February’s art exhibitions across the Hudson Valley reward close looking and sustained attention. A standout is “Freeze Frame” at Front Room Gallery in Hudson, an all-star group show drawn from the gallery’s roster that treats stillness as a charged, generative state. Elsewhere, artists revisit landscape, portraiture, photography, and design history with fresh urgency—whether probing the Anthropocene, reclaiming overlooked legacies, or examining how images shape memory and power. Together, these exhibitions reflect a moment when restraint, material intelligence, and historical awareness feel newly vital, offering viewers work that unfolds slowly and lingers long after leaving the gallery.
“Michael Prettyman: In Suspect Terrain” at Garrison Art Center
February 7-March 8
Opening reception, February 7, 5-7pm.
In “In Suspect Terrain,” Michael Prettyman revisits the grand tradition of American landscape painting—then sets it on fire, sometimes literally. His meticulously rendered oil paintings echo 19th-century pastoral scenes, only to be disrupted by creeping flames or the quiet intrusion of tiny UFOs hovering in otherwise serene skies. The effect is at once humorous, unsettling, and pointed, reflecting life in the Anthropocene, where beauty and catastrophe coexist. Drawing on classical training and a background in comparative religion, Prettyman probes humanity’s relationship to nature, mystery, and consequence with technical rigor and sly absurdity.
“Bunmei Kaika: Political Landscapes in Early Modern and Modern Japan” at Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie
February 14-June 7
This sweeping exhibition at the Lehman Loeb explores how Japanese political upheaval from the late Edo into the Meiji era shaped a vibrant print culture. Taking its name from bunmei kaika—“civilization and enlightenment,” a slogan tied to rapid Westernization—the show centers on woodblock prints that captured cultural and physical transformations at home and abroad. Drawn mostly from the Loeb’s collection with select loans, the installation highlights works by masters such as Hiroshige, Hokusai, Kunisada, Yoshitoshi, Kiyochika, and Ogata Gekko. Images range from sensational battlefield reports to landscapes that helped cultivate a modern national imagination.
“Ocean Vuong: Song” at CPW in Kingston
January 31-May 10
Opening reception January 31, 5-8pm.
In his first public exhibition of photography, Ocean Vuong brings the same quiet precision that defines his writing to the visual field at CPW. These images—set in nail salons, modest interiors, and other unremarked spaces of immigrant and working-class life—resist explanation or spectacle. At the exhibition’s core is a tender, unsentimental series of photographs of Vuong’s younger brother, made in the wake of their mother’s death. Rather than dramatizing grief, the work lingers in its aftermath, registering care, endurance, and the daily labor of living on. The result is photography that listens as much as it looks.
“Modern Women | Modern Vision: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection” at Hudson River Museum in Yonkers
Through May 10
This sweeping exhibition traces the indispensable role women have played in shaping photography from the early 20th century to the present. Featuring nearly 100 works by more than 40 artists—including Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Carrie Mae Weems—the show is organized into six thematic sections spanning modernism, documentary practice, environmental work, and global contemporary photography. Drawn from the Bank of America Collection, the exhibition situates iconic images alongside lesser-seen works, reframing familiar photographs within broader historical and social contexts. A rare New York metropolitan appearance, and the exhibition’s only regional stop at the Hudson River Museum.
“Ashtray” at the International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Kingston
February 7-June 29.
Members-only preview on February 7.
Before smoking was banished to sidewalks and back alleys, it had a seat at the table. “Ashtray” at the International Museum of Dinnerware Design revisits a time when dining sets routinely included matching receptacles for cigarettes, cigars, and pipes—sometimes elegant, sometimes baffling. Drawing from more than 100 examples, the exhibition spans Art Deco and Midcentury Modern design alongside truly perplexing mid-20th-century curios, including pediatric and Braille ashtrays. Featuring work by designers like Eva Zeisel, Russel Wright, and Viktor Schreckengost, the show examines taste, habit, and cultural contradiction with equal parts fascination and discomfort.
“The Drawing Show” at Carrie Haddad in Hudson
January 30-March 22
Opening reception on January 31 from 5-7pm.
Drawing takes center stage in this expansive group exhibition at Carrie Haddad that treats the medium not as a preparatory step, but as a fully realized mode of thinking. Works by Mark Beard, Linda Newman Boughton, David Dew Bruner, Sue Bryan, Paul Chojnowski, Donise English, Kathryn Freeman, Louise Laplante, Glenn Palmer-Smith, and David Soman move between accumulation and erasure, narrative and abstraction, precision and intuition. From Boughton’s lush ballpoint forestscapes to Chojnowski’s torch-singed nocturnes and English’s system-driven abstractions, the exhibition unfolds as a series of quiet, layered conversations about mark-making, memory, and restraint.
“Freeze Frame” Front Room Gallery in Hudson
January 31-February 22
Opening reception January 31, 4-6pm.
An all-star group exhibition drawn from Front Room Gallery’s deep bench of Hudson Valley talent, “Freeze Frame” brings together painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media works that linger in moments of suspended time. Artists including Thomas Broadbent, Sasha Bezzubov, Ken Butler, Peggy Cyphers, Debra Drexler, Stephen Mallon, Joanne Ungar, and Zoe Wetherall approach stillness from multiple angles—isolating decisive gestures, heightening tension, or translating pause into abstract and material form. Across the gallery, motion is implied rather than shown, sharpening perception and inviting closer looking. A concise survey of a roster in full stride.
“Hudson Valley Artists 2026: Terrestrial Extra” at the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz
February 7-March 29
Opening reception February 7, 4-6pm.
At once rugged and poetic, “Terrestrial Extra”—the Dorsky’s 19th annual Hudson Valley Artists exhibition—explores how industrial materials shaped by extraction and terrain become art. Guest-curated by artists Alta Buden and Craig Monteith of Roundabouts Now in Kingston, the show brings together a diverse group of regional creators whose work reimagines stone, glass, cement, clay, steel, wood and charcoal as sources of form, surface and meaning. Across painting, sculpture and mixed media, remnants of quarries and factories surface as aesthetic and ecological inquiry, anchoring a deeply local yet expansive conversation about place and material.
“Taha Clayton: Historic Presence” at Tremaine Gallery at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut
February 14-April 5
In Historic Presence, Brooklyn-based painter Taha Clayton channels heritage, history, and hope into richly detailed oil paintings and works on paper at the Tremaine Gallery. Grounded in realistic portraiture, Clayton’s art confronts mistruths of Black antiquity and elevates elders, everyday strength and resilience as central to the American story. Drawing inspiration from the 1930s through the 1950s, his canvases juxtapose historical references with futuristic allusions, exploring social injustice, spiritual energy and bloodline in visual narratives that feel both grounded and visionary. Curated by Terri Moore, this exhibition celebrates culture and legacy with luminous technique and profound dignity.
“Sita Gomez: A Retrospective” at Hudson Hall
February 7-April 4
Opening reception February 7, 5-7pm.
This sweeping retrospective at Hudson Hall restores overdue attention to Sita Gomez, the Cuban-American painter and sculptor whose fiercely expressive work spans more than seven decades. Bringing together paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the 1950s to today, the exhibition traces Gomez’s lifelong focus on women—saints and sinners, matriarchs and ingénues—rendered in saturated color and unapologetic artifice. Shaped by a life marked by exile and reinvention, Gomez’s work grapples with gender, power, faith, and survival with wit and defiance. Chronogram featured Gomez on its October 2021 cover; this exhibition affirms her enduring relevance.
