Valentine’s Day is an annual reminder that affection for others and private ardour are important features of dwelling creatively amid difficult instances. The vamp of artwork leads the best way into February’s crop of exhibitions in Upstate New York. Kick off this romantic time of the yr with a go to to Mary Ellen Mark’s present on the not too long ago reopened Heart for Images at Woodstock to see this award-winning photographer’s poignant pictures of ladies in a high-security psychiatric facility. Head to the Hyde Assortment in Glens Falls to see Nigerian-American painter Odili Donald Odita’s vibrant work. On the Entrance Room Gallery in Hudson, Linda Griggs exhibits luxurious and moody oil work laced with solitude, whereas Joan Harmon’s exhibition at Garner Arts Heart in Garnerville contains glass sculptures and charcoal works on paper that really feel otherwordly. In the meantime, a six-decade survey of painter Ralph Fasanella on the Ruffed Grouse Gallery in Narrowsburg options spirited works by this self-taught artist from the Bronx, and Z Behl’s exhibition at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson options wild sculptural creations. Allow us to indulge our ardor for artwork throughout these amorous days of February!
Joan Harmon: Chaos/Gentle
Garner Arts Heart, 55 West Railroad Avenue, Garnerville, New York By means of February 23
Joan Harmon, Streambed, 2024, ceramic, forged glass, mild, wooden (picture by Susan Stava, courtesy the artist)
One idea holds that the universe is held in place by opposing binaries — the place there’s kind, then, there’s at all times formlessness. Joan Harmon’s exhibition at Garner Arts Heart in Garnerville appears to toggle between these two states with a collection of glass items and charcoal works on paper that morph between free-form and totally fashioned. “Streambed” (2024), a ceramic, forged glass, wooden, and emitted mild work that remembers a mattress of undulating crimson clay with a fiery gold stream working proper by way of the center, is each tomb-like and fairytale-esque. “Lighted Footpath” (2024) seems like one other chapter from the identical narrative of wandering some far-flung world, that includes a quarter-circle of strung-together glass ft lit from beneath atop a pile of crushed basalt. And whereas the sci-fi blue-hued “Bouton Cluster” (2024), a hand-blown glass object, appears to wrangle with its personal unusual form, Harmon’s glowing “Glass Brain” (2020) is simply the reminder that consciousness is the final word formless energy.
Rand Hardy, Lisa Hoke, Buzz Spector
Catskill Artwork House, 48 Important Avenue, Livingston Manor, New YorkThrough March 1
Rand Hardy, “Scribbler” (2024), Aqua-Resin (picture courtesy Catskill Artwork House)
Among the many nice trios of Hindu iconography are Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer), and their colourful incarnations provide timeless insights into the true nature of actuality. At Catskill Artwork House in Livingston Manor, Rand Hardy, Lisa Hoke, and Buzz Spector discover playful modes of creation, preservation, and destruction by way of a collection of mixed-media installations and sculptures. Hardy’s Aqua-Resin “Scribbler” (2024) and “Ta Ta Tati” (2024) recommend the creation stage with their quasi-phallic protruding shapes and pleasant nonsensical kind. Spector’s “About the Author” (2014), which consists of pictures and textual content on museum board, and “Frieze” (2025), a row of mud jackets put in gracefully in a horizontal line throughout the wall, are concerning the preservation of the previous. And Hoke’s superbly chaotic “Lady Liberty” (2025) and “Pop” (2024) installations experience destroyed supplies, reworking recycled packaging and disposable ephemera into spinning and twisting shapes that dance as they cascade down the wall, bringing the dialog full circle to creation
Linda Griggs – Consolation and Loss
The Entrance Room Gallery, 205 Warren Avenue, Hudson, New YorkFebruary 8–March 9
Linda Griggs, “Pool Fence – Letter of the Law” (2024), oil and selective varnish on canvas, galkyd
A collection of luxurious and moody oil work by Linda Griggs on the Entrance Room Gallery in Hudson displays a sense of solitude laced with a hint of strangeness. The story of the exhibition begins with works comparable to “Night Swimming” (2024) and “Sirens” (2023), by which aqua-tinted swimming pools recommend midnight skinny dipping on sultry summer time evenings. The ambiance lightens with works comparable to “Hamilton Fish Kiddie Pool” (2023), by which empty lifeguard chairs and recliners anticipate an inflow of seasonal swimmers and solar worshippers. Griggs’s story then takes a flip in the direction of a hazy dream state: The existentially prosaic “Salad Bar, Myrtle Beach” (2022) depicts a variety of bowls filled with coloured Jello nestled amid a mattress of wilting kale on ice. “Piggly” (2022) is probably the apex of this exhibition-as-memoir. We’re witnesses to this unusual black and white scene of two figures holding palms as they stroll down a street smattered with previous autos and incredulous of us staring on the outsized pink pig head of one of many pair. On the foreground, a toddler gazes outward at us in a scene that feels bizarrely nostalgic.
