If May is the month the Hudson Valley bursts into bloom, then the region’s galleries are keeping pace. From Beacon to Millerton, Kingston to Wassaic, artists are excavating memory, mapping loss, skewering the absurd, and conjuring new modes of resistance—each with a singular visual language.
Jack Shainman’s General Conditions offers a sobering snapshot of civic breakdown; Lindsey Wolkowicz and Aleksandra Stepanovic render the human form as a site of psychic reckoning. Renée Green’s landmark Dia Beacon survey redraws the lines between history and hallucination, while Carol Cory’s farewell show in Kent (Roz Chast!) finds neurotic joy in eggs and embroidery.
Whether it’s Francine Tint’s luminous gestures or William Corwin’s metal invocations of myth, the works on view this month are tactile, embodied, urgent. In an era increasingly shaped by fracture, forgetting, and flux, these artists remind us that bearing witness is a practice—and that art, stubbornly, is still a public good.
“General Conditions” at The School in Kinderhook
May 17-November 29
Another blockbuster summer offering from Jack Shainman: A dread-soaked meditation on the slow dissolution of civic order. “General Conditions” at The School gathers more than two dozen artists confronting the architecture of power in its slipperiest forms. Bureaucracy as gaslight, borders as death traps, landscapes as ledger entries—each work crackles with the unease of living in an age where the rules are rewritten mid-sentence and stability is little more than a memory. Richard Mosse’s thermal images of refugee camps, Hayv Kahraman’s disembodied eyes, Jaclyn Wright’s excavated desert maps, and Gordon Parks’s luminous portraits of Black life under segregation all sharpen the show’s political edge. Meanwhile, the sculptures of Rose B. Simpson and Emanoel Araújo hold space for spiritual resilience and formal defiance. It’s an exhibition not of answers but of strategies: aesthetic, political, and psychic. The crisis is general, as artist Alina Tenser notes—but the responses here are vivid, fierce, and, above all, collective.
“Fractural: Sculpting the Human Condition” at the Art Society of Kingston
May 3-25
Before turning to sculpture, Aleksandra Stepanovic spent two decades working as a journalist in war-torn Yugoslavia—an experience that haunts and informs her work. In “Fractural: Sculpting the Human Condition” at the Arts Society of Kingston, Stepanovic’s fragmented clay and bronze forms reflect the psychic damage of conflict, exile, and identity lost and remade. Her figures are partial, textured, caught mid-reckoning—each one a silent witness, each surface a palimpsest. This isn’t abstraction for its own sake; it’s the body as battleground, memory as medium. The show opens May 4, 3–5pm. Bring your ghosts. They’ll find company.
“Folds and Faults” at Jane St. Art Center in Saugerties
May 17-June 21
Fragility isn’t in Lindsey Wolkowicz’s vocabulary. In “folds and faults” at Jane St. Art Center, the Kingston-based artist’s figures tumble, collide, and grasp at anchors in a world of shifting surfaces and psychic landslides. Her layered compositions—part drawing, part architecture—treat bodies not as symbols of grace but as battlegrounds of memory, grief, and stubborn persistence. Working on wood and paper, Wolkowicz leaves parts of the surface raw, a reminder that skin, like space, bears scars. The result is an urgent, unpretty poetry of survival, where connection is tenuous but vital and control is always an illusion at best.
“Symbolic of the Whole” at 68 Prince Street Gallery in Kingston
Through June 8
Francine Tint’s “Symbolic of the Whole” inaugurates 68 Prince Street Gallery with a burst of color and gesture. A veteran of New York’s abstraction scene, Tint’s canvases are expansive, luminous, and unapologetically physical. Her latest “Open Painting” series invites negative space into the conversation, letting raw canvas breathe alongside bold swaths of pigment. The result is a visual rhythm that feels both spontaneous and deliberate, balancing chaos with clarity. At 82, Tint is not winding down—she’s pushing forward, and Kingston is lucky to host her momentum.
