If you’re itching for a day trip to escape the New York fall frenzy, there’s no shortage of art to explore just outside the city. The autumn leaves make for a scenic drive to the Newark Art Museum, where Bony Ramirez takes an incisive deep-dive into the colonial history of orchids, or the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition of 20 works by the trailblazing eco-feminist artist Helène Aylon. A trip through the Hudson Valley offers vistas of the same natural landscape that inspired the mid-19th-century Hudson River School movement, which continues to influence the local brimming community of nonprofit art spaces, historic houses, and contemporary galleries.
Inaugural Exhibition and NXTHVN x The Campus
The Campus, 341 NY-217, Hudson, New York
Through Oct. 27
It’s your teenage art dream. Six galleries take over an abandoned high school in upstate New York, bringing contemporary art to the classroom — and the gym, and the science lab, and the locker room, and the teacher’s lounge … The sprawling inaugural exhibition features curated presentations pairing artists from the different galleries as well as a section dedicated to this year’s Studio Fellows at the Connecticut nonprofit NXTHVN.
Mis/Communication: Language and Power in Contemporary Art
The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, New York
Through Nov. 3
Language is an unwieldy force, and the 16 artists in this show shed new light on its potential for power and resistance. From American Sign Language and Spanish to Zapotec and Bété, Gala Porras-Kim, dulce soledad ibarra, and late Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, among others investigate the historical and political roots of language, illuminating its influence and possibilities.
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group
Storm King Art Center, 1 Museum Road, New Windsor, New York
Through Nov. 10
Artist Arlene Shechet has long played with limitations of place and time through brilliantly warped ceramics and a focus on experimentation. Six new commissions at the Storm King Art Center reveal her distinct sensibility applied to monuments rendered in steel, paper, bronze, and more.
Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream
Hessel Museum of Art, 33 Garden Road, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York
Through Dec. 1
Carrie Mae Weems needs no introduction, but this century-spanning exhibition invites us into more obscure bodies of work that still channel her unparalleled limpidity and conviction. Leave, Leave Now! (2022) follows the story of her grandfather, a sharecropper in Arkansas, while the 2021 photographic series Painting the Town captures the aftermath of protests demanding racial justice in Portland after the murder of George Floyd, with other bodies of work touching on historical moments in between.
Alan Michelson: Prophetstown
Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street Catskill, New York
Through Dec. 1
Taking its title from the Shawnee community founded in 1808 in resistance to settler colonialism, this exhibition weaves together works by Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River) in a textual, fictional, historical, and visual tapestry of Indigenous relationships to land.
Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger
Hessel Museum of Art, 33 Garden Road, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York
Through Dec. 1
Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s expansive practice gets its first major show in Time & the Tiger. At its center is the installation “One or Several Tigers” (2017), a palimpsest of Singaporean folklore and colonial history through the figure of the Malay tiger, on display with four other installations. Together the works capture the material, mythological, and narrative elements that inform Ho’s keen interest in who constructs history — and how.
Michelle V. Agins: Storyteller
Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Through Dec. 8, 2024
Eminent photojournalist Michelle V. Agins, the second Black woman ever hired as a photographer on staff at the New York Times, is getting her first museum exhibition. From her timely coverage of the 1990 protests in the wake of the murder of Black teenager Yusuf Hawkins to her intimate portraits of Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, and Serena Williams, among many others, Agins is celebrated for her ability to tell a story and capture the essence of her subjects.
Carmen Herrera: Estructuras Monumentales
Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, New York
Through Dec. 8
Staged across the museum’s bucolic South Meadow are four of Carmen Herrera’s Estructuras, monumental sculptures designed in the late ’60s but not realized until some four decades later, when the artist finally secured the recognition and resources to fulfill her larger-than-life vision. Herrera, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 106, conceived of each work as a harmonic equilibrium of line, form, and color, both breaking with and expanding on her two-dimensional creations.
Ettore Spalletti: Parole di colore
Magazzino Italian Art, 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, New York
Through Jan. 6, 2025
Developed in concert with the space that houses it, the works in this sparse exhibition by late Italian artist Ettore Spalletti evoke a sense of balance and tranquility. Monochromatic canvases and sculptures converse with Studio Alberto Campo Baeza’s columns and windows, whose placement was calculated with sunlight and cast shadows in mind.
Dana Robinson: The Urgency of Leisure
Wassaic Project, 37 Furnace Bank Road, Amenia, New York
Through Jan. 12, 2025
Dana Robinson translates portraits and ads from Ebony magazine issues of the 1970s into entrancing paintings, often smudged, smeared, and textured beyond recognition. Her acrylic-on-panel works have a tactile quality that distorts their subjects, visualizing the ways that capitalism and ideals of upward mobility in turn distort us.
