Medina’s New Triennial Looks at What Keeps Art — and Life — Going
In a former high school in Medina, a rural village in Western New York, a new triennial is asking a question that feels increasingly urgent: what sustains a society when comfort, labor, and supply chains all feel precarious? “All That Sustains Us,” the inaugural edition of the triennial, gathers 39 artists whose work turns toward maintenance, resourcefulness, and the hidden systems that make daily life possible.
Rather than framing decline as a spectacle of collapse, the exhibition treats it as a condition to be studied, and in some cases repaired. The show’s oldest living artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, appears at the main site with a video that introduces visitors to her landmark “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!” Ukeles wrote the text after becoming a mother and recognizing how invisible upkeep labor had become. Her long collaboration with sanitation workers, including decades as an unpaid artist in residence at the New York Department of Sanitation, gives the triennial a clear conceptual anchor: care is labor, and labor is infrastructure.
That idea runs through the exhibition’s strongest works. Victoria-Idongesit Udondian honors immigrant textile workers by exchanging new coats for their old work clothes, then transforming the garments into a sculpture of stiffened black jackets that seem to crawl across the floor. Deirdre O’Mahony turns the pressures facing Irish farmers into a libretto set against aerial views of their fields, while Michael Wang works with Medina maple tree tappers to produce “Sugar Bush Energy,” a locally sourced drink that links ecology, labor, and historical memory.
Elsewhere, Dionne Lee uses analog photography and its hands-on processes as a metaphor for self-reliance, presenting black-and-white images of spiral markings on rocks that suggest navigation, survival, or both. Taysir Batniji photographs keyrings from homes in Gaza that have been destroyed, while Aki Inomata, Anne Duk-Hee Jordan, and Finnegan Shannon extend the exhibition’s attention to interdependence through works that draw on beaver-made forms, rainwater filtration, and disability activism.
Set in a post-industrial town along the Erie Canal, “All That Sustains Us” is less interested in catastrophe than in the practical, often overlooked labor that holds communities together. In a moment when food, energy, and materials can no longer be taken for granted, the triennial suggests that art’s role may be to make those systems visible again.
