THOMAS COLE: AN AMERICAN VISIONARY, MAUREEN DOUGHERTY, and SENSE OF PLACE.
THOMAS COLE: AN AMERICAN VISIONARY, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY, through December, ‘26.
Thomas Cole, Diagram of Contrasts (1834), oil on panel[; Photo courtesy Thomas Cole Historic Site.
Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is widely regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School of painters, whose eco-conscious, Romantic outlook seems to be growing in influence exponentially with every passing year, especially among younger generations of artists, writers and thinkers. As environmental protection programs and measures are increasingly under siege lately, the images that these 19th-century painters have bequeathed to the 21st-century are ever more potent and pertinent. Consider, for example, the site-specific installation, Emily Cole and her Father, My Mother, and Me . . . (2025), a contemporary intervention by Valerie Hegarty included in this historical survey. The elaborate assemblage construction occupying one wall of an upper floor gallery is on one level a tribute to Thomas’s Cole’s daughter Emily and incorporates designs from the ceramic decorations she produced in the early 20th century, which are displayed across the room. The work also includes a painted rendition of Thomas Cole’s famous landscape The Oxbow (1836), although Hegarty’s version is appropriately entropic befitting current environmental alarms.
Installation view, Thomas Cole: American VIsionary, 2026; Photo Peter Aaron; courtesy Thomas Cole Historic Site.
The work is from the collection of Richard T. Sharp, who, aside from Thomas Cole, is the principal protagonist of the current exhibition since it inaugurates his namesake gallery on the second floor in the main house of the historic complex. The show features 16 paintings by Cole as well as one by his student, Frederic Church (1826-1900), whose fabled home, Olana, is situated directly across the Hudson River from Catskill. Also on view in the show are many artifacts and objects owned by Cole, including his collection of minerals, plaster casts of Michelangelo sculptural heads, his paint-laden palettes, and a guitar (Cole was also an accomplished musician). The most important of Sharp’s recent gifts to the museum, and central to this exhibition, is Cole’s legendary painting Diagram of Contrasts (1834). This oil on panel composition appears to be a prescient work of modern abstract art —an example of early 20th-century Orphism by František Kupka or Robert Delaunay, perhaps. In fact, this mesmerizing painting is a color wheel that Cole likely used to explore color relationships, the correlation of color and sound, plus the unfathomable emotional resonance of color. Thomas Cole: American Visionary offers at once an homage to the source of the Hudson River School and to the ongoing and often esoteric allure of its legacy. — David Ebony
MAUREEN DOUGHERTY, Mendes Wood DM, Germantown, NY, through June 14, ’26.
Maureen Dougherty, Picasso Collector (2025); Photo Kate Orne.
In her vibrant oil paintings, Carnegie Mellon University and New York Studio School alum Maureen Dougherty focuses on collectors—those connoisseurs and aficionados of art and culture whose identity is often bound up with their acquisitions. One of the most striking on view, Picasso Collector (2025), is a large canvas displayed against a dark wood wall of Mendes Wood’s adjunct building. It shows in the lower center foreground a mustachioed figure in a black shirt with a white stripe running along the arm, whose countenance recalls Diego Velásquez’s self-portrait in his celebrated painting Las Meninas (1656). Behind him is his collection Picasso ceramics, like those he produced mostly in the 1950s in Vallauris, France. Neatly arranged on several long shelves, the painted plates and pots feature familiar Picasso images of bullfights, faces, doves, and fish. With deft brushwork, Dougherty suggests these images without being pedantically descriptive.
Maureen Dougherty, Asparagus Dish Collection (2025), Photo David Ebony.
Another engaging work in that space, Crypt Collector (2025) shows a supine bearded figure in the lower portion of the canvas—dead or alive is uncertain—cradling a human skull. Above him are long vertical shelves aligned with a collection of many more human skulls. On view in the main gallery, a modest-size, renovated home, are seven high-toned and often comic images of objects on shelves and the collector who assembled them. One especially appealing work, Asparagus Dish Collection (2025), is collector-less, but the focus on the objects alone affirms the painter’s clearly heartfelt homage to artist mentors like Édouard Manet and David Hockney. Dougherty adds touches of humor throughout the show, as in Bardot Collects Staffordshire (2025), featuring at right a schematic image of the late film star Brigitte Bardot, known for her love of animals. With her long lissome legs extended, she stands beside her collection of ceramic Staffordshire dogs arranged neatly on shelves. In her painting, Dougherty is not out to reinvent the wheel or blow viewers away in terms of technique or conceptual aims, but her well-realized compositions convey a feeling of utter sincerity and considerable charm. — David Ebony
SENSE OF PLACE: Available Items x Amin Tadj Studio, at Ohayo Mountain House, Glenford, NY, through May 31, ‘26.
Installation view, Sense of Place, 2026, showing works by (l-r), Michael McGrath, Amin Tadj, Jake Coan, Swell Studio; Photo: Valeria Flores; courtesy Available Items.
Housed in a newly constructed showcase—a three-bedroom house of modernist design by the Amin Tadj Studio architecture firm—Sense of Place features the work of 21 artists and designers, most based in the mid-Hudson Valley. It is a rather remarkable and unusual environment for an art exhibition, apart from a gallery or museum setting. Visitors are offered a rare opportunity to experience contemporary art and artifacts as part of everyday living, albeit within an idyllic location in a wooded area near ever-tony Woodstock. The pool was still under construction when I visited, but otherwise, I could be very much at home here.
Bob Betchtol, Is It Is, acrylic and paper on panel, 48 x 40 inches; in "Sense of Place;" Photo courtesy Available Items.
Available Items is a design store and gallery in Tivoli, NY, founded in 2022 by Chad Phillips and Kristin Coleman, who organized the elegant and tasteful display of objects on view here. Hardedge, geometric outdoor sculptures by Tristan Fitch effectively punctuate the verdant landscape just outside the house. Inside the home, in several rooms, spare and delicate metal constructions by Jake Coan, with leaf- and other vegetal shapes, and with LED components, recall the graceful sculptures of Italian artist Fausto Melotti. In this context, however, Coan’s works may serve as sources of illumination. Francesca DeMattrio’s baroque ceramic sculpture, Jordan Meissen (2024) quietly commands the dining room space like a friendly sentinel, while in the living room area, April Johnson of flowerpyscho studio softens the building’s rigid contours with a gently flowing assemblage of wheat stalks suspended from the ceiling. Bob Betchel’s large, carefully composed abstract collage paintings feature what appear to be ambiguous interior-exterior spaces. With nuanced tonality and refined geometry, disrupted here and there by expressive gestures, Betchel’s work on panel, It is Is, harmoniously corresponds to the surrounding architecture and nature. — David Ebony