November arrives with those familiar Hudson Valley feelings—sweater weather, woodsmoke, and a sudden urge to wander into rooms where other people have been thinking hard about beauty, identity, time, and ants (yes, ants). This month’s exhibitions tilt toward the elemental: the body as instrument, the home as crucible, the nation as unfinished sentence. Daryl K drapes rebellion in impeccable tailoring; Tehching Hsieh and Linda Mary Montano turn endurance into devotion; Corinne May Botz whispers the uncanny under fluorescent light. Elsewhere, feral cats, honey ants, reclaimed jewels, and tiny wolves stage their own mutinies. It’s a season of looking closely—at fur, fabric, landscape, ritual—and finding the seams, the teeth, the tenderness. Step inside, it’s wild in here.
(And just a reminder: this month is your last chance to see “Faraday Cage,” RAE BK’s whole-house installation in Kerhonkson, which has been the artistic revelation of the year.)
“I Am My Muse” at Verse Work/Shop
November 1-23
Daryl Kerrigan didn’t wait for a muse—she became one. “I Am My Muse,” the first exhibition dedicated to the downtown fashion icon behind Daryl K, turns Verse Work/Shop in Red Hook into a memory palace of ’90s New York grit and glamour. Kerrigan’s own body was her fit model, her manifesto, and her rebellion against the male-gaze atelier; the pieces here—about 50 garments, archival drawings, runway footage, and handmade forms—trace a singular vision: clothes that move, work, and smolder. Before sustainability was a slogan, she was repurposing fabrics and racing a bike through the East Village in impeccably cut pants. Fashion as life practice. Fashion as freedom.
“Dogs and Cats” at September
November 1-December 21
September in Kinderhook leans into the eternal binary—dogs vs. cats—with an exuberant group show that treats the theme less like a prompt and more like a playground. The gallery opened submissions for the first time and was met with a flood of nearly 250 applicants; more than 80 artists made the cut, spanning geographies, mediums, and career stages, from London to Los Angeles to locals like Ashley Garrett, Laleh Khorramian, and Scott Ackerman. The result is unruly in the best way: a democratic menagerie where personal mythologies, pet lore, internet culture, and devotion collide. Ten percent of sales benefit the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement.
“Sharing the Space” at the Kleinert/James Art Center
Through November 30
Landscapes slip their historical frames and reassemble in the present tense in this exhibition in Woodstock. “Sharing the Space” pairs paintings from the Byrdcliffe Guild’s collection with 50 landscape photographs by 16 members of the Women Photographers Collective of the Mid-Hudson Valley, creating a cross-generational conversation about how the Hudson Valley is seen, felt, and held. Curated by Anne Arden McDonald, the show rejects nostalgia in favor of lived witness—quiet woods, altered ecologies, human traces at the edges of wildness. Solace and vigilance coexist. Names familiar and emerging stand shoulder-to-shoulder, a collective vision in shared terrain.
“PHOTOcentric 2025: State of Our Union” at Garrison Art Center
November 1-23
At Garrison Art Center, a fractured, fervent, unfinished decade comes into focus. “PHOTOcentric 2025: State of Our Union” gathers work shot between 2015 and 2025, a period when “normal” dissolved into protest marches, pandemic fog, reckonings public and private. Juried by veteran photographer Alan Haywood, the show spans street witness and intimate interiority, glimpses of dissent and flashes of grace. Nearly 30 photographers—from community chroniclers to formally trained image-makers—map a country wrestling with itself. The result isn’t tidy or consoling; it’s plural and unresolved, urgent in its quiet way. A portrait of America mid-sentence.
“Ghosts, Mother’s Milk, and Other Stories” at Hudson Hall
Through November 23
In “Ghosts, Mother’s Milk, and Other Stories,” Corinne May Botz turns the quietly familiar into the quietly unnerving. Housed at Hudson Hall, this exhibition mines everything from crime-scene miniatures to lactation rooms, drawing uncomfortably close to the hidden architectures of care, confinement, and feminine labor. Botz’s lens moves steadily across thresholds—the domestic sphere, the forensic table, the body at work—and invites us to see what we’ve learned to ignore. What emerges is an uncanny cartography of the unnoticed: seams between safety and suffocation, solace and surrender. (Read the full exhibition review by Taliesin Thomas.)
“Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999” at Dia:Beacon
On long-term view.
At Dia:Beacon, “Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999” charts an almost mythic arc of endurance, where time becomes both medium and adversary. The legendary one-year works are all here—the cage, the hourly time card, the year outdoors, the year without art—alongside the 13-year plan, each project collapsing art and life into a single, relentless gesture. Crucially, the exhibition also nods to Rope Piece (1983–84), Hsieh’s year-long collaboration with Saugerties-based performance icon Linda Mary Montano, whom we’re profiling this month. Their tethered experiment remains a radical testament to intimacy, constraint, and the porous borders between bodies and time.
“Acquired Tastes” at DRAW Kingston
November 1-15
At DRAW Kingston, the humble jewelry box becomes a site of reinvention. “Acquired Tastes” is the SUNY New Paltz installment of Community for Ethical Jewelry’s Radical Jewelry Makeover project. The exhibition showcases pounds of discarded adornment donated by the New Paltz community, dismantled by hand, and reimagined by SUNY New Paltz Metal program students, faculty, and local jewelers. Part exhibition, part ethical inquiry, the project asks: What does sustainability looks like in a field built on preciousness and extraction? The results aren’t just recycled; they’re re-authored: Hybrid pieces that carry the ghosts of past owners, the labor of young makers, and a future that glimmers responsibly.
“Picnic” at The International Museum of Dinnerware Design
Through January 17
A picnic is never just a picnic at the International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Kingston. “Picnic” gathers ceramics, sculpture, photography, vintage kits, and trompe-l’oeil oddities to consider leisure, nostalgia, and the rituals that turn eating outdoors into American myth. Bush Picnic by Australian ceramicist Lynette Lewis imagines honey-ant delicacies rendered luminous; Myra Mimlitsch-Gray melts a skillet into near-valentine form; Alice Abrams plates deviled eggs too perfect to poke. Astroturf plinths, plaid suitcases, retro soda ads, and a tablecloth-pulling station keep things playful. (Read the full exhibition review by Sparrow.)
“Hard Palate” at Creative Legion
Through December 5
Photo: William Kaner
At Creative Legion in Hudson, “Hard Palate” lands somewhere between anatomy lesson and metaphysical diagram. Curated by Tara Foley, the show treats the mouth’s vaulted roof not just as a biological fact but as an architectural chamber where breath becomes tone, and tone becomes voice. Works by nine artists, including June Glasson, Gracelee Lawrence, and Daria Irincheeva, trace that internal arc outward: how bodies hold conviction, how ideas travel from interior to exterior, how perception sharpens into presence. Sculpture, drawing, and mixed media become instruments, resonance chambers in their own right. A chorus of forms, learning to speak.
“Animalia” at Olive Free Library
November 15-January 3
At the Olive Free Library ’s “Animalia” show, the wild and the domestic collide in compact, bite-sized artworks. The 8th Annual Small Works Show showcases 69 pieces by 59 regional artists, all under 12″ × 12″ and all riffing on the idea of animality—be it your companion critter, barnyard beast, wild creature, or mythic beast. From clever ceramics to layered prints, each piece invites you to reflect on the human-animal boundary—and the ways we project ourselves onto other species. A refreshingly intimate, affordable holiday art event.
