When most people see a vacant Dollar General, they see a problem waiting for a tenant. Aleksandra Scepanovic sees a draft.
On June 27, Scepanovic and co-curator Jennifer Miller will transform a vacant Dollar General in Esopus into “Of Frame and Fallow,” a one-night-only contemporary art exhibition featuring 51 artists working across sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional media. Some of the artists included in the show will be well known to local gallery goers, with Amanda Russo Rubsam, Joe Concra, Edward Bakst, and Christina Varga showing work. For three hours, from 6 to 9pm, the vacant 9,000-square-foot retail shell will become one of the Hudson Valley’s largest temporary galleries. Then it will disappear.
“How Site Seen sees this is that it’s not an absence,” Scepanovic says. “It’s a sort of a draft of what can happen next.”
The exhibition is the latest project from Site Seen, the artist-run nonprofit founded by Scepanovic and Miller that specializes in activating overlooked, underused, and transitional spaces. Rather than operating a permanent gallery, Site Seen seeks out places most people have stopped noticing: abandoned storefronts, vacant commercial buildings, forgotten industrial sites, and properties caught between their past and whatever comes next.
“We specialize in places that most people have already decided not to look at,” Scepanovic says. “They pass by them as if they’re not there.” That philosophy has produced some unusual venues. Earlier Site Seen projects include “Hull and Hush,” staged in a former shipyard and marina building in Kingston’s Rondout waterfront district last summer, and “Grit and Grid,” which occupied a former office storefront in Williamsburg this spring. Each exhibition was conceived in direct response to the character of the site itself.
The Dollar General in Esopus presented a different challenge. “I don’t know anybody who dreams about filling a Dollar General with contemporary art,” Scepanovic says with a laugh. “But here we are.”
Unlike the layered histories embedded in a shipyard or an office, the building is almost entirely empty. The shelves are gone. The merchandise is gone. What’s left are concrete floors, bare walls, and a handful of abandoned beverage coolers. Rather than working with a site rich in visible traces of its past, the curators found themselves confronting a blank slate. “We’re not trying to save a space,” she says. “We’re trying to reimagine it.”
That fascination with spaces in transition reflects Scepanovic’s own experience. Before becoming a sculptor and curator, she worked in real estate spent her early adulthood navigating the upheavals of the Balkan wars before eventually building a new life in New York. Those experiences shaped her interest in places in flux and the stories they might yet tell.
When Site Seen enters a building, the first task is not installation but observation. Scepanovic and Miller spend hours studying the structure, its history, its light, and its possibilities. They try to understand what the building once was and what it might become.
“We walk into a space and we try to understand what its past was, what the hope is for its future,” Scepanovic says, “and then based on the conditions of the site itself we try not just to transform the space but incorporate that past and turn it into a possibility for future use.”
The resulting exhibitions often feel as much like acts of civic imagination as art shows. Site Seen’s projects ask viewers to reconsider not only the artwork but the buildings that contain it. By temporarily transforming overlooked spaces into cultural destinations, the organization invites visitors to imagine alternative futures for places they may have written off long ago.
The organization’s commitment to impermanence is equally central to its identity. “Of Frame and Fallow” will be open for only three hours.
To some, that might seem like an extraordinary amount of work for a fleeting result. Scepanovic estimates that each project requires roughly four months of planning, fundraising, coordination, installation, and community outreach. The final exhibition may last only an evening, but the effort behind it is substantial.
For Scepanovic, the brevity is part of the point. “We are trying to grab the attention for three hours only and try to weave a new story really quickly,” she says.
That compressed timeframe creates an intensity that traditional gallery exhibitions often lack. Visitors know the experience is temporary. Artists know their work will vanish almost as soon as it appears. The event becomes less an exhibition than a shared moment. Or, as Scepanovic puts it, an “activation of communal joy.”
The phrase captures Site Seen’s broader mission. While many contemporary galleries can feel intimidating or detached from the communities around them, Scepanovic argues that art belongs everywhere. “Our art nonprofit believes in art everywhere, at all times, for everyone,” she says.
That belief has guided Site Seen from a waterfront shipyard to a Brooklyn storefront and now to a vacant Dollar General in Esopus. For one summer evening, a building once stocked with household essentials will instead offer visitors something less tangible: a chance to imagine what else a space—and perhaps a community—might become.
At 9pm, the doors will close, the artists will leave, and the crowd will disperse. The building will still be there. But if Site Seen succeeds, visitors may never see it the same way again.
