10 Must-See Shows During Upstate Art Weekend 2024

Adding a touch of queer to country, Wassaic-based painter Danielle Klebes transforms Mother-in-Law’s cottage-like space into a wild-and-witty domestic cabin—complete with a faux rug, fake wood paneling and make-believe liquor cabinet.

Mixing her colorful canvases of friends and fellow artists with painted wood cutouts of cats, motorcycle gear, signature hats and license plates, guitars, and actual furnishings, her immersive ‘man-cave’ installation captures the essence of country living from a fresh, liberated point of view.

Image: Danielle Klebes, Easy Riders, 2024. Oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches. 

Celebrated for his realistic, large-scale photographs of sculptural and architectural models, James Casebere has created a new series of large-scale wooden geometric sculptures that simulate the notion of nature for ‘T’ Space’s dynamic Archive Gallery, designed by architect Steven Holl, the foundation’s founder.

Using wood preserved by charring it with fire (an ancient Japanese technique known as Shou Sugi Ban, which ironically makes the timber fire-resistant), Casebere has constructed modular mountains that offer new possibilities for both rural and urban architecture and industrial design.

Image: James Casebere, Shou Sugi Ban #3, 2024. Burnt bamboo plywood, approximately 3 x 4 x 5 ft. 

Taking its title from a 1968 hippie-era song by Tommy James & the Shondells about a new day that’s coming, this survey of recent works by Newburgh-based sculptor Daniel Giordano delves into his magical ways of blending traditional craft techniques with found art assemblage to create mystical sculptures.

Mining mythologies, art historical sources, and popular media while referencing family, religion, food, and the action figures and toys he coveted as a child, Giordano combines so many different things in the making of his surreal sculptures that his wall labels read like the ingredients list for a witches brew, with the results being visually intoxicating.

Image: Daniel Giordano, My Mon Calamari VI, 2016–2022, Mixed media assemblage, 41.5H x 15.5 W x 23.5D inches. 

Tracing the evolution of artist Carrie Mae Weems’ groundbreaking, politically engaged photography, video, and installation works, this 30-year overview offers nine rooms of works by the 2013 MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius Grant’ Fellow.

Shining a light on the injustices of racism from the Civil Rights era of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement of more recent times, her imagery takes viewers on the artist’s journey into cities and homes across America and sights around the world while offering observations of what’s good, what’s bad, and what needs to change.

Image: Carrie Mae Weems, The Edge of Time - Ancient Rome, 2006. Digital C-print, 73 x 61 in. (185.4 x 154.9 cm). Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Presenting a selection of 56 marvelous Murano glassworks designed by artist and architect Carlo Scarpa, “Timeless Masterpieces” takes us into the innovative glass workshops from 1926 to 1947, when the talented craftsman worked with two of the island’s most venerable glassmakers of the time: M.V.M. Cappellin & Co. and Venini.

Curator Marino Barovier, a member of one of the oldest families of Murano glass masters, chose the pieces in the show from Magazzino’s Olnick Spanu Collection of more than 150 works by the Italian artist for the various ways his glass vessels have contributed to the history of the medium, which makes this exhibition all the more enticing to see.

Image: Carlo Scarpa, A fasce, 1942 (L) and A fasce, 1942 (R). Glass, 8 1/2 in. (21.6 cm); 9 3/4 in. (24.8 cm). Olnick Spanu Collection, New York. 

Appropriating vintage images of black women and liquor bottles from the pages of Ebony magazines from the 1970s, Dana Robinson offers a series of expressive portraits and still lifes in a colorful solo show of intimate paintings, organized in collaboration with Wassaic Project.

The Brooklyn-based artist recreates distorted likenesses of the subjects to address ideas of upward mobility and a growing black middle class. Reducing the images to painterly smeared, pressed, and textured marks on solidly rendered or floral-patterned fields, Robinson takes the subjects out of their near-perfect, ad-world context and lets them speak for themselves— and for herself— revealing that by deviating from the norm, we can discover our true selves.

