Upstate Art Weekend: A Major Event for the New York Art Scene

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

On Friday night at Assembly—a former Catholic girls’ school–turned–music venue in Kingston, New York, a two-hour drive due north of midtown Manhattan—self-described “Virgo arts organizer” Helen Toomer was busy flying across the dance floor, introducing guests in a black-and-white polka dot dress with an oversized bow in back, like a gift. Half the crowd matched her energy in extravagant outfits; the other half swayed in sweaty T-shirts and jeans to sunny disco beats. The event marked the official launch of the sixth edition of Upstate Art Weekend, the annual arts festival Toomer founded in 2020.

“I woke up in June [2020] and realized how lucky and privileged we were to have space and trees. So many of my friends in the city were just losing their minds,” Toomer told ARTnews, as a meter projected behind her tallied donations for abortion-rights nonprofit Noise for Now. “I just thought, I need to do this, because I miss people, and I miss art.”

The inaugural edition of UAW, which featured 23 participants, came at the right time. While artists and the art-adjacent have slowly filtered up to Hudson and the surrounding region since the mid-2010s, the exodus from New York City surged in 2020, as the wealthy (and the merely upper middle-class priced out of the Hamptons) fled the city for green space. Now, UAW’s participants have grown to a whopping 158 stretching across 6,000 square miles, south to north from Tarrytown to Stamford, west to east, from Narrowsburg to East Chatham.

While the pace of relocation has slowed some, the movement itself has not. The pandemic exodus and its aftermath are most evident in the real estate market. In January, Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress reported that the median home price across the region’s nine counties topped $300,000 for the first time last year. Counties tied to the area’s growing art scene saw the steepest climbs since 2019—Sullivan rose 158 percent, Ulster 89 percent, Orange 85 percent, and Columbia 84 percent. Kingston and Hudson, meanwhile, have seen sharp income growth: in Hudson, the top income bracket jumped from $225,000 in 2013 to $632,000 in 2023. However, that report also noted deepening income inequality in Hudson and a growing housing crisis across the region.

As Kristen Dodge, the founder of September Gallery in Kinderhook, told ARTnews, the pandemic supercharged demographic shifts already underway. “When we opened back up [after lockdown], it was like the world around us had shifted. Suddenly there were so many people here that I didn’t know before. Like a whole new population,” she said. The real estate market, she added, “went nuts during and after [the pandemic], and in many ways still is.”

Dodge moved upstate in 2014 after closing her Lower East Side gallery, burned out by the “immense pressure” of the “more is more” contemporary art market, as she described it in interviews at the time. She relocated with plans to become a real estate agent, but was coaxed back into curating by dealer Zach Feuer at his and Joel Mesler’s Hudson project space. When that closed in 2016, Dodge opened September.

Dodge has participated in every edition of Upstate Art Weekend, which she said has been critical to getting collectors in the door to purchase work, but also getting writers and curators to understand the gallery’s program, which features both internationally recognized artists and local practitioners for whom art may not be a primary career. About half of September’s exhibitions are group shows.

“That’s pretty unheard of in other programs, especially in the city,” she said. “That’s possible because our rent is so much lower. We can afford to sell work at a range of price points. In one group show, we sold 15 pieces each at $500. That would be a bad business plan if you were in the city.”

The gallery also participates in two fairs a year, with past appearances at Expo Chicago, Untitled Miami, and the Armory Show.

Storage Facilities Turned Into Art Destinations

Dodge said one reason she opened September was the example set by The School, Jack Shainman’s ambitious outpost in Kinderhook—proof that serious art could thrive in the “middle of nowhere,” as she put it. 

Founded in 2013, The School began as a “fantasy” to have a big storage facility with “a couple of large viewing rooms,” but the magisterial former high school—renovated by Spanish architect Antonio Torrecillas—has become much more. Its 30,000 square feet have hosted major solo shows by artists like Nick Cave and El Anatsui, often on view for six months or more. On a typical weekend, it draws about 200 visitors; blockbuster exhibitions, like 2019’s “Basquiat x Warhol,” have brought in as many as 650 in a single day.

