My favorite thing to do in New York City is leaving. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a little break, especially to explore the beautiful exhibitions below. They’re just a short distance from the city – and just as the weather is starting to show signs of warmth.
Many of these shows offer alternative visions, not just from the concrete crush of New York City, but entirely from our dimension. See, for example, Liz Nielsen’s abstract photographs at the Hartford Art School Galleries in Connecticut—she calls them “interdimensional timelines.” Or Piero Manzoni’s all-white and furry room, featured in a major exhibition at Magazzino in Cold Spring.
Upstate, three artists from Utopia in Kingston, also communicate with the world beyond perception, offering an escape from the overwhelm that seems to be the defining characteristic of our times. Who knows? A trip to Beacon to sink into the serene paintings of Agnes Martin may be just what the soul needs.
—Lisa Yin Zhang, editor-in-chief
Spirit in the flesh
Utopia35 North Front Street, Kingston, New York
March 7–28
What should we do in times of extreme overwhelm? Perhaps we try to embrace moments of beauty as they arise. At Utopia, three artists—Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Saul Chernick—come together to present sculptures, paintings, and works on paper that are playful, curious, and joyful in their engagement with a world beyond perception, what they call “Source.”
Interdimensional Timelines: Liz Nielsen
Hartford Art School Galleries200 Bloomfield Avenue, Hartford, Connecticut
March 5 – April 11
Liz Nielsen calls her photographic works ‘light paintings’. These recordings of carefully timed exposures yield lush terrains of blue, green and yellow, achieved through a process that requires her to work in the dark. Timed with her position as distinguished chair in the University of Hartford’s Department of Photography, her recent works feel like transportive postcards from another dimension.
Piero Manzoni: Total space
Magazzino Italian art2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, New York
Until April 13
Despite his short life, post-war artist Piero Manzoni is credited with changing the definition of art through his satirical approach to the avant-garde. Accompanying several works of his famous Achromes (1957–58) series consists of two experiential spaces, conceptualized by the artist but only realized posthumously, multiple displays of Manzoni’s writings, archival materials, and a replica of ‘Base Magica (Magical Base)’ (1961), a simple plinth that invites visitors to become works of art themselves.
EE Kono: Known
Wassaic Project in Troutbeck515 Leedsville Road, Amenia, New York
Until April 19
EE Kono’s vibrant silverpoint and egg tempera paintings transport you to whimsical realms where legend, art history, and the natural world collide. For this show, the artist drew inspiration from Troutbeck’s natural and man-made landscape, and in particular the enchanting clematis blossoms that climb in the walled garden.
Lines of Influence: Artists Teaching Artists
Heckscher Art Museum2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, New York
March 29 – May 3
Amid an art world that still values the myth of the “lone genius,” this show reminds us of the power of mentors and teachers. Structured as a genealogical tree of students and teachers, such as Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers, Lines of influence traces the collaboration and exchange at the heart of so many artists’ practices throughout history.
Modern women/modern vision
Hudson River Museum511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, New York
Until May 10th
This touring exhibition features works by more than 50 pioneering women working in documentary, modernist, contemporary and experimental modes, to recognize their under-examined role in shaping photography over the past century. Modern women/modern vision pits influential artists such as Sandy Skoglund, Carrie Mae Weems and Barbara Krueger against photojournalists Marion Post Wolcott, Dorothea Lange and members of the Photo League.
Uman: After all things…
Museum of Contemporary Art AldrichRidgefield, Connecticut
Until May 10th
Landscapes in Africa, Europe and the United States that have influenced the intuitive, richly hued, semi-abstract images of Somali-born artist Uman. Her first institutional solo exhibition features paintings, drawings, sculptures and immersive environments that welcome viewers into her sensory world. Here, light and color seem to merge distant landscapes into a single space.
Read Qingyuan Deng’s review
Women’s Work: Organizing Independent Film and Video in New York
Frances Lehman Loeb Art CenterR124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, New York
Until May 24
Much of the work that sustains our daily lives – from housework to fighting for rights we now take for granted – is undervalued and, not coincidentally, often done by women. This exhibition seeks to update the framework and celebrate how women have organized labor through programming notes, community and student planning documents, and other objects and stories often overlooked in the art world.
Regeneration: Long Island’s History of Ecological Art and Care
Parrish Art Museum279 Montauk Highway, water mill, Long Island
February 22–June 14
An intergenerational group of eleven artists focuses on the interconnected problems of rising sea levels, pollution and the destruction of natural habitats on the coast of Long Island, where thriving communities have lived for more than ten millennia. A highlight is a commission created by artist Sara Siestreem in collaboration with indigenous collective Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, combining a long tradition of seaweed harvesting with abstract mark-making.
Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in clay
Princeton University Art Museum63 College Road West, Princeton, New Jersey
Until July 5
The late ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu is beloved for her “closed” clay vessels and sonic bodies, but another crucial part of her legacy lives on at Princeton, where she taught for nearly thirty years. Alongside musings of her former studentsthis exhibition places her sculptures in conversation with work by her own mentors and colleagues, including Isamu Noguchi, Helen Frankenthaler and Lenore Tawney.
What it stands for…
Fairfield University Art Museum200 Barlow Road, Fairfield, Connecticut
Until July 25
The American flag is a loaded symbol, now perhaps more so than ever. This exhibition charts the layered history of the flag and the subversive ways in which artists have engaged with it to disrupt nationalist narratives, featuring more than seventy works by the likes of Faith Ringgold, Robert Rauschenberg and, of course, Jasper Johns.
Rina Banerjee: Take me, take me, take me. . . to the Palace of Love
Yale Center for British Art1080 Chapel St, New Haven, Connecticut
Until July 26
What makes a monument? Rina Banerjee’s transparent view of the Taj Mahal undermines everything that is often considered monumental: durability, solidity, precious materials. It floats above other debris from the wreckage of colonialism, including an antique Bombay chair and a chandelier that combines found objects with everyday objects – revealing imperialism as a hollow enterprise that still haunts.
Allan Rohan Criticism: Neighborhood
Zimmerli Art Museum71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Until July 31
Organized in collaboration with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, this exhibition celebrates the creative vision of the New Jersey-born, Boston-raised artist. Crite spent his career capturing scenes of African-American urban life through paintings, illustrations and prints. His artwork conveys stories and histories largely focused on his local community, with rich detail and color bringing his realistic images to life.
Frederic Church: global artist
Olana State Historical Site5720 State Route 9G, Hudson, New York
May 17 – October. 25
Nineteenth-century American landscape painter Frederic Church absorbed the sights and sounds of his travels around the world, and now his historic home studio exhibits the fruits of his wanderings. A small group of drawings and studies in this exhibition record fragments of his travels through South America, Europe, the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings
Slide beacon3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
April 4 – Continuous
Based largely on Dia’s own collection, this exhibition focuses on the pivotal period of the 1950s and 1960s, when Martin moved from loose abstraction to her famous graphite grid pieces. This includes several works made after 1974, after a painting hiatus of several years, including her late ‘black’ paintings. Together they chart her creative evolution and enormous contributions to minimalism.