Z Behl: Stand in My Hazard
Pamela Salisbury Gallery, 362 ½ Warren Avenue, Hudson, New YorkThrough March 30
BALONEY, “Fertility Tub” (2024), concrete and metallic (picture by David Behl, picture courtesy Pamela Salisbury Gallery)
Z Behl isn’t afraid to go huge. The primary time I encountered the larger-than-life sculptures of this New York Metropolis-born-and-raised badass, I used to be smitten together with her work. Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson presents a four-story set up of latest multi-media works by the artist and her collaborator Kim Moloney (collectively generally known as BALONEY), together with set up, work, drawings, and movies. In “Artist as Coyote” (2025), Behl crafts a legendary half-human, half-animal out of forged concrete, metallic, and stone; the shadows it casts are as compelling as its eccentric hunched anatomy. BALONEY’s “Harpy (3 Fates)” (2024), in the meantime, is a dynamic imaginative and prescient of one other unusual creature created from a wicker birdcage that seems on the verge of withdrawing from a metal perch. And the duo’s “Fertility Tub” (2024) hints at an ulterior narrative with its surreal assemblage consisting of three snakes slithering across the empty metallic body of a bathtub. BALONEY’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Filmmaker” (2025) is the showstopper: Fabricated from metal, concrete, and materials together with lace, cheesecloth, and velvet, this elaborate harlequin character hangs down from the fourth ground and fills the open shaft of this historic carriage home with its monumental physique, whereas Behl’s drawing “Plan for Carriage House” (2024) presents a sketch of this feminine trickster archetype balancing completely in a daring yogic place.
Historical past Classes
College Artwork Museum, College at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, New YorkThrough April 4
Demian DinéYazhi’, “my ancestors will not let me forget this” (2020), letterpress print (picture courtesy College Artwork Museum)
Historical past Classes on the College Artwork Museum in Albany presents works by 15 artists working from the Nineteen Sixties to the current, together with deceased greats comparable to Louise Nevelson and powerhouse modern figures comparable to Glenn Ligon. This mixed-media exhibition considers counternarratives that reposition the previous and promote activism and schooling as elementary to the well being of society immediately. “AIDS (Marcus Garvey)” (1991) by Common Concept — the collective venture of Canadian artists Jorge Zontal, AA Bronson, and Felix Partz — is a daring reconfiguration of Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” (first created in 1964) and a poignant reminder of the once-crippling epidemic that ravaged queer communities (and claimed the lives of Zontal and Partz). “my ancestors will not let me forget this” (2020) by Demian DinéYazhi’ is a robust text-based imaginative and prescient of an American flag that reads “EVERY american [sic] flag is a WARNING SIGN,” which is all of the extra chilling throughout our present political local weather. Jeffrey Gibson’s “SHE KNOWS OTHER WORLDS” (2019) is a beautiful instance of his signature mixing of geometric compositions and patterned beadwork to create punchy graphic visuals. And Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds’s “Sweetheart Songs” (2017–18), consisting of 24 monoprints with white textual content in opposition to shades of crimson, brings a smile with saccharine statements comparable to “hold me tight in your arms dear” and “no matter where you are I love you.”
Seen: Six A long time of Ralph Fasanella Work
The Ruffed Grouse Gallery, 144 Important Avenue, Narrowsburg, New YorkThrough April 6
Ralph Fasanella, “Nathan’s with Bakery” (1996), oil on canvas (courtesy the Ruffed Grouse Gallery and the Property of Ralph Fasanella)
Ruffed Grouse Gallery is displaying six a long time of the work of Ralph Fasanella, an artist who dropped out of faculty to work on his father’s ice truck (amongst different odd jobs) earlier than devoting his life to portray. His “Night Nude” (1947) a home psychological composition barely paying homage to Matisse’s “The Red Studio” from 1911, incorporates a bare crimson girl mendacity stiff on a crimson tabletop (or is it a mattress?) in a home scene overpowered by the hulking crimson lamp to the best. “Nathans with Bakery” (1996) depicts love for neighborhood within the type of motley people snacking collectively in a cafeteria setting. Fasanella’s work might be featured on the Ruffed Grouse Gallery’s sales space on the Outsider Artwork Honest in New York Metropolis later this month, giving artwork lovers on each ends of the Hudson River an opportunity to come across this self-taught ace.
Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81
The Heart for Images at Woodstock, 25 Dederick Avenue, Kingston, New YorkThrough Might 4
Mary Ellen Mark, “Laurie in the Ward 81 bathtub, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon” (1976) (© Mary Ellen Mark; courtesy the Mary Ellen Mark Basis)
The yr 1976 is the backdrop for Mary Ellen Mark’s solo present on the newly renovated and reopened Heart for Images at Woodstock in Kingston. Curated by Gaëlle Morel and Kaitlin Booher, the present is organized by the feminine names — pseudonyms for these within the pictures — featured in every cluster of photographs, together with “Laurie,” “Carol T.,” “Mona,” and “Beth” as foremost characters. Mark met these ladies whereas taking pictures on the set of the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1973) at Oregon State Hospital in Salem, the place she returned a yr later for 36 days to doc day by day life at this high-security psychiatric facility. In “Mona with Michael Douglas’s Picture,” Mark pictures Mona from above as she leans gently right into a poster of Douglas throughout his early heartthrob years, whereas “Carol T. in the Mirror” positions Mark’s digital camera barely behind this frail feminine who friends at herself earnestly. “Laurie in the Bathtub” depicts the titular topic’s head and her moist hair matted in opposition to the porcelain tub in a comical and childlike second. These moments of levity uplift a present that’s usually somber: “Mona and Beth in the Shower,” as an illustration, depicts two ladies collectively in bathing fits who stare upon Mark with faces each incredulous and defiant, inviting extra questions than solutions with regard to psychological well being and private intimacy.
Odili Donald Odita: A Survey of Context
The Hyde Assortment, 161 Warren Avenue, Glens Falls, New YorkThrough Might 11
Odili Donald Odita, “Eternal” (2020), acrylic on canvas (courtesy the Hyde Assortment)
The Hyde Assortment in Glens Falls presents a survey of Nigerian-American artist Odili Donald Odita, who employs a vibrant, daring graphic model that mixes West African aesthetic traditions with a type of abstraction related to Minimalism. Sturdy conceptual undercurrents comparable to violence and displacement (he fled from warfare in Nigeria as a toddler) spotlight his private journey to the States and infuse his work with fearlessness. As an example, in “Burning Cross” (2023), among the many most frightening collage works within the present, an overlay of colourful shapes conquers photographs of KKK members within the background with their geometric magnificence. The equally sized and composed “Smoke” (2023) is a variation on this theme of overlapping realities. A collection of early pictures reveal Odita’s curiosity in promoting and Black American vogue: works comparable to “The Authentic African (Businessman)” (1997) characteristic fashionable lone figures free-floating in opposition to a white backdrop. A number of large-scale summary work anchor the present, together with “Eternal” (2020) and “Return” (2024), each of which vibrate vigorously with Odita’s signature shade palette. The place the extremely angular “Light Storm” (2023) seems like a flash of depth, “Descent” (2001), with its horizontal layers of cool colours, is a metaphorical exhale.
Making Connections: Highlights from a Decade of Acquisitions
Memorial Artwork Gallery at College of Rochester, 500 College Avenue, Rochester, New YorkThrough July 13
2021.70Landmines: Dawoud Bey, Christina Fernandez, Richard Mosse, Rick Silva
The Dorsky at SUNY New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, New YorkThrough July 13
Christina Fernandez, “Untitled Farmworker (Photographic Collage)” (1989/1994/2020/2025), archival digital pigment print on vinyl
The historical past of humanity is riddled with tales of colonization and acts of violence towards Indigenous peoples. Landmines, curated by Sophie Landres on the Dorsky at SUNY New Paltz in New Paltz, presents the work of 4 artists whose camera-based work explores the function of landscapes as revealers or concealers of narratives. “Cabins and Shadows” (2019) by Dawoud Bey is a black and white {photograph} of a lonesome stretch of shadowed plantation yard, hinting on the horrors of slavery. Richard Mosse’s “Slaughterhouse, Rondônia” (2021) is an aerial drone’s view of this unforgiving location within the Amazon basin — and but he turns this bleak place into an in any other case lovely imaginative and prescient of psychedelic colours and shapes. Christina Fernandez’s “Untitled Farmworker (Photographic Collage)” (1989/1994/2020/2025) agitates for reform in its depiction of an nameless hand repeatedly inserting a white card with the title of somebody who has died and their reason for loss of life — often, poisonous farming chemical compounds — into the earth.