“We never did this as a get-rich-quick kind of thing, and a lot of the collectors up here we knew already [when we opened],” Shainman told ARTnews. “But there are so many more artists and galleries here now. Catskill has changed like crazy, and Kingston too. I was shocked last year when I saw how long the list of venues [for UAW] was.”

The long drive to Kinderhook—whether from Manhattan or farther afield—is part of the appeal for Shainman. If collectors or institutions make the trip, he said, they tend to spend more time and have “deeper conversations” about the art.

Veteran dealer James Cohan similarly described The Campus, a year-old joint venture between six major Manhattan galleries, as an art storage play that has turned into something more. Last year’s inaugural show was a scattershot, if occasionally sublime, exhibition spread across the classrooms of the former school in Hudson. This year, the one- and two-artist presentations appear more focused and intentional. In one standout, Dana Schutz’s grotesque, yet humorous paintings rhyme with her partner Ryan Johnson’s strangely lyrical, slyly figurative sculptures. 

There is also a far wider spread of artists; Cohan estimated that 70 percent of the artists in the current show aren’t represented by any of the partner galleries. 

Several mega-galleries pitched in to bring The Campus’s  expanded offering to life. Pace founder Arne Glimcher helped shape presentations for Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Arlene Shechet, according to Cohan. Gagosian assisted with works by Nancy Rubins and Katharina Grosse. Hauser & Wirth helped secure pieces by Rita Ackermann and Schutz. Tuttle and Smith even traveled Upstate to help install their work.

“Whether we intended to or not, we created conditions that are very artist-friendly, and it’s a great venue where artists really want to be seen,” Cohan said.

While the Campus has been successful in “selling some pictures and sculptures,” as Cohan put it, the greater success may be foot traffic—something that could eventually translate into sales. On a typical weekend, the outpost draws 400–500 visitors. During Upstate Art Weekend this year, it appeared to be many times that, with the downtown fashionable, the Brooklyn tote brigade, and Upstate locals crowding the hallways, and filling the gymnasium for a dance performance by artist Nicole Cherubini, who is represented by September. (Jeffrey Gibson, who converted his own former schoolhouse in Hudson into a 14,000-square-foot studio, was spotted in attendance on Saturday.)

The Campus has added a café, bookshop, and a lawnside BBQ vendor this year. “There’s an element of hospitality, too,” Cohan said. We see that doing events—concerts, performances, and talks—lends itself well to the community.”

An ‘Anti-Hamptons’ Fair

At Caboose Hudson, a newly renovated wedding venue adjacent to Hudson’s Amtrak station, Fairchild Fries, a former brand designer for Apple and Saint Laurent, put on an impromptu “invitational” featuring stalwart Upper East Side gallery Franklin Parrasch, Chinatown’s Post-Times, Dutton of the Meatpacking District, and Abri Mars, the gallery Fries founded in the Lower East Side last fall. Fries had originally planned a solo pop-up at an Airbnb, but when that fell through, he scrambled to secure Caboose—an airy former coal barn far too big for just one gallery. That’s when he called Broc Blegen, the director of Post-Times, and the two picked up the phone and started calling in favors.  

Within a matter of weeks, Loading…—as Fries dubbed the event at Caboose—was born. Fries designed the website, branding, and materials in a single week. “I didn’t sleep for, like, eight days straight,” he said, with a laugh. “I started calling local places and was like, I accidentally started an art fair. Can you bail me out?”

On Friday afternoon, golden sunlight poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows, lighting up the artworks, which were hung salon-style on a zig-zagging plywood divider that matched the venue’s maple walls. (Because they couldn’t drill into the historic walls, the plywood was mounted with ratchet straps and clamps.) The works on view ranged from an affordable (by art-world standards) $1,000 to $20,000, with a standout piece from Parrasch—an $80,000 solar burn by Land artist Charles Ross—anchoring the upper end. The vibes were similar to Esther, the alternative fair held in Manhattan’s Estonia House, which Blegen participated in in May.

