Art Walk Kingston Reveals a City Built Around Creativity
by Robert Brune
KINGSTON — Ten hours were never going to be enough. Spread across two days, Art Walk Kingston opened more than 20 galleries and 40 studios featuring more than 200 artists Sept. 19 and 20, making it one of the largest open studio tours in the Hudson Valley.
Trying to see everything would have required considerably more than a weekend. Instead, seven extended artist visits and interviews offered a smaller window into something much larger: a city where art has become deeply woven into its cultural and community life.
Across Kingston, painters, photographers, sculptors and multidisciplinary artists welcomed visitors into galleries, studios and spaces where the distinction between making art and living an artistic life often disappeared. What emerged was not simply an abundance of artwork. It was the depth of experience behind it.
The artists encountered during the weekend represented different generations, disciplines and paths into the arts. Some carried decades of professional experience. Others spoke about continuing experimentation and reinvention. Their work moved between abstraction and realism, photography and painting, deeply personal explorations and observations of the larger world.
Taken together, they revealed a Hudson Valley arts community possessing a breadth of skill, education and creative experience that would be at home in a much larger metropolitan arts center. Yet Kingston’s strength may lie precisely in the fact that it is not one.
Artists here operate within a network of galleries, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, businesses and community spaces that have helped turn creativity into part of the city’s identity.
Arts Mid-Hudson is one piece of that infrastructure. Serving Dutchess, Ulster and Orange counties, the nonprofit supports regional artists and arts organizations through grants, exhibitions, performances, education, advocacy and professional development. Its stated mission emphasizes thriving and diverse arts throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley, including greater access to resources that allow artists to develop their work.
Few places encountered during Art Walk illustrated the connection between art and community as vividly as The Lace Mill. Built in 1903 as the U.S. Lace Curtain Mill at 165 Cornell Street, the factory once employed hundreds of Kingston residents before eventually closing and spending decades largely abandoned. RUPCO purchased the property in 2013 and transformed the historic industrial building into affordable housing with a preference for artists.
The first residents arrived in 2015. Today, The Lace Mill contains 55 apartments along with galleries, work areas and community spaces. This is not a temporary artist residency. The artists live there.
Inside their apartments, high ceilings and open spaces become studios. Downstairs, gallery walls hold exhibitions before rooms are rearranged for performances, workshops and community gatherings.
Artist James Martin, known as Cornbroom, moved into The Lace Mill in 2016 after years when maintaining stability while continuing his artistic practice could be difficult. “My living room is my studio,” Martin said. “So I get to work and live life as an artist.”
That simple statement may help explain something larger about Kingston. An arts community requires artists, but sustaining one requires more than talent. It requires places to work, places to live, opportunities to exhibit, organizations willing to provide funding and education, businesses willing to participate and audiences willing to walk through the door.
Art Walk Kingston brought those pieces together for a weekend. Even within 10 hours, only a fraction could be experienced. Every studio passed on the way to another interview represented another artist and potentially another story. Every gallery doorway suggested another exhibition that deserved more time than the schedule allowed. That impossibility became part of the experience.
Across seven interviews, the artists spoke about their work, education, influences, experiments, careers and communities. Artists such as Lynn Woods also carried something less immediately visible on gallery walls: decades of memory about Kingston itself, its changing neighborhoods and an arts community that has evolved alongside the city.
Their individual stories differed considerably, but collectively they demonstrated something difficult to measure on an event map: the accumulated creative knowledge residing within the Hudson Valley.
Education and experience move through this community from one artist to another. Established artists exhibit beside emerging ones. Residents organize shows for their neighbors. Institutions provide grants and professional resources. Old industrial buildings find new lives. Visitors walk through doors that might otherwise remain closed.
Kingston’s arts community has not developed through one gallery, organization or individual. Its strength comes from the connections among them. There is an enormous amount of art here, certainly more than two afternoons could contain. But perhaps that was the most convincing impression Art Walk Kingston left behind.
On a Kingston wall, surrounded by brightly painted hearts, a mural carries two words beneath the city’s name: #BETTERTOGETHER. After a weekend spent moving through its studios, galleries and conversations, the sentiment felt particularly appropriate.
Kingston’s artists may work individually, but the community they have built around that work is unmistakably collective.