Spotlight: Upstate Art Weekend
Upstate Art Weekend: A Celebration of the Arts in the Hudson Valley + Catskills
In the late summer of 1825, a young Thomas Cole made his first trip to the Catskills. Cole, enamored by the wild grandeur before him, sketched the dramatic scenery and eventually painted a series of sublime landscapes that struck a chord with New York collectors. His style of painting would plant the seed for a fraternity later known as the Hudson River School, the nation’s first major art movement.
Cole and his contemporaries — who trudged up the Hudson long before trains, dragging hefty easels and paints through densely forested valleys and peaks — captured nature’s untamed spirit; the earth they conjured was romantic, spiritual — a pastoral ideal.
That wild beauty exists today, but with a little less schlep — just an afternoon’s drive or ride from Manhattan. In fact, artists have turned the landscape into a bonafide art pilgrimage over time, where studios, galleries, and museums tuck into towns and hamlets radiating throughout the region. The sheer amount of art can be daunting — plotting an art-focused journey isn’t as easy as entering a single address in your GPS when worthwhile venues are scattered across over 7,000 square miles on both sides of the river.
“I just really felt like we needed to reconnect. The early months of the pandemic were so hard for everybody, obviously, and everybody was so scared and staying apart.”
Or at least, it wasn’t as approachable before Upstate Art Weekend.
Now in its third year, Upstate Art Weekend will take place July 22nd-24th. Over three full days, a web of over 140 Hudson Valley participants (up from 61 participants the previous year), including art galleries, studios, museums, pop-ups, and more, put on special exhibitions and programs (most are free, none are costly) to “connect the dots.”
“Upstate Art Weekend is about discovery,” says Helen Toomer, the event’s founder, who’s worked with countless art fairs over the past fifteen years and previously owned a small gallery for emerging artists in New York’s Lower East Side. “It’s not just about people coming up from the city or from out of town — it hopefully empowers locals to discover what’s on their doorstep.”
Opening doors to the arts is nothing new for Toomer, who — after calling Brooklyn home base for years – decided to move upstate and open a retreat in her house. In 2017, she co-founded Ulster County’s Stoneleaf Retreat (a residency focused on supporting women artists and families) with her husband Eric Romano. She recalls: “We were looking for a home upstate and as soon as I stepped into the upstairs of the barn I said to Eric 'this is an artist's studio and if we are able to live here, it will be an artist's residency' — [and] so it was!”
Toomer dreamed up what would eventually become Upstate Art Weekend years ago after planning countless art-bound itineraries for friends arriving in the Hudson Valley. In a sense, she’d already laid the groundwork, but other priorities (like the residency, and becoming a mother) kept pushing it back. Alas, the pandemic gave her the final push.
In June of 2020, with the pandemic in full force, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. “I woke my husband up in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep and was like: I’m doing it, I’m doing it in August,” recalls Toomer. “I just really felt like we needed to reconnect. The early months of the pandemic were so hard for everybody, obviously, and everybody was so scared and staying apart.”
She placed a few calls to see if there was interest. The response was overwhelmingly positive — the arts community was feeling the same way. Within just about two months, Toomer launched Upstate Art Weekend with 23 venues. The following year, it expanded to over 60 participants. This year, the total has grown to 140 participants.
In its simplest form, Upstate Art Weekend is a cultural roadmap of the Hudson Valley’s arts scene. “One of the things that we do is create a great Google Map which you can save and customize — so if you’re an OCD Virgo like me, you can download it and create your itinerary,” says Toomer.
The map leads toward new programming throughout the region: you can start in Orange County, at Storm King Art Center, which will unveil a new exhibition of site-responsive work by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, and end up way north across the river at Art Omi, the 120-acre sculpture and architecture park in Ghent. Naturally, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, in Catskill, joins in amongst the bold-faced institutions.
The point is to spread your wings, to expand your horizons. There are venues you might be visiting for the first time (like Ravenwood, a 19th century barn in Kerhonkson), along with brand-new and artist-led pop-up exhibitions nestled throughout towns, villages, and hamlets. Scribner’s Catskill Lodge will be welcoming artists, and naturally, a stop at Toomer’s Stoneleaf Retreat counts among the notable pit stops: It's off the beaten path, in Ulster County, and will host an exhibition for Las Hermanas Iglesias (a collaboration from two sisters: Lisa and Janelle Iglesias), former 2018 residents of the retreat.
This year’s festival will also unlock even more stops. “We’re going to launch Upstate Open Studios,” adds Toomer. “So there’s going to be a special focus on single-artist studios that are going to be open.” In addition to young and emerging galleries like Newburg’s Elijah Wheat Showroom, entirely new spaces continue to flourish in the community, too, and the festival is quick to bring them into the fold. For example, last year saw the debut of Foreland in Catskill, an 85,000 square foot arts campus that opened inside a clutch of abandoned mills.
Of course, it’s just as much about getting out to these venues as it is about getting outside.
“The reason why I think Upstate Art Weekend works is because of the marriage between art and nature,” says Toomer. “So it is that you’re able to see art, but you’re also driving through or catching a train along the Hudson River, stopping off at a Farmer’s market, and then going to a cidery and then back to a museum. So it is really trying to immerse yourself in these towns.”
But don’t let the festival’s name mislead you. The point is not, after all, to see it all in one weekend. The key, according to Toomer, is to allow yourself time to drive around, discover, and have a first connection to the flourishing art scene.
“It’s the blessing and the curse — it’s so rich up here, and there’s so much, and it’s so exciting to see so many things, but you’ve just got to come back, that really is the key,” says Toomer. “Having that kind of the first connection — and then coming back.”
Find @upstateartweekend throughout the Catskills. www.upstateartweekend.org
By Keith Flanagan
Images courtesy of Upstate Art Weekend/Kate Milford
Volume 8