Given the short notice, Fries and company seemed unsure what to expect, and mostly just hopeful to get their name out there. Parrasch too seemed unsure, despite his far longer history upstate. He has owned a home in nearby Hillsdale since 2006, and operated a gallery in Beacon through various partnerships until this past fall, when Analog Diary—his joint venture with Derek Eller, Abby Messitte, and Katharine Overgaard—quietly closed. He described his participation in Loading… as a kind of market research mission.

“I wanted to get a sense of what’s going on in Hudson,” he said. “I don’t know who comes here that buys art, but that’s what I’m hoping to find out.”

Blegen, meanwhile, confessed, “We’re not the most sales-oriented group of galleries. We just want people to engage with the art in a real sense.”

As we talked, their friend Alex Camacho, an artist and art handler, wandered in after completing a third round-trip drive between Upstate and the Hamptons, where he’d been installing for the Hamptons Art Fair there. As we compared the two summer destinations, he quipped of Loading…, “The anti-Hamptons—there’s no pretense.”

“It’s a little slow in the summer in the art world,” Fries added, hopeful that he could put on a more planned version of Loading… next year. “But there’s energy here. So it’s just like, let’s take it to where everyone went.” 

He continued, “People are getting sick of going to the Hamptons. It’s a very different kind of energy here. A lot of people come up here now in the summer.”

The Return of the Ambitious Group Show

In a recent edition of On Balance, ARTnews reporter Daniel Cassady noted the conspicuous absence of ambitious summer group shows in New York—a seasonal tradition. This year, the answer to where they went seems clear: Upstate.

Artist Ashley Garrett moved to the Hudson Valley with her husband, artist Brian Wood, in 2016. She has participated in UAW since its first edition, when she showed work with September. Last year, the pair organized “Upstate Gnarly,” a group show in their 4,000-square-foot studio in Chatham. It wasn’t the first time that Garrett, a former member of the Brooklyn collective Underdonk, has worn multiple hats.

The first “Gnarly” featured four artists—sculptors Gracelee Lawrence and Courtney Puckett alongside paintings by Garrett and Wood—staged as a dialogue between the two mediums. The response was strong enough that they extended the show to accommodate visits from collectors and institutions, including Ian Berry, director of Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs.

Garrett told ARTnews the show helped build lasting relationships with both local and international collectors. One large painting, priced at $14,000, sold to a collector who had previously acquired three smaller works from her 2023 solo show at September. Another UAW open studio visitor bought a painting from that show for $18,000. Wood sold several drawings priced between $2,500 and $3,000, and Lawrence sold two 3D-printed sculptures for about $1,000 each.

This year’s “Upstate Gnarly” expanded to include 14 artists, with prices ranging from $1,000 to $75,000. Highlights include a print from Sam Messer’s “Photoplasm” series—a suite recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum—and collaborations with galleries such as P.P.O.W, DC Moore, and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, as well as the Carolee Schneemann Foundation.

One of the goals, Garrett said, is to center artists who have lived and worked in the region for years. “We want to make space for artists who have been here for a long time, and to retain the freshness of that,” she said.

At the same time, she acknowledged that the arrival of major venues like The Campus has created new visibility. “It just feels like [UAW] has given us space to imagine all kinds of awesome possibilities,” she said. “There’s room for it, and support in the community, and attention because of the platform.”

The buzziest exhibition of the weekend—and perhaps the summer—was the inaugural biennial from Sky High Farm, the food-security nonprofit founded by artist Dan Colen more than a decade ago. Installed in a former apple storage facility, the show featured more than 50 artists with a curatorial emphasis on ecology, social justice, and place-based dialogue.

The roster is stacked: Mark Grotjahn, Tschabalala Self, Roni Horn, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lyle Ashton Harris, rafa esparza, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Puppies Puppies, and Anne Imhof, whose dystopian installation of water-storage tanks formed the show’s central infrastructure. Also included were artists with deep ties to the Hudson Valley.

