Summer art season arrives in many forms. A vacant Dollar General in Esopus becomes a temporary cathedral of contemporary art in Site Seen’s “Of Frame and Fallow.” The Aldrich launches an ambitious decennial survey of Connecticut artists. Kaatsbaan’s fields sprout sculpture in “Earthly Delights.” At CCS Bard, Uman receives the most expansive exhibition of her career, while Olana reintroduces Frederic Church as a global traveler rather than a Hudson Valley provincial. Elsewhere, artists occupy former schools, high schools, galleries, and storefronts, proving once again that art has a peculiar talent for finding—and transforming—the spaces we thought we knew.
“Earthly Delights”
Kaatsbaan Cultural Park
June 6-October 31
Kaatsbaan’s sixth annual visual arts exhibition, “Earthly Delights,” turns the organization’s sprawling grounds into a dreamlike ecology of sculpture and installation. Curated by Hilary Greene, the exhibition features nine contemporary artists—many based in the Hudson Valley—whose works riff on botanical forms, insects, planets, and other organic phenomena. Returning artists Aurora Robson, Ian McMahon, and Portia Munson are joined by Thea Berman, Sharon Broit, Laura Battle, Kris Perry, Nadia Yaron, Virginia L. Montgomery, and others, while two monumental bronzes by Gaston Lachaise anchor the exhibition with a touch of modernist gravitas.
“The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me”
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
June 7-January 10, 2027
The Aldrich launches an ambitious new recurring survey with “The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me,” a sprawling exhibition spotlighting 40 Connecticut-based artists across generations and disciplines. Filling the museum’s galleries and sculpture garden, the show positions Connecticut not as an artistic outpost but as fertile ground for experimentation, reinvention, and sustained practice outside major art capitals. Curated from more than 100 studio visits, the inaugural triennial-scale survey includes work by artists like Ellen Altfest, Aki Sasamoto, Tammy Nguyen, and Philip Taaffe, alongside emerging voices and rediscoveries. The exhibition takes its title from a Wallace Stevens poem written during his years in Hartford.
“The Legacy of Disembodiment”
Private Public Gallery
July 11-August 9
At Private Public Gallery in Hudson, painter and sculptor Melora Kuhn reimagines the myth of Persephone by removing Hades entirely from the scene. The result is psychologically destabilizing and strangely liberatory: Persephone no longer reads as a passive victim trapped in an old narrative, but as a consciousness suspended at the edge of transformation. Centered around Kuhn’s first life-sized sculpture and surrounded by eruption-like paintings, the exhibition interrogates the long Western tradition of aestheticizing violence against women through mythological imagery. Rather than revisiting these stories as distant allegories, Kuhn makes them feel immediate, visceral, and unresolved—mythology as lived psychic experience rather than inherited cultural artifact.
** The opening of the Melora Kuhn exhibition has been moved from June 13 to July 11.
“E. E. Kono: Dispersion”
Elijah Wheat Showroom
June 13-July 19
After several years in Newburgh, Elijah Wheat Showroom opens a new chapter with a move to Main Street in Beacon and an inaugural exhibition by painter E. E. Kono. On view June 13 through July 19, “Dispersion” presents Kono’s luminous egg tempera paintings, which probe ideas of settlement, migration, and American identity through an intensely material practice. Using pigments sourced from historically charged sites—including former brick factories—Kono excavates the quieter histories embedded in the landscape. The exhibition title refers both to the suspension of pigment in egg yolk and to themes of generational displacement, belonging, and the lingering psychic residue of westward expansion.
“An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection”
Clark Art Institute
June 13-February 21
This summer, the Clark Art Institute unveils one of the most significant acquisitions in its history with “An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection.” Drawn from the late collector’s extraordinary holdings, the exhibition assembles roughly 150 works spanning four centuries of European art, from rare early Netherlandish paintings to Baroque portraiture and French Enlightenment sculpture. Masterworks by Jan van Eyck, Anthony van Dyck, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun anchor the show, which also offers a preview of the museum’s future Tavitian Wing opening in 2028.
“Uman: In Between”
Hessel Museum of Art
June 27-November 29
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College delivers the most expansive survey yet of the painter Uman, tracing more than two decades of work across over 100 paintings, collages, drawings, and murals. On view at the Hessel Museum of Art, the exhibition charts the evolution of the self-taught artist’s dense, symbol-rich visual language, shaped by memories of East Africa, Arabic calligraphy, portraiture, and the natural world. Featuring early street-salvaged assemblages alongside monumental recent works and new site-specific murals, the show reveals an artist continually reinventing abstraction on her own terms.