Image: Dana Robinson, Truly Laveda Cooper, 2024.

Best known for her innovative wood sculptures, Taylor Davis’ multidisciplinary practice is currently centered around paintings, sculptures, and drawings made according to systems of chance and logic. The works in the show, titled after a text in the bible, are built of multiple parts and composed with found images, texts, boards milled from rough lumber, and rectilinear patterns of red, green, black, and white paint.

A standout in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Davis was the first artist to be invited to curate an exhibition based on the ICA Boston’s collection last year and now has work on view in a current group show there.

Image: Taylor Davis, Untitled (Floor Work 3), 2022, Milled sugar maple, elm, and oak, 9 X 67 X 83 in. 

Assembling historical and contemporary works from an intergenerational set of artists who utilize landscape to evoke alternative, yet distinguishable, domains, “Groundswell” confronts global environmental concerns with the double-edged sword of preservation or ruin. 

Highlighting paintings, sculptures, and photographs by LaKela Brown, Teresita Fernández, Anders Hamilton, Kat Lyons, Donald Moffett, Katie Stout, Alexandria Tarver, and Eva Watson-Schütze, the exhibition takes Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony co-founder Watson-Schütze’s utopian vision of nature— hauntingly depicted in her vintage photo Nude Woman on a Rock— as its point of departure.

In contrast, Teresita Fernández presents an ashen tropical landscape in her burnt and cut paper piece; Donald Moffett cuts two holes, adds a zipper, and collages an infinity symbol to his abstract painting of the cosmos, while other artists add to the argument for saving the landscape in this rural realm.

Image: Donald Moffett, 021007/20 (OO, night loop), 2007/2020. Oil, aluminum, and cotton on cotton duck, 24 1/8 x 20 1/8 in (61.3 x 51.1 cm). © 2024 Donald Moffett.

Organized by Upstate Diary founder and editor and Manitoga’s 2024 Art + Design resident curator Kate Orne, “The Source of Everything” takes its point of departure from industrial designer Russel Wright’s modernist home, Dragon Rock, which he built in dialogue with the landscape of his property, Manitoga. 

Following Wright’s innovative ideas of incorporating pressed hemlock needles, encased butterflies, and other elements of nature into the striking interiors of his home— perched high above a quarry— the show features work by artists who share a deep connection to nature.

Spread throughout this architectural and environmental masterpiece, well-chosen pieces by Jeremy Anderson, Sam Falls, Kieran Kinsella, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Lola Montes, Rodger Stevens, and Sagarika Sundaram pay homage to Wright’s inspiring vision, while offering creative ways to keep it alive.

Image: Sam Falls, Untitled (Schindler House, 11), 2018. Ceramic, 17 3/4 x 10 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches. 

Presenting the third in its series of home invasions of the Catskill Octagon House, New Discretions (a NYC gallery located in Chelsea) offers an assortment of artworks in a variety of media by Lucas Ajemian, Kenneth Anger, Elmer Batters, Heather Benjamin, Niki de St. Phalle, Jordan Eagles, Scott Daniel Ellison, Allison Jae Evans, Dorothy F. Foster, Simon Foxall, Vincent Gallo, Bibbe Hansen, Jeff Ladouceur, Cary Leibowitz, David Anaya Maya, Bjarne Melgaard, Russ Meyer, Bob Mizer, Genesis P-Orridge, Betsy Lin Seder, Aaron Skolnick, Karlheinz Weinberger, Lao Xie Xie, and Harald Zipfel.

Inspired by The Love-Thrill Murders, a 1971 film about a Manson-like cult leader who takes his drug-crazed followers down a bloody trail of carnage, the work in the show takes an equally-adventurous walk on the wild side.

Image: Niki de Saint Phalle, Daddy, 1973. Silkscreen on paper, 33 1/10 × 23 3/5 in. 84 × 60 cm.