What to See in Upstate New York This May

Stephen Mallon: Passing America

Front Room Gallery, 205 Warren Street, Hudson, New York
Through May 18

As our understanding of the United States changes with every day of the current administration, Passing America at Front Room Gallery in Hudson presents a series of powerful photos of train cars that seem to capture the emptiness of it all. Exploring the soiled beauty of raw industry and the aging glory of locomotive systems, Mallon’s images are an homage to trains and their enduring importance in this country. “Locomotive FEC 803” (all works 2024) includes a robust orange and yellow train set against an exciting pastel-colored Floridian backdrop, while “Centerbeam Flatcar TTZX 861740” shows the bare bones of a train car that has offloaded its goods as it musters along against dry flat land, mountains in the distance. And in photos such as “Boxcar ATW 173673” and “Gondola WFRX 914233,” we encounter rusty trains bombed with colorful graffiti. Mallon’s “Caboose UP 25807” is a portrait of a faded yellow Union Pacific train that embodies nostalgia for an American time gone by.

Bruce Cahn: Woodstock Work

Opus 40, 365 George Sickle Road, Saugerties, New York
Through May 25

The late Bruce Cahn was “socially disinterested” as a youth, according to the press release, and declined to exhibit his art during his lifetime. After studying at Bard College and the Arts Student League, he worked obsessively in a small apartment in Manhattan before adopting Woodstock as his hometown. Woodstock Work at Opus 40 in Saugerties presents a series of gouache on paper works that reflect Cahn’s esoteric flair and his affinity for sacred geometries. His undivided creative focus comes through in “Blue Eye Mandala” (2016), featuring a blue circle with a white slit at the center set against a black background, and a crimson triangle with a small white circle embedded in its center appears within a cerulean sphere in “Red Triangle Mandala” (2016). While his “Four Axe Mandala” (2016) displays exquisite cross-fertilization between Buddhist and Native American imagery, his “Flower Mandala” (2016) is a blooming, layered vision of bright squares and circles that appear to rotate.

Lisa Diebboll: Between Observation and Abstraction

Buster Levi Gallery, 121 Main Street, Cold Spring, New York
May 3–31

Mother Nature is the supreme muse, and Lisa Diebboll is an unabashed devotee. Her solo show Between Observation and Abstraction at Buster Levi Gallery in Cold Spring presents a series of recent studies and vibrant landscape paintings that extol the natural world at her most glorious. Where densely colored works such as “White Pines” (2024) and “Quarry, View West II” (2024) lean more toward the abstraction side of the equation with their heavier painterly feel, “Chartreuse and Ultramarine Violet Receding” (2025) and “Squirrel Island Assemblage” (2025) beautifully reflect Diebboll’s plein air practice from direct observation. Other works, including “Sculpted Field” (2024), appear to morph from abstract (as seen from up close) to observational (as seen from afar), a curious aspect of all the artworks in this visually rich and soothing show.

Boundless Creativity: Immigrant Artists in the Hudson Valley

Reher Center, 99-101 Broadway, Kingston, New York
Through June 1

The Reher Center in Kingston honors the titular family legacy and amplifies a new generation of immigrants in the Hudson Valley. Their current group exhibition Boundless Creativity features artworks across a range of media by local immigrant artists who explore themes of identity and heritage. Anat Shiftan’s porcelain and glaze works reflect the organic strength of the natural world, including the lovely “Tiles with Floral Imagery” (2024) and “Flora in Celadon and Stoneware” (undated), a beautiful pile-on of white blossoms. Néstor Madalengoitia’s watercolor “Tai chi-Paracas no. 64” (2024) features a towering figure in a wildly surreal environment, and Elisa Pritzker’s“Magic Leaf” (2021) is a large dried Coccoloba vivifera leaf with white symbols set against a black background, suggesting a contemporary interpretation of the enduring yin-yang binary.

Peter Shear: A Point Between the Eyes

Mendes Wood DM, 10 Church Avenue, Germantown, New York
Through June 1

Abstraction as a movement is a yet unfinished project, one that consistently evolves in the most mysterious ways. Self-taught painter Peter Shear explores the boundless joys of abstract adventures in his first solo show A Point Between the Eyes at Mendes Wood DM in Germantown. We encounter Shear’s poetic paintings throughout the first floor and outer garage of this rustic old home converted into a sophisticated gallery space, and each piece invites us to explore the dreamlike trance induced by his gestures. Where “Memory Game” (2024) layers deep hues horizontally across the canvas, “Classic Car” (2025) is a solo green shape in the middle of an otherwise empty white background. The tone of “On this Day” (2023) is a wink at Rothko’s sublime style, and “Press” (2024), with its warm green field on all sides and organic contours that dance in the middle, is an elated painterly embodiment of the season.

