On the second floor of an 1830s house at 16 Adams Street in Kingston, an exposed gas fixture protrudes from cracked plaster. Wallpaper patterned with owls, urns, and geometric forms emerges from beneath a later coat of white. Elsewhere, the walls are painted a jolting blue, though whoever began the job never finished it. Holes puncture the plaster, paint peels from the ceiling, and square-headed nails rise from the original floorboards.
The rooms have gone largely untouched since the building was divided into three apartments, probably in the 1950s. For decades, the space sat unoccupied, accumulating lumber, discarded linoleum, rodent droppings, and a thick layer of mystery.
It is now an art gallery—at least until the end of September.
“Hole in the Wall,” featuring collage and sculpture by Tania Alvarez and paintings by Tim Doud, is the third exhibition organized by the Living Room Project, curator Sylvia Estes’s itinerant project devoted to presenting art in underused and unconventional spaces. The exhibition opened August 22 and remains available to view by appointment through September 26, with an artist walkthrough and a closing reception planned for that day from 4–6pm.
The Living Room Project began, as its name suggests, in Estes’s own living room, where she mounted a photography exhibition. Its second show occupied a 1930s bungalow in Ulster Park during the liminal period between owners. Six artists installed work throughout the house, and the real estate photographer arrived the following day; the resulting Zillow listing doubled as an exhibition catalogue.
“It’s like, why not an art installation in a Zillow post?” Estes says. “That’s a different way of looking at a house.”
The Adams Street space came to Estes through a neighbor who owns the building and showed her the long-abandoned rooms three years ago. Estes kept the site in mind while waiting for the right artists. Before installing “Hole in the Wall,” she spent several sweaty days cleaning in a hazmat suit, followed by weeks of smaller interventions. She removed the old linoleum but resisted making the place pristine. “I’m cleaning, but I’m not restoring in the same way,” Estes says. “I want to have the layers of history be apparent.”
Those layers provide a resonant setting for Alvarez, whose assemblages incorporate wood, plaster, paper, and other materials salvaged from the Germantown house she is restoring. Her pieces examine how houses retain evidence of previous lives and how people, in turn, are shaped by the structures they occupy. Installed among the building’s exposed wallpaper and crumbling surfaces, the work can appear to have been excavated from the rooms themselves.
Doud’s paintings, covered in looping splatters, introduce another question. He begins with spontaneous gestures—paint flung intuitively across a surface—then painstakingly reproduces them. The works blur the distinction between an authentic moment and its manufactured copy.
That tension plays out across the Adams Street space, where every unfinished paint job and punctured wall invites speculation. Was a repair abandoned or simply forgotten? Was a hole accidental, functional, or made in anger? “We don’t know if certain things were intentional,” Estes says. “There’s a gray area of what was done with intention and what was done through circumstance and decay.”
Estes, who is pursuing a master’s degree at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, studied art history and human rights before working on a regenerative farm in the Finger Lakes. The Living Room Project applies lessons drawn from land stewardship to exhibition-making. Each show should leave its site improved, whether through cleaning, mitigation, restoration, or helping a property and its owner navigate a transition.
It also addresses a practical problem: Gallery space is expensive, and emerging artists can struggle to gain entry. The Living Room Project expands the geography of where art may be encountered while allowing each setting to participate in the curatorial conversation.
Estes is now fielding offers of barns, garages, houses, and other possible venues. She is drawn to places bearing marks of incompletion or neglect, spaces with complicated histories that remain visible. “There’s a deep intentionality and a desire for it to feel like the space is speaking,” she says. On Adams Street, it has plenty to say.
To schedule a viewing, email sylviabestes@gmail.com.