Most works are for sale, with artists designating a portion of proceeds to Sky High Farm. Prices ranged from a few hundred dollars to more than $1 million—a spread seemingly typical of upstate shows, where audiences vary widely in financial capacity. Proceeds support Sky High’s programs and expansion, including its current 40 acres and a new 560-acre farm acquired in 2023. Revenue helps fund community food access, farmer training, and grants ranging from $250 to $40,000. In 2024, the farm donated 26,000 pounds of vegetables, 6,000 pounds of protein, and 45,000 eggs to organizations in the region’s urgent food system.

The exhibition is bookended by works that embody the organization’s ethos. The opening gallery is dedicated to Ben Wigfall, the late artist from New Paltz and Kingston whose community print shop, Communications Village, anchors the show. A suite of his prints is accompanied by audio of his father recalling life in the Jim Crow South. A central installation displays about 20 African masks from Wigfall’s personal collection, curated by Lauren Halsey, alongside tapestries by his wife, Mary Wigfall, who ran a school for children of migrant farm workers. 

The show’s title, “Trees Never End and Houses Never End,” comes from a guerrilla artwork by the nonprofit’s first farmer, self-taught artist Joey Piecuch, who died in 2014. The piece stands vigil in the show’s expansive final room, which features a mirrored floor by Rudolf Stingel.

The Wigfalls “really believed in creative practice and its role in solving social problems,” said Sarah Workneh, who became the organization’s co-executive director—along with Josh Bardfield—in January 2024 after 14 years leading the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. 

“I always think about the similarity between art-making and farming. It’s all world-building, right? Especially what we do—we’re building the world that we want to inhabit,” she said.

A ‘Spotlight’ On Upstate

The Upstate art network is, fittingly, like a small town. Earlier this month, painter Tschabalala Self and curator Michael Mosby held their wedding reception at Caboose, the Hudson venue that also hosted the Loading… invitational. On Saturday, Self welcomed the Guggenheim Young Collectors Council to her two-floor Catskill studio, followed by a cocktail party hosted by Alma Communications—whose clients include Shainman—at the Taghkanic House, a glass home designed by architect Thomas Phifer (and recently featured on Severance)

And wherever you go, one name always comes up: Helen Toomer.

“I always say, it’s not me,” Toomer said of UAW’s success. “I’m not doing it. I’m just shining a spotlight on the work being done up here.”

Each edition of UAW has added tweaks aimed at both accessibility and professionalization. This year, Toomer launched Upbringing, a year-round art space in Kingston that now serves as the event’s headquarters. Throughout the weekend, she offered custom itineraries for visitors and answered questions on-site. UAW’s application process—shaped in part by Toomer’s experience running Photofairs New York, the IFPDA Print Fair, and Pulse—is intended less as a gatekeeping tool than a way to ensure broad access across venues. This year also saw a new partnership with Bloomberg Connects, the museum-focused audio guide app.

UAW has made its name by skipping many art-world conveniences: there’s no single venue, no heavy-handed curation, no guided tour for out-of-towners. But after feedback from attendees and would-be participants, Toomer is moving the 2026 edition to the final weekend of June. The new timing could position UAW to capture the post-Basel crowd—especially as London’s summer sales, once a fixture on the calendar, fade in significance. (Christie’s sat them out this year.)

Is an art fair next? Toomer didn’t rule it out, but she’s not eager. “I’ve hung my art fair hat up,” she said. For her, success means driving traffic to galleries and institutions across the region. “Hopefully, acquisitions are made, and galleries and artists get paid,” she said. She’s heard that sales are happening—“the proof is in the pudding,” as she put it—and museums have reported membership bumps to her.

While some attendees grumble about the distances between venues, few artists or dealers expressed interest in a more centralized format. For most, the draw is precisely the opposite: the chance to encounter art in situ and to draw attention to the diverse variety of local arts organizations.

“Upstate Art Weekend has successfully drawn a map and webbed together all these different organizations—for-profit, nonprofit, and artists’ studios—in a way that didn’t exist before,” said September Gallery’s Kristen Dodge. “The more programming there is Upstate, the more people will come up who can have an impact on what we can do for our artists.”