At the Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden in North Salem, New York, art doesn’t stay inside the galleries. Since 1964, the museum has staged exhibitions that move from its gallery walls to its patio, tea hut, and garden paths, with about fifteen shows a year and the number growing. Contemporary and historical, drawn from many styles and cultural traditions, the exhibitions often aim to build cross-cultural understanding, while those set outdoors open a dialogue between art, nature, and personal reflection. This fall, five shows fill the grounds: Tomoko Amaki Abe’s Heaven Come Down in the Main Gallery, Meg Hitchcock’s Fang in the Hays and Goelet Galleries, Soli Pierce’s Poetry of Place in the Tea Hut, Matthew Weber’s Ground Shift on the Patio, and Kurt Steger’s In the Garden along the Japanese Stroll Garden. In this conversation, the museum team talks about how the Exhibition Committee selects its shows and how each one carries the museum’s mission forward.
Autumn Exhibitions at Wave Hill
An autumnal lineup of exhibitions at Wave Hill delve into the splendor of the landscape through intersections of nature, societal transmission, history, and political climate. These engagements are created through processes involving acts of listening, archival practices, explorations of bodily autonomy and mythologies. The following is an interview with Wave Hill curators Rachel Gugelberger and Gabriel de Guzman, unpacking key takeaways about its most recent projects.
The Artist, the Loom, and the Microchip: Marilou Schultz’s Replica of a Chip
A microchip replicated in hand-spun Churro wool sounds like a conceptual provocation, but the actual object is even more compelling. The title of Marilou Schultz’s exhibition, Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz, refers both to the artist’s feat and an unlikely pairing between computer architecture and Diné (Navajo) weaving. In 1994, Schultz was commissioned by Intel to reproduce the company’s Pentium microprocessor as a textile, translating its intricate geometry into interlaced threads. She followed through, replicating a device associated with the precision and abstraction of computing through the material intelligence of the loom. The success of this artistic translation inspired the replication of other chips in wool thread — Nizhóní AMD (2008), Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving (2024), Popular Chip (2025), and Golden Computer Chip Diné Weaving (2026) are included in the exhibition — and to a body of work translating complex systems and new ideas into color and pattern.
“Best by 07/21/2026” at Eli Klein Gallery
For artists Clare Hu, Tianyi Sun, and Shaan Ken Rao, their residency-then-exhibition is already well past its expiration date. Entering the group show Best by 07/21/2026 may feel more like intruding on a gallery’s installation or deinstallation than attending its finished presentation. Moving blankets are spread across the walking path, with splashes of white paint visible on the quilted fabric. Glass tables lean on white walls. Enter the back room, and you may trip over one of many sandbags, or duck your head under the arm of a swinging C-stand.
Meet at the Ferris Wheel: Kathleen Beausoleil’s Plein Air Paintings Combine Psychology and Light
Painter Kathleen Beausoleil is enamored by her backyard, literally. The fair grounds and beaches that are synonymous to her home state, New Jersey, form her primary subjects. Visiting local fairgrounds each summer, she paints plein air, out in the open, and on view in her latest solo show at The Painting Center are works that beautifully capture the light, vibrancy, and togetherness of these places. After speaking with the artist, I understand that Beausoleil’s scenes are not only advanced in their painterly technique, but created through perspectives cleverly scaffolded by sociological terms around gathering and group behaviour.
Paul Fägerskiöld’s Expanding Fields
The first painting in Paul Fägerskiöld’s solo exhibition Ergosphere, at Peter Blum Gallery, offers a modest entrance into an immeasurable subject. A small, dark blue field scattered with points of light initially suggests what could be an image taken by NASA of deep space. Its title establishes an improbably precise appointment: New York. July 1, 3586. View south towards the black hole Gaia BH1 (1,560 light-years). We have a location, a direction, and a date. Whether these coordinates help us find our bearings is another matter.
No Ideas but in Things: Jim Condron and Dean Kessman at MONO PRACTICE
Looking at Condron and Kessman’s MONO PRACTICE exhibition, I’m struck by the aura their pieces exude. Both make work using found materials, and both represent/re-present those materials in ways that push them close, but not past, the point of recognizability. The “things” of this exhibition have been abstracted and estranged but not transcended. They exist in a liminal moment, when the subject recedes, and the idea begins to shape itself. However, the objects persist in being objects.
James Esber’s, My Thing, Your Thing, and the Thing Itself
James Esber’s paintings are inherently punchy, with a bold, fluoro-pop palette and active surfaces. In My Thing, Your Thing, and the Thing Itself at Satchel Projects, it is compounded by the intimate quarters as well as the scale of the works, most roughly the size of the average viewer. One can pivot in place and take in the entire exhibit with a quick rotation that may trigger a rush of associations, from Hairy Who Chicago to Ed Roth “Weirdo,” et al. It can take a moment to pause, regard each work in turn, and register the artist’s point of view.