For one weekend each summer, Upstate Art Weekend (June 25-29) turns the Hudson Valley and Catskills into a sprawling, decentralized art crawl, with museums, galleries, artist studios, farms, storefronts, and improbably beautiful old buildings all pulled into orbit around contemporary art. The sheer scale of the event can be overwhelming, which is why this roundup leans toward the fleeting, the site-specific, and the novel: pop-up fairs in the woods, guided tours through reimagined industrial spaces, experimental installations, temporary activations, and exhibitions that feel inseparable from the places hosting them. Taken together, they reflect one of the defining qualities of Upstate Art Weekend itself—not just the density of cultural activity in the region, but the willingness of artists and organizers to transform barns, libraries, mills, gardens, and domestic interiors into spaces for improvisation and collective experience.
Front Room Gallery: Expanded Field
For Upstate Art Weekend, Front Room Gallery expands beyond its walls in Hudson with Expanded Field, a sprawling indoor-outdoor exhibition at Kingston’s historic Friedrich Gross Mansion. Running June 25–29, with an opening reception on Friday, June 26, from 6–8pm, the show pairs large-scale outdoor installations with painting, photography, drawing, and installation work inside the Victorian-era Steamboat Gothic residence. Sculptors and site-responsive artists engage the mansion’s grounds, while the interior galleries present work by a wide range of Hudson Valley and international artists. Guided tours and artist walk-throughs invite visitors to consider how landscape, architecture, and contemporary art shape one another.
A Presentation of Films at Widow Jane Mine
Few artists reshaped the boundaries of contemporary art as radically as Carolee Schneemann. A pioneer of performance, film, and body-based art, Schneemann spent decades challenging conventions around gender, sexuality, and artistic expression. On June 27 at 3pm, the Carolee Schneemann Foundation presents a screening of films and videos inside the cavernous Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, an evocative setting with its own artistic history. The program includes Interior Scroll – The Cave (1995), filmed at the mine, alongside works by Schneemann, Linda Montano, and Kathy Brew. Together, the screenings illuminate a singular artistic legacy in a singular Hudson Valley space.
Front Street Illuminations
On Friday, June 26, beginning at 6pm, Newburgh’s waterfront becomes an outdoor gallery during Upstate Art Weekend. Front Street Illuminations transforms 195 Front Street into a canvas for large-scale digital projections curated by Japanese-born artist MOTOMICHI and the Tribeca gallery NowHere. The free evening opens with live music curated by local musician Elizabeth Arnold, with projections beginning at sunset (approximately 8:30pm). Works by MOTOMICHI, Maiko Kikuchi, CHiKA, and the acclaimed net-art duo exonemo will light up the riverfront, alongside video art by Fluxus pioneer Shigeko Kubota. Bring a blanket, a chair, and stay for sunset.
“Louche Company” at the Octagon House
“Louche Company” gathers the work of Sita Gomez, Baker Overstreet, and Claudia Renfro into a delirious menagerie of queens, demons, dolls, and androgynous mischief-makers. Curated by Hannah Barrett and installed in artist and occult scholar Jesse Bransford’s eccentric 19th-century Octagon House in Catskill, the exhibition revels in folk-art weirdness, cabaret theatricality, and gender nonconformity. Gomez’s sensual assemblages, Overstreet’s stuffed-canvas figures, and Renfro’s wiry embroideries and bronzes transform the domestic interior into a stage for rebellion, fantasy, and beautifully louche disorder.
The Sphinx at Basilica Hudson
Opening at Basilica Hudson’s Back Gallery on Friday, June 26, from 5–8pm, “The Swan’s Script I” takes inspiration from visionary artist Hilma af Klint’s celebrated Swan paintings, exploring transformation, duality, and the shifting boundary between figuration and abstraction. Featuring work by Rachel Cope, Max Razdow, and Dana Sherwood, the exhibition unfolds through visual art, performance, and literature. The opening reception includes a performance by Melora Creager of Rasputina. A closing reception on Sunday, June 28, from 5–8:30pm features performances by Creager and magician Jeanette Andrews, plus readings by Melissa Auf der Maur and Pam Grossman from their recent books.
“Putting it Together: Transforming Collage” at 68 Prince Street Gallery
This show in Kingston at 68 Prince Street surveys the endlessly elastic possibilities of collage through the work of more than 20 artists. Curated by Alan Goolman, the exhibition spans formal experimentation, layered histories, and contemporary approaches while serving as a companion to Vassar College’s “Making Meaning” symposium in July.