Bony Ramirez: Cattleya
The Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington Street, Newark, New Jersey
Through March 9, 2025
As part of the Global Contemporary program, which brings living artists into conversation with works in the museum’s collection, Bony Ramirez presents paintings and site-specific installations that contend with Caribbean history and his upbringing in the Dominican Republic. The show takes its name from the cattleya orchid native to Central and South America, a vestige of the colonialist legacy whose enduring effects Ramirez explores in his practice.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Through Spring 2025
In a gallery intentionally left empty, wispy blue curtains filter a haze of light flooding in through the windows. Comprising the late artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1989 “‘Untitled’ (Loverboy),” the tender installation invites a reflection on queer selfhood as the translucent fabric obscures, illuminates, drifts, and dims in response to its environment.
Steve McQueen
Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Through Spring 2025
In Steve McQueen’s “Bass” (2024), deep notes reverberate underfoot and 60 lightboxes display the full visible light spectrum. The new installation continues the artist and filmmaker’s exploration into the ways light, sound, and color can converge to alter how we experience space and time.
Jimenez Lai: Outcasts from the Underground
Art Omi, 1405 County Route 22 Ghent, New York
Opening Sept. 6
Septic tanks, basement staircases, and other industrial structures are often buried deep in the ground, but Jimenez Lai brings them to the surface in this fittingly titled installation. The artist meticulously arranged a stack of precast concrete materials into a towering puzzle of a sculpture, pushing us to consider that which is intentionally kept out of sight and out of mind.
Riley Hooker: Body, Language
Art Omi, 1405 County Route 22 Ghent, New York
Opening Sept. 6
Artist Riley Hooker gives new meaning to the museum bench in this installation, comprised of a bizarre biological material colloquially known as “slime mold.” The inflatable benches, designed specifically for rest and community, fly in the face of typical institutional seating and draw on the leftist political inception of inflatable art in the 1960s.
The Body Politic: Long Island Biennial 2024
Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, New York
Sept. 14–Jan. 19, 2025
Featuring 60 artists from across the region and themed for the first time, the eighth edition of the Long Island Biennial focuses on contemporary sociopolitical issues ahead of elections in the United States and dozens of other countries.
Helène Aylon: Undercurrent
Art@Bainbridge at the Princeton University Art Museum, 158 Nassau Street, Princeton, New Jersey
Sept. 14–Feb. 2, 2025
The eco-feminist artist Helène Aylon, as she described herself beginning in the late ’70s, is known for installations, paintings, and performances that probe complex topics, from nuclear warfare to the role of women in Judaism. This exhibition of around 20 works spanning five decades explores the distinctively experimental and collaborative approach of a severely underrated artist.
Lucas Samaras
Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Opening Sept. 21
This exhibition gathers the work of Greek-American artist Lucas Samaras, who passed away earlier this year at age 87, in a play on mirrored surfaces, notions of Minimalism, and geometric harmony. The 24 totemic gray sculptures that make up one of Samaras’s best-known series, Cubes and Trapezoids, are notably on view for the first time since their unveiling in 1994.
Kimberly Camp–Cross River: A Parallel Universe
Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton, New Jersey
Sept. 22–Jan. 12, 2025
Kimberly Camp began creating hand-painted dolls some 50 years ago, often using household materials such as cardboard and pipe cleaners. This exhibition gathers a selection of her figures, rooted in both her African diasporic community and a mythological world of her own making, along with recordings of her voice narrating the story behind each doll.
A New Subjectivity, 1979/2024
Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, New York
Oct. 13–April 6, 2025
In 1979, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels mounted Nouvelle Subjectivité (A New Subjectivity), exploring figurative expression in painting and curated by art historian Jean Clair. Over four decades later, the Parrish Art Museum looks back at that landmark show and its appeal for a return to the “subjectivist passion” of painting. The institution brings together works by artists in the original Brussels show, including David Hockney and Philippe Roman, and contemporary names such as Jordan Casteel and Arcmanoro Niles.
Barrier
ArtYard, 13 Front Street, Frenchtown, New Jersey
Oct. 19—Jan. 26, 2025
As many residents of either state would tell you, there’s a gulf between New Yorkers and New Jerseyans that runs deeper than the river that separates them. This exhibition brings together artists from the above states, as well as Philadelphia, to explore just such physical, psychic, and cultural barriers.
Martha Diamond: Deep Time
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Nov. 17–May 18, 2025
Beginning with exploratory depictions of the cloistered space of her New York City studio in the 1960s, this tight survey of Martha Diamond’s oeuvre explodes outward into meditations on the psycho-spaces of both ancient monuments and contemporary buildings. Spanning works on paper, paintings, and monotypes, the exhibition proposes “deep time” — the multi-disciplinary theory that patterns repeat over eons — as a reading of the late artist’s work.