Nicki Green: Fruitful Vine

River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, 26 Beechford Drive, Boiceville, New York
Through June 8

Combining colorful mounds of clay with decorative vessels to create dramatic organic shapes that border on ritual objects, Nicki Green’s earthenware style is an exciting vision of contemporary ceramics. Her first New York solo show Fruitful Vine, curated by Liz Munsell for the River Valley Arts Collective and staged in Al Held’s former drawing studio at the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, presents a series of new sculptures created for the space plus an installation formerly commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. “Hybrid Vessel 11 (copper jar)” (all works 2025) and “Hybrid Vessel 10 (yellow double jars)” appear to ooze with glowing globs of amorphous clay that overtake their white jar containers, while her three “Tender Offering Jars” are stoic and stately. Greens references the “queering of figuration” and “trans embodiment” as core aspects of her creative practice, according to the press release; true to form, futuristic works such as “Hybrid Vessel 12 (blue jar)” seem to simultaneously contain and resist.

Menagerie: Animals in Art from the Wellin Museum

Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Road, Clinton, New York
Through June 8

Presenting hundreds of artistic objects from the museum’s collection, this dynamic visual feast explores the concept of animals in art through artifacts and diverse media, including works by past greats such as Francisco de Goya and contemporary stars such as Shahzia Sikander. Among the most exciting visions is Asad Faulwell’s “Artifice” (2022), an acrylic and photo collage on canvas work featuring a futuristic figure towering amid a wild esoteric environment with a fiercely stoic lion at their feet. Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut “The Rhinoceros” (1515) is a lovely antiquated vision of the titular beast, as is Édouard Manet’s black and white etching “Le Chat et les fleurs (The Cat and the Flowers)” (1869). Other lively works include Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s “Koinobori (eggs in the belly)” (2021), a mixed-media hanging sculpture of a koi fish and an exquisite reinterpretation of this classic Japanese symbol.

Millicent Young & Virginia L. Montgomery: Compact, Relaxed, & Intact

Jessica Hargreaves: Girls At the End of the World

Elijah Wheat Showroom, 195 Front Street, Newburgh, New York
Through June 22

The art ecosystem in Upstate New York is peppered with dynamic gallery spaces, and Elijah Wheat Showroom in Newburgh is among the most exciting in the region. Their latest pair of exhibitions features three artists who explore themes of transformation and intentionality through their diverse projects: Compact, Relaxed, & Intact contains sculptures and a video installation by Millicent Young and Virginia L. Montgomery, respectively, and the solo exhibition Girls at the End of the World includes paintings and other mixed media works by Jessica Hargreaves. Young’s “Sanctuary” (2022) installation speaks to ecological concerns and features clay sculptures and suspended wood strips of charred cedar that hang down from the ceiling. Montgomery’s “Moon Moth Bed” (2024) is a surreal video and sound piece about cycles of rebirth and collective consciousness as experienced through the journey of Luna moths. 

Wolfgang Tillmans

Hudson Hall, 327 Warren Street, Hudson, New York
Through June 22

Among the most recognized and celebrated photographers working today, Wolfgang Tillmans reveals the poetry in the prosaic. Hudson Hall presents a selection of Tillmans’s photographs made between 1988 and 2015, in collaboration with the non-profit organization Second Ward Foundation, whose co-directors, Walter Sudol and Steven Johnson, are longtime collectors of his work. Richly hued photos such as “still life, New York” (2001), which presents everyday objects against a window, and “São Paulo” (2012), which offers an evening view of one of its dense neighborhoods, pull us into the exciting corners of his globe-trotting lifestyle. Other works slow us down to acknowledge the precious nowness of things, including “chaos cup” (1997), an image of a white mug, the surface of the liquid within congealed into the shape of a lightning bolt. “Arms and legs” (2024) is a close-up photo of two men, one wrangling his hand suggestively inside the bright red shorts of another, while “man with clouds” (1993) depicts a beautiful figure in a white tank top leaning back, his face in a blissful state of elation.

Joanna Grabiarz

Green Kill, 229 Green Kill Avenue, Kingston, New York
May 3–June 28

Joanna Grabiarz’s artistic universe goes from a small plot of land with curious creatures roaming about to a blown-out scene of lively human mayhem. Her solo show at Green Kill in Kingston presents a series of older etchings that disclose the sheer delight of her practice. In “Life in Captivity” (2013), we encounter a blobby green being that hovers above three little octopuses in boxes — it feeds one of them while the second is plugged into some kind of technology, and a third rests blissfully. “Bingo” (2014) shows three Tarot-inspired cards side-by-side with titles such as “La Dama” featuring a naked female figure with a stylish mustache who unflinchingly severs her body in half and cuts off her limbs. “Fairy Tail” (2015) contains a diverse world within a single realm, complete with children picnicking among happy mini UFOs at the bottom, an urban chaos and random tree stumps in the middle, and Tai Chi practitioners at the top — all of it wild and wonderful.