Rural Projects
Nearly 20 years after its debut, Martine Kaczynski’s Route 11 returns to the spotlight during Upstate Art Weekend. Created in 2007 as the inaugural Rural Projects artist residency commission, the site-specific work—a replica gas station canopy installed along County Route 11 in Gallatin—examines energy, mobility, and the landscapes shaped by both. Recently refurbished, the sculpture feels even more timely today, as questions about fossil fuels and alternative energy remain unresolved. From June 26–28, Rural Projects will present drawings, maquettes, photographs, and archival materials related to the work. A reopening and rededication ceremony, followed by a poetry reading, takes place Saturday, June 27, at 3pm.
“Enlighten Peekskill” at locations across the city
“Enlighten Peekskill” turns the city into an open-air gallery, unveiling a years-in-the-making network of murals, illuminated sculptures, and public art installations stretching from the waterfront to downtown. Organized through partnerships with Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art and local arts groups, the project celebrates Peekskill’s growing identity as a creative hub while highlighting the city’s history, architecture, and evolving streetscape.
Glogg Glogg Art Faire in Woodstock
Glogg Glogg brings together more than 30 Upstate artists for a pop-up art fair staged in a woodland setting in Woodstock. Hosted at Melissa Dadourian’s studio, the event mixes indoor and outdoor installations with affordable small works priced under $300. Part salon-style gathering, part treasure hunt, it foregrounds emerging regional artists and DIY creative energy.
“Cagecircle: Composition for an Exhibition” at Bard College’s Stevenson Library
This exhibition at Stevenson Library uses John Cage’s famed chance procedures to curate a wonderfully strange cabinet of curiosities drawn from 22 collections. The resulting exhibition pairs archival oddities, artworks, and ephemera in unpredictable combinations, accompanied by live performances of Cage’s famously indeterminate compositions.
“Stay Frosty Kingston” at ArtPort Kingston
During Upstate Art Weekend, ArtPort Kingston’s parking lot becomes a gallery on wheels. “Stay Frosty Kingston,” a collaboration between ArtPort Kingston and BravinLee Programs, invites more than 50 artists, curators, and cultural producers to transform cars, trucks, and parking spaces into pop-up exhibitions. Expect sculptural installations, performances, sound works, live podcasts, portrait drawing, workshops, and other artist-led interventions scattered across the asphalt. Part art fair, part tailgate party, and part site-specific exhibition, “Stay Frosty” reimagines the parking lot as a place for experimentation, conversation, and creative exchange.
“Tracing Paths” at Farm & Field
“Tracing Paths” at Farm & Field centers on the work of Jill Duffy, whose paintings are made with hand-crafted pigments derived from natural materials. The exhibition expands beyond the gallery with pigment-making demonstrations, guided foraging walks, open studios, and self-guided trails across the property’s 210-acre landscape in Chatham, connecting artistic practice directly to the surrounding environment.
“Ghost Dance for America, 1890”
At Hudson Hall, filmmaker and projection artist Karl Nussbaum unveils “Ghost Dance for America, 1890,” an immersive installation exploring Indigenous dispossession and spiritual resistance. Projected onto a 25-foot circular scrim that surrounds viewers, the work uses shadow, movement, and pre-cinema illusion techniques to place audiences inside a spectral meditation on American history.
Loom in Philmont
Loom offers a first look inside the 1876 Summit Knitting Mill in Philmont, where a massive historic factory is being reimagined as a future hub for artist residencies, exhibitions, and public programs. During guided tours and open-access hours, visitors can explore the restored industrial space and its next chapter in progress.
“Distant Lands” at Ligenza Moore Gallery
“Distant Lands” at Ligenza Moore Gallery gathers work by more than 20 artists, including Katherine Bradford, Judy Pfaff, and Stephen Westfall, exploring imagined geographies shaped by memory, experience, and interior life. Set amid sculpture gardens and wooded grounds in Cold Spring, the exhibition treats landscape less as place than as a psychological and emotional terrain.
Villa Isis
Villa Isis transforms a wooded New Paltz retreat into a live-in gallery where contemporary art, wellness, and immersive installation converge. “Villa Isis: A Nordic–New York Immersive Art Experience” unfolds across the house and grounds with sculpture, film, workshops, and rotating exhibitions, blurring the line between domestic space, exhibition venue, and creative sanctuary.
This article appears in June 2026.
