Jane Semple Umsted, a Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma tribal member and Durant resident, has been appointed to the Institute of American Indian Arts Board of Trustees.

The fourth edition of Upstate Art Weekend (21-24 July) is returning to the regions north of New York City this summer with more than 130 participating venues, an exponential jump from its inaugural 23-participant event in 2020.

The idyllic art experience, spearheaded by curator, fair director and Stoneleaf Retreat artist residency co-founder Helen Toomer, combines extended hours at major institutional destinations like Dia Beacon and Storm King Art Center with spotlight events at local non-profits, pop-up spaces and commercial galleries. The event welcomes thousands of visitors each year, and the latest iteration will feature a plethora of screenings, open studios, performances and workshops.

Despite the region getting hit with record-breaking floods in the last month, the Hudson Valley art scene is poised for a rich and ambitious weekend—so rich, in fact, that the logistics can prove overwhelming. “It’s impossible to do everything,” Toomer told Artnet News. “This event was created to shine a light on the incredible organisations in the region and to solidify lasting connections with those visiting to come back.”

For those planning an adventure upstate, here are some must-sees for the days ahead.

Mother in Law’s
140 Church Avenue, Germantown, New York

Mother-in-Law’s is an experimental, installation-forward project space in Germantown directed by Kathleen Vance and Daniel Aycock of Hudson-based Front Room Gallery, alongside artist Jessica Hargreaves. Set in a converted carriage house, Mother-in-Law’s programming foregrounds the mesmeric, mixed-media visions of women-identified artists. For Upstate Art Weekend, the space is pairing Darkening Skies, an immersive audiovisual screening by artists Pamela Lonongobardi, Craig Dogonski and Suusan Knippenberg, with an outdoor exhibition, Par.ley, curated by the team behind New York gallery Field Projects.

Par.ley, which takes place on the grounds surrounding the carriage house, investigates the push-and-pull between the natural and constructed, examining “different methods of living with and parallel from nature”. From noon to 6pm on 21, 22 and 23 July, artist Lauren Cohen will also operate a yard sale at the site featuring ceramic objects curated by the Field Projects team.

Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Bard’s in-house museum specialises in exhibitions foregrounding marginalised voices and heady, conceptual ideas. Indian Theater; Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 (until 26 November) is the first large-scale exhibition to centre performance as the genesis of contemporary Indigenous artistic inquiry. The exhibition brings together more than 100 works by over 40 artists and collectives, melding new and historic materials and methods in an expansive display.

During Upstate Art Weekend, a series of performances will take place at the museum. At 6pm and 8pm on 22 July, artists Emily Johnson (Yup’il Nation) and Jeffrey Gibson (Missisippi Band of Choctaw Indians) will take the stage. The following day at 2 pm, Johnson and Gibson will be in conversation at Bard’s Collection Teaching Gallery, moderated by curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). Registration for these and other weekend events is available on the museum’s website.

ArtPort Kingston
The Cornell Steamboat Building, 108 East Strand, Kingston, New York

Built along the Rondout Creek, this contemporary art gallery and curatorial project space in Kingston is housed in a former steamboat machine shop. Its left-of-centre programming has been making waves in the area since opening in 2020, and the team behind ArtPort—Laurie De Chiara and Stefan Saffer—are extending that attitude to Upstate Art Weekend. Starting 21 July, ArtPort will be hosting Joy Ride, a high-colour exhibition featuring Didi Rojas, Arnaldo Morales, Lady Labor and Traci Johnson, among others. Joy Ride will coincide with the opening of this year’s ArtStream, an outdoor exhibition of sculptural artworks by local artists

ArtStream takes place along the Point Rail Trail, inviting viewers to engage with the works as they interact with the natural landscape. On 22 July, from 2pm to 5pm, the ArtPort team will celebrate the launch of both shows at the nearby Artbuoy Cafe in an event that involves giant inflatable artworks and bubble machines. On 23 July, from 3pm to 5pm, ArtPort will also be hosting a yogic movement and tantric perfume experience conceived by artist and polymath Kelly Heaton.