“Of Frame and Fallow”
1162 Broadway, Esopus
June 27, 6-9pm
Last fall, Site Seen transformed a Rondout waterfront marina into the hauntingly atmospheric “Of Hull and Hush.” This summer, the nomadic arts nonprofit heads inland for “Of Frame and Fallow,” a one-night exhibition staged inside a vacant former Dollar General in Esopus on June 27. Curated by Aleksandra Scepanovic and Jennifer Miller, the exhibition gathers sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional work inside a stripped 9,000-square-foot shell where emptiness itself becomes part of the composition. Rather than neutralizing the site into a white-cube gallery, Site Seen embraces its raw commercial afterlife, turning an abandoned retail space into a temporary zone for encounter, tension, and experimentation.
2026 Exhibition
The Campus
June 27-October 26
For the third summer, The Campus transforms the former Ockawamick School in Hudson into one of the region’s most ambitious contemporary art destinations. Opening June 27–28, this year’s sprawling exhibition expands its collaborative model with the addition of eight UK galleries joining the six founding spaces behind the project. Rather than organizing around a curatorial thesis, artists respond to the architecture and institutional memory of the old school itself, creating immersive room-by-room installations that turn hallways, classrooms, and transitions into part of the experience. The participating roster includes Tony Oursler, Tschabalala Self, Hurvin Anderson, and Qualeasha Wood, among many others.
“Moshagn Rezania: Eyes of the Unseen”
Mad Rose Gallery
Through June 28
At Mad Rose Gallery in Millerton, Iranian American artist Moshgan Rezania turns the American bison into both subject and symbol in “Eyes of the Unseen.” Drawn from plein air sessions in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, the monumental paintings arrive at a moment when renewed political battles over bison grazing rights have thrust the animal back into the national conversation. For Rezania—who lived through the Iranian Revolution and emigrated to the United States in 1986—the bison becomes a metaphor for survival, displacement, and cultural endurance. Rendered in blazing oranges and thick expressionist gestures, the work pulses with urgency.
“Frederic Church: Global Artist”
Olana State Historic Site
Through October 25
Timed to the bicentennial of Hudson River School titan Frederic Edwin Church, “Frederic Church: Global Artist” at Olana reframes the painter not as a provincial landscape romantic, but as a restless cosmopolitan shaped by global travel. The sweeping exhibition gathers paintings, oil sketches, and drawings inspired by journeys through South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Mexico, and the North Atlantic, alongside rarely seen works from Olana’s own collection and loans from major institutions. The show also casts fresh light on Church’s environmental awareness, scientific curiosity, and influence on American identity—while reminding visitors that Olana itself may be his most complete artwork.
“Modus Operandi”
Jack Shainman Gallery: The School
Through November 28
Every summer, Jack Shainman Gallery: The School serves as one of the Hudson Valley’s most reliable contemporary-art pilgrimages, transforming a 1929 former high school into a cavernous showcase for museum-scale work. This year’s exhibition, “Modus Operandi,” opens May 30 and continues the venue’s tradition of ambitious thematic group shows that reward slow wandering and repeated visits. Founded by dealer Jack Shainman in 2014, the space has hosted everyone from Nick Cave and El Anatsui to Nina Chanel Abney and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sprawling Federal-style building itself remains part of the draw: a place where contemporary art collides with institutional memory, creaking hallways, and the peculiar thrill of encountering major work in Kinderhook.
Stagecoach Run Art Festival
Treadwell and Franklin
July 11-12
Now in its 30th year, the Stagecoach Run Art Festival remains one of the Catskills’ great under-the-radar cultural adventures: a free, self-guided tour through the hills of western Delaware County where artists open their studios, homes, barns, and galleries to the public. Held July 11-12 across Treadwell and Franklin, the festival feels less like a formal art fair than a sprawling open-house weekend stitched into the landscape itself. Visitors follow the old Catskill Turnpike between ceramics studios, painters’ barns, literary spaces, and impromptu conversations with artists, all while tracing the increasingly vibrant creative ecosystem that has taken root in this corner of the western Catskills.
This article appears in June 2026.