“Urban Archaeology” at Garner Arts Center in Garnerville
May 3-June 15
Occhi Belli, Rome, Franc Palaia, archival color photograph, paint, paper collage, wood, sprafy, faux cement on Polystyrene, 2023
Franc Palaia’s “Urban Archaeology” at Garner Arts Center is a 20-year retrospective that transforms the gallery into a faux excavation site of urban memory and myth. Featuring over 60 works—including frescoes, photographs, sculptures, and a 15-minute video—the show blurs the line between artifact and illusion. Palaia’s faux-concrete wall fragments, inspired by street art from cities like Berlin, Havana, and Gaza, are actually lightweight constructions crafted from a secret mix of materials. Each piece is a layered meditation on decay, resilience, and the aesthetics of urban entropy. Opening reception May 4, 3–5pm.
“The Equator Has Moved” at Dia:Beacon
Through August 31, 2026
Renée Green’s “The Equator Has Moved” at Dia:Beacon is a landmark exhibition that reconfigures the museum’s central galleries into a layered exploration of colonial legacies, scientific mythologies, and the politics of perception. Green’s first major solo museum presentation in New York, the show brings together rarely seen works from the 1980s and ’90s with newly commissioned pieces, including her vibrant Space Poems—text-based banners suspended along the corridors—and modular Bichos, which serve as media architectures for her moving-image and sound works. The exhibition also reunites her “Color” series (1990) for the first time since its inception, examining how color functions as a tool for categorization and a socially coded value system. Green’s recursive process—juxtaposing archival fragments, personal ephemera, and speculative narratives—invites viewers to reconsider the unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, public recollection and personal memory.
“Things: Wheels, Ladders, Teeth, Alps, Gods, Boats, Etc.” at Geary in Millerton
Through June 8
William Corwin’s “Things: Wheels, Ladders, Teeth, Alps, Gods, Boats, Etc.” at Geary in Millerton is a sculptural séance with the past. Spanning a decade of cast metal works, the exhibition conjures ancient tools, mythic vessels, and symbolic forms—each piece a tactile meditation on the evolution of meaning. Corwin’s process involves hand-working sand molds, allowing for spontaneous textures and gestures to imprint directly onto the metal. His recent focus on the goddess Artemis intertwines classical depictions with references to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Paleolithic figurines, creating a dialogue between antiquity and modernity. This is Corwin’s fifth exhibition with Geary
“Roz Chast: New Work” at Carol Corey Fine Art in Kent, CT
May 3-June 8
Roz Chast’s final exhibition at Carol Corey Fine Art is a fittingly neurotic, hilarious, and heartfelt sendoff. Opening May 3, “Roz Chast: New Work” features recent New Yorker cartoons, hand-embroidered panels, and a new flock of pysanky eggs—Ukrainian-style dyed eggs reimagined with Chast’s signature off-kilter humor. Birds, both stitched and shelled, abound. Each piece is imbued with the charmingly unstable energy that defines her work. This final show also marks the gallery’s closure, as owner Carol Corey relocates to Scotland. It’s a bittersweet farewell, but one softened by Chast’s wry wit and the laughter echoing through the gallery.
“So It Goes” at Wassaic Project
May 17-September 13
The Wassaic Project’s 2025 summer exhibition, “So It Goes,” transforms Maxon Mills into a labyrinth of contemporary anxieties and surreal reflections. Drawing inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s refrain, the show confronts our desensitization to recurring horrors through works that blend playfulness with profound commentary. Highlights include Siara Berry’s stained glass pieces echoing rural “No Trespassing” signs, Lin Qiqing’s hand-spun paper yarn collages tracing bodily movement, and Ollie Goss’s video sculpture featuring a goose protesting at a town hall. Rosabel Rosalind’s triptych reimagines a post-apocalyptic San Fernando Valley as Sodom and Gomorrah, while Saberah Malik’s tapestries depict Pakistan’s 2022 megafloods from an aerial perspective.
“Ekaterina Vanovskaya” at D’Arcy Simpson Art Works in Hudson
Through May 25
Ekaterina Vanovskaya’s latest exhibition at D’Arcy Simpson Art Works in Hudson, running through May 25, presents a compelling exploration of memory and emotional landscapes. Her new works, comprising three large-scale watercolors and seven acrylic paintings on wood, are characterized by their layered compositions and nuanced palettes. Vanovskaya’s paintings delve into themes of longing and transformation, inviting viewers to engage with the interplay between personal history and imagined spaces. The exhibition offers a poignant reflection on the ways in which our past experiences shape our perceptions and emotional responses.