The Post Office
158 West Main Street, Port Ewen, Ulster County, New York

Artists Rachel de Joode, Kate Steciw and Letha Wilson will be showing new works at the former Port Ewen post office during this year’s Upstate Art Weekend. Each participating artist’s practice addresses the “photographic object”, using sculptural image-making techniques to trouble the line between these seemingly disparate media. Combining transcendental landscapes, found imagery and post-studio interventionist gestures, the three artists demonstrate the full breadth of their contributions to the “photo matter” genre. The Post Office is open from 2pm to 6pm all four days of Upstate Art Weekend.

The School by Jack Shainman Gallery
25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, New York

The School is a 30,000 sq. ft former high school in Kinderhook that Manhattan dealer Jack Shainman turned into a kunsthalle of sorts in 2013, to present large-scale exhibitions that highlight artists working within and outside of the gallery’s programme. For Upstate Art Weekend, the venue will be exhibiting Michael Snow: Life Survey (1955-2020), chronicling the late artist’s wide-ranging career, which defied genre, medium, or taxonomy.

Born in Toronto in 1928, Snow made a name for himself blending jazz improvisation with Modernist design, taking a “try this, try that” approach to creative communication. At 1pm on 22 July, The School will host a screening of Snow’s 45-minute masterpiece Wavelength (1967). Visitors can also register in advance for a private exhibition tour with Irem Ikizler, associate director of Jack Shainman Gallery, starting at 3pm.

• Upstate Art Weekend 2023, 21-24 July, various venues in New York State

Bright colors. Dark subjects.

Jim Denomie’s vivid paintings tell stories of colonialism, oil pipelines, violence. Stories the artist himself wasn’t aware of until adulthood.

So it goes for a Native American assimilated into white culture through the machinery that culture has designed to do so. Indian Urban Relocation. The generational trauma of Indian Boarding Schools. Popular culture. A public education system centered on white nationalism.

Learning his history and culture, and acquiring the artistic tools necessary to express what he was feeling visually, would come later for Denomie (Ojibwe, Lac Courte Oreilles Band, 1955–2022).

After dropping out of high school.

He recognized traditional schooling wasn’t for him and asked his counselor to help him attend a school focused on arts education. She thought that was a dead end. He said he’d drop out if she didn’t. She didn’t care.

After a near 20-year stretch of aimless partying and alcoholism.

After working long days in construction and trying to raise a family.

Jim Denomie, paragon of the late bloomer.

He sobered up in 1989, got a GED, and the next year enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where he had and would spend most of his life. Like millions of others, he found himself at college, Denomie just happened to be in his mid-30s when doing so.

On campus, he became involved with the Native American community, connecting to the heritage he hadn’t previously. Future parents raised in the horrors of the boarding school era, like Denomie’s–oftentimes the scars are too deep, the attempts at cultural erasure too successful, to pass customary ways along.

At the University of Minnesota he would learn about his past and establish a future. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Indian studies. What he learned was painful, and then, candidly, pissed him off. Broken treaties, genocide and the like.

He simultaneously pursued his boyhood desire of artmaking, the one amputated by the counselor. In 1995 he also secured a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art and began pursing his painting career.

The culmination of his dual journeys into Native American history and fine art can be seen now through March 24, 2024, during “The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie,” an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art highlighting Denomie’s singular vision and signature style over the second half of his career (2007–22).

Color

Denomie could be described as a colorist. His primary attraction was to color and he noticed it everywhere–sunsets, birds, fish, frogs, minerals. He often told the story of how color theory was his most important, transformative class at university.

Pinks, purples, fuchsia.

His palate is deep and rich with nonrepresentational hues recalling the Fauves of the early 20^th century.

Denomie’s paintings routinely engage with art history. The Last Supper. Manet. Nighthawks. Vincent van Gogh boxing Mike Tyson.

