Up in Beacon, N.Y., art handlers were arranging dozens of little embroideries under the watchful eyes of the curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi; 50 miles to the north, in Millerton, a painter named Karen Marston was painting an iceberg on the side of a barn: It was time for Upstate Art Weekend again. The five-day festival, which extends across 10 counties in the Catskills and Hudson Valley, is a chance for artists and art lovers beyond the metropolis to remind one another how large and vibrant their community really is — but it’s also the perfect excuse for city dwellers to hop on a train, or into a car, and work some fresh air and greenery into their lives.
This year’s big change, as the fair celebrates its seventh edition, is an online smart itinerary builder. Type in your preferences, from distance and direction to genre of art, and it will tell you where to go. But you can also just work the old-fashioned way, starting with a single landmark destination — like the newly renovated KinoSaito, an art center in Verplanck, or an exhibit of Richard Sandler’s street photography at the Capa Space in Yorktown Heights, or an architectural fantasia like Boscobel or the Lyndhurst Mansion — and work backward. These are some of the newer attractions that caught my eye.
But make sure you’re properly caffeinated, because there are also several unmissable shows just across the river at Bard College in Annandale. In “Cagecircle: Composition for an Exhibition” at Stevenson Library, the John Cage Trust uses chance procedures to put together a group of miscellaneous objects, including a box of the maestro’s own piano “preparations” and a pair of embroidered silk suspenders. (Don’t miss a live re-enactment of his “Lecture on Nothing” at 1 p.m. on Saturday.)
At the Hessel Museum of Art, also at Bard, exhibitions of explosively colorful paintings by Uman, a prolific artist born in Somalia, and work by the Diné mathematician and textile artist Marilou Schultz hang alongside a survey for Betty Parsons (1900-82). Though she was best known as a gallerist who showed heavy hitters like Pollock, Rothko and Newman, Parsons was a dedicated painter herself, producing a distinctive body of abstractions in which forms like animal cells float across strangely fraught planes of unusual color.
