“Gherao” Exhibition Highlights Political Art in East Chatham and Hudson

The word gherao slipped into English from Bengali by way of labor movements—a strategy of encirclement in which management is physically surrounded until demands are met. A tactic born of workers insisting on visibility, accountability, and the basic dignity of being heard. It’s an apt title for an exhibition convened in a season when many Americans feel the walls closing in.

“Gherao: A Group Response to the Fall of Freedom” curated by artist George Lawson, assembles 30 New York artists across two Hudson Valley locations in response to Fall of Freedom, Dread Scott’s nationwide campaign rallying creative resistance to an administration bent on executive overreach. Taken together, the works form a collective barricade—less a blockade than a holding of space, a communion of artists who refuse silence while the democratic floorboards groan beneath us.

The political urgency is overt in pieces like David Becker’s contribution, which refashions the American flag into a suffocating head bag—a meditation on patriotism strained to its breaking point. Nearby, Beth Davila Waldman’s Our Flag Was Still There, Wendy Miller’s State of (Dis)Union, and Hugh Biber’s distress-signal inversion of the stars and stripes turn national iconography into a semaphore of warning. These aren’t subtle gestures; they’re flare guns.

Others go for blunt provocation: Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Pedophile and Christopher Griffith’s Free deploy language as weapon and wound, while Dan Devine’s frottaged handcuffs and Arnold Lieberman’s shattered globe make clear that the machinery of restraint—political, planetary—feels increasingly brittle. Stephen Whisler’s Walking the Bomb stalks the gallery like a specter of consequences long deferred.

Yet the show’s power lies in its range of approaches. Donna Moylan’s My Elephant—gentler, more humane—nonetheless conjures the GOP’s charging mascot, recast here as something caught between vulnerability and menace. John Franklin’s bestial forms slouch, Yeats-like, toward Washington; Meg Lipke’s Position of Power hunches in a posture familiar to anyone who has watched a strongman’s appetite exceed the available table. Maureen Beitler’s The Shearing gives us the black sheep splayed and exposed, somehow both brutal and tender. Sue Muskat’s InThralled With Freedom, its gloved hands striking a matchbook, casts the fragility of civic ideals in the sudden flare before ignition.

Quieter works—Deborah Dancy’s Resistance, Virginia Reath’s The Girl Who Made a Mistake, Mark Safan’s By the Dawn’s Early Light—operate like pressure systems, shaping mood and atmosphere rather than detonating statements. Lawson’s own pieces, including Where the Light Enters and Kill, slip between illumination and shadow, as though suggesting that the line between the two is both perilous and porous.

Some artists use surrealism, nostalgia, or meticulous craft to widen the aperture: Adam Parker Smith’s Bucatini Amphora skewers the fetish of luxury during national unspooling; Barbara Kilpatrick’s Goya-infused Mommy’s Smock invokes the devouring parent-state; Dennis Gordon’s Inflection Point and Meg Hitchcock’s Lamentation labor with patient precision, as if insistence itself were a form of resistance.

In the end, “Gherao” isn’t merely a protest exhibition—it’s a reminder that when institutions fail to uphold their obligations, artists step into the breach. They encircle. They witness. And they demand that the rest of us stop trying to slip out the back door.

“Gherao”
November 21–24, 12–5pm
362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson and 137 County Route 24, East Chatham.
Reception: November 22, 5–7:30pm, Hudson location.