otherworld; and Stephen Morrison’s canine friends cordially invite you to an all-dog dinner party.
This article appears in June 2022.
