Walk through any antique barn in the Hudson Valley and you’ll find the ghosts of joinery—mortise and tenon beams, hand-cut pegs, rough-sawn boards planed into permanence. Wood has always been a native language here, passed from barns to workbenches to the present generation of makers. “Woodworkers of the Hudson Valley,” on view at Studio Tashtego in Cold Spring through December 7, gathers 16 of the region’s most accomplished artisans in a single space—an uncommon convergence of talent that offers a cross-section of contemporary craft in the valley.
Curated with a sculptor’s eye rather than a furniture dealer’s logic, the show expands the definition of woodworking beyond chairs and tables into something closer to material philosophy. These pieces don’t shout utility—they whisper discipline, reverence, and a kind of quiet defiance against the disposable age.
Among the artists, Jonah Meyer (of Sawkille Co. in Kingston) brings his signature approach: furniture as distilled form, where geometry reads as poetry and small gestures carry emotional weight. His work has always felt like it’s carved out of silence—objects that remember the tree they came from.
Beacon-based Jessica Wickham is perhaps the most ascetic in her devotion to the material. Working almost exclusively with locally felled hardwoods and Japanese hand tools, her work channels a kind of spiritual engineering. Grain isn’t ornament—it’s narrative. You don’t look at her joinery so much as feel its inevitability.
Michael Robbins, whose eponymous studio operates out of the Columbia County woods, brings muscular refinement to the show. His pieces honor Shaker restraint but don’t genuflect to nostalgia. They’re contemporary without affect, exacting without coldness—the kind of design that could only emerge from long hours of patient repetition.
Andrew Finnigan, based in Stone Ridge, leans in the opposite direction—pushing toward sculptural expression where wood seems to flirt with movement. Surfaces ripple. Edges melt. His work suggests a story unfolding in layers, proof that woodworking is as much improvisation as measurement.
And then there’s Christopher Kurtz. When I profiled him in 2016, I wrote that he “shapes wood the way other people shape light—by revealing what’s already there.” That remains true. His pieces in the exhibition hover between sculpture and cosmic diagram, otherworldly yet carved by hand. If earlier studio craft valorized perfection, Kurtz embraces asymmetry and rhythm—wood as pure gesture.
Taken together, the show reads like a topographical map of Hudson Valley craft today: grounded in tradition, outward-looking in form, and rigorously personal. What links these makers isn’t style but ethos. Each has chosen slowness over speed, mastery over novelty, integrity over convenience. In that respect, “Woodworkers of the Hudson Valley” isn’t just a group exhibition—it’s a quiet declaration of regional identity. Here, making things still matters. Materials still matter. Meaning still matters.
Studio Tashtego, which opened in 2021 as both gallery and cultural outpost, has become a node in the valley’s expanding design ecosystem—one that includes recent arrivals, post-city craftspeople, and legacy artisans who never left. This show is its strongest signal yet: The Hudson Valley isn’t just a place where craft survives. It’s where it evolves.
