Upstate Art Weekend Returns to the Hudson Valley With a Bigger Map and Sharper Focus
The Hudson Valley’s sprawling summer art circuit is getting a new kind of infrastructure. Upstate Art Weekend returns for its seventh edition this weekend, arriving in the post-Art Basel slot for the first time and pairing its rapidly expanding footprint with a new digital guide from Bloomberg Connects.
Founded in 2020 with 23 participants, the festival now includes 160, a striking measure of how quickly the region’s art calendar has thickened. An open studios event in May added another layer, drawing 240 artists. This year’s main weekend is spread across roughly 6,000 square miles, making the new itinerary planner especially useful: visitors can build a route by mood, region, or focus, with venue listings, an interactive map, and estimated drive times.
The festival’s marquee destinations remain familiar to many visitors — Dia: Beacon, Jack Shainman’s The School in Kinderhook, Storm King Art Center, and The Campus in Hudson among them — but some of the most compelling stops are farther off the obvious path. At Art Omi in Ghent, Tschabalala Self (b. 1990) is showing new work alongside Nayland Blake (b. 1960), whose first outdoor commission, “Haunt: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre(2026),” will be accompanied by performances, activations, and workshops. Art Omi describes the project as “part classroom, part lounge, part farm stand, part abandoned amusement park ride,” a formulation that captures Blake’s long interest in the unstable boundary between audience and institution.
In Kingston, Stay Frosty returns to ArtPort Kingston for its second edition, again blurring the line between exhibition, fair, and trunk show. Fifty participants will transform parking lots and vehicles into miniature exhibitions and installations. Among them are Baloney — Z Behl and Kim Maloney — with “Car Pile Pyre,” a tactile sculpture built from automobile bodies and tractor tires around an outstretched hand that recalls protest imagery.
Bard College is also mounting three exhibitions at its Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-On-Hudson: “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World,” “Uman: In Between,” and “Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz.” The Parsons exhibition traces her work from 1922 to 1982, while Schultz’s project revisits the woven replica of Intel’s Pentium chip she was commissioned to make in 1994.
For a festival that now stretches across a vast geography, the challenge is no longer finding enough to see. It is deciding where to begin.