“Beyond his formal education, Jim was a lifelong student,” Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Project Coordinator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art Nicole Soukup told Forbes.com. “He was a regular museum visitor to not only the Minneapolis Institute of Art, but museums across the country. His sketchbooks list artists and artworks he saw at museums like Brooklyn, The Met, etc. His studio was filled with exhibition catalogues and books.”

While his work has the freedom and visionary quality of self-taught or folk artists, Denomie doesn’t belong to that category. He was highly trained. Deeply studied.

Spiritual, yes.

Indigenous, yes.

Descending from Western art traditions, also, yes.

The nudes, the color, the continuation of art historical movements descended from Europe by an artist not similarly descended recall the paintings of Bob Thompson and Robert Colescott. Denomie and Colescott further share a bawdiness and absurdity.

Denomie’s art has acutely been descried as “surreal, satirical,” “a Far Side cartoon painted by Hieronymus Bosch.” Bingo.

“If you look at his oeuvre, you can see tropes from the history of European art—like the Arcadian landscape. Of course, he gave it his own spin,” Soukup explains. “However, in works like Standing Rock—2016, you see the classic landscape as a stage-like setting. Jim used elements like a river and pipeline to lead the viewer’s eye from foreground to mid-ground. The rounding hills create a clear horizon line. Using a tight framework allowed Jim to focus on the hyper-layered vignettes and details in his genre and history paintings.”

The painting recalls Bosch or Bruegel. It’s stuffed with figures and action, often bizarre and macabre. Donald Trump gropes an Indigenous lady justice. Oil pipelines, Cerberus, Klansmen, swastikas, military vehicles, helicopters, people, animals, a tipi encampment, porta potties.

Denomie’s “Standing Rock” series explores his response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016–17. Following the exhibition of his “Standing Rock” series at the esteemed Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis which represented Denomie since 2007 and has as a specialty representing Native American artists, Soukup asked the artist, “What would an exhibition at Mia look like?”

“The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie”

It looks big, colorful, confrontational.

Figures everywhere.

Nudes.

Men and women with deer heads who came to him in dreams.

Spiritual. Mystical.

Witches.

Denomie liked witches. Even dated one.

Sturgeons, frogs, pileated woodpeckers.

Drawing inspiration from lived experiences, pop culture, Anishinaabe–what many Ojibwe prefer to call themselves–traditions, and American histories, Denomie’s work forwards provocative stories of being Native in America.

“The boundary between Jim’s portrayal of Anishinaabe traditions and beliefs, what he saw in his dreams, and what is realized on the canvas is a thin, porous line. If visitors are familiar with Anishinaabe beliefs, they may find elements in nearly every work of art,” Soukup said. “For those of us like myself who are not Native, we can readily see the spirits that fill the skies and landscapes. A notable example is the spirits in the sky pouring water onto the Earth in the painting Standing Rock–2016.”

Despite the emotional weight of his subject matter, visitors will be excused from chuckling here and there. Denomie, as with many contemporary Native American artists, brings a rapier’s wit and highly attuned sense of humor into his paintings.

The exhibition features approximately 60 artworks, some well-known, others never before seen in public. On display together for the first time are his large-scale paintings, unfinished works, rare sculpture and sketchbooks.

And a curious series of assemblages.

“The funny thing about Jim is that he was always making something out of the hundreds of trinkets and bobbles that filled the tables in his studio and garage,” Soukup said. “Jim worked across media, but rarely showed sculpture. He filled his studio with these masks and painted found objects. I think he found humor and joy in making them. For example, Diabetic Spirit, or the untitled (fish) made from his shoe and five-iron. Right before he passed, Jim was dynamically returning to sculpture.”

Cancer took Denomie’s life in late winter 2022. He and Soukup were deep into planning the exhibition, a process he was highly engaged with from the start. No one expected him to go so quick. The show was intended as a mid-career survey.

Denomie’s artmaking started late and ended early, in between, a prince of a man and an extraordinary artist.