Season Preview 2024: Art Shows

From thematic group exhibitions to stunning solo projects, this summer’s regional fine art shows offer something for everyone. And if you’re looking for art that makes you think — particularly about nature, ecology, and the environment — this is your year. Here’s our suggestion for an epic north-to-south museum and gallery road trip.

1. “The Plastic Bag Store”
MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
This expansive multi-disciplinary project, a collaborative production between MASS MoCA and Williamstown Theatre Festival, is billed as “a tragicomic ode to the foreverness of plastic.” It features a supermarket, its shelves stocked with thousands of original, hand-sculpted items made from discarded, single-use plastics. Brooklyn-based artist Robin Frohardt isa 2018 Guggenheim Fellow for drama and performance art. May 9-September 2

2. "Fragile Beauty: Treasures from the Corning Museum of Glass”
The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
Corning Incorporated, a renowned materials science company known for glass and ceramic innovations including Corelle tableware and smartphones’ Gorilla Glass, established a museum in 1951 to preserve and feature glass objects from around the world. What a delight, then, to have the opportunity to see 28 pieces from the collection without making the four-hour drive to Corning, New York. Presented in the Clark’s Michael Conforti Pavilion, these objects draw upon plants, animals, and other aspects of nature for inspiration — and are some of the most exquisitely gorgeous things you will see this summer. July 4-October 27

"Speak Softly" by Julie Bell. 2017, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

3. “The Wild Indoors: The Animal Art of Julie Bell”
Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA
Julie Bell’s paintings are like chameleons; defiantly singular on their own, they seemingly shift genre depending on context. Described as an illustrator, fantasy artist, science fiction artist, comic artist, imaginative realist, and ARC Living Master™, Bell makes highly detailed, emotional paintings inspired by nature, narrative, and the human figure. For this exhibition, Pennsylvania-based Bell will showcase around 30 paintings of wildlife — domestic and exotic, innocent and dangerous, calm and chaotic. Her paintings are imbued with symbolism and metaphor; “[the tigers’] teeth are visible to us and we clearly know their capacity for ugly and powerful destruction, but we only see gentleness and trust in their display. It’s a body language that we recognize in our own human social interactions.” June 1-September 29

4. “Microcosms”
Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA
Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Leonhardt Galleries are something of a hidden treasure in the regional gallery scene as the Garden is best known for, well, its gardens. But the fairly new exhibition program has mounted impressive, thought-provoking multimedia shows from local and national artists whose work is inspired by the natural world. This summer, the galleries will feature a solo exhibition of works by Connecticut artist Peter D. Gerakaris. “I invite viewers to lose themselves within the minutiae of each microcosm, just as I do through the process of painting, drawing, and being in nature,” says Gerakaris. “From the macro perspective, presenting varied strands hopefully stimulates viewers to discover common threads and to awaken our sense of place — especially in this paradisiacal setting — and how gardens can serve as nurturing portals between nature and culture.” June 7-August 4

"Spin" by Joy Taylor. 2022, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches

5. “Summertime”
Bernay Fine Art, Great Barrington, MA
Aptly titled, “Summertime” will feature the work of roster artists Karen Lederer, Jason Middlebrook, Janet Rickus, and Joy Taylor as well as Columbia County-based artist Lawre Stone. This group show offers five diverse interpretations of the eternally interpreted still life. Middlebrook is the most literal; his paintings on live-edge wood slabs often retrace the history of each tree through its growth rings. Like seasoned chefs, Lederer, Stone, and Taylor reduce their subjects to shapes, textures, colors, and marks that intensify and enrich the beauty of natural phenomena. And trompe l'oeil paintings by Rickus, a Berkshire favorite, are expertly crafted studies of relationships — both literally and metaphorically. July 13-August 11

6. “THE SUMMER SHOW”
Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY
Self-described as “the first fine art gallery in Hudson, NY,” Carrie Haddad Gallery is a staple of Hudson’s art scene. “THE SUMMER SHOW” is a two-month-long group exhibition featuring new abstract paintings by Shawn Dulaney, Joseph Maresca, and Bruce Murphy as well as technicolor Hudson Valley landscapes by the late Bill Sullivan (1942–2010). Germantown, New York-based artist Stephen Walling will debut intricately carved and painted abstract wood wall sculpture, and Dora Somosi will present a new series of cyanotypes in the second-floor photography gallery. June 21-August 11

“Bud Vase II” by Rachel Burgess. 2022, monotype, 36 x 36 inches

7. “Simple Gifts”
Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson, NY
Upon walking into Susan Eley Fine Art in downtown Hudson, you may, at first glance, think you are looking at a room full of Andy Warhol’s screenprints. At three feet by three feet, his iconic portraits are the size of many of Rachel Burgess’s monotypes featured here. Complementary color palettes — bright reds and dull greens, dark purples and pale yellows, baby blues and rusty oranges — are similar as well. However, the difference between the two lies not simply in age but in concept. While Warhol deconstructed fame, Burgess elevates the ordinary; specifically, flowers brought to her by her husband, an NYPD detective, from her local corner deli in Manhattan. Burgess immortalizes the short-lived flowers by printing them on a monumental scale, allowing her to “pay tribute to the things we take for granted, to the city, to its essential workers and services and to the fundamental relationships that underpin our lives.” July 5-August 18

8. “Just Drawing”
Geary, Millerton, NY
A new series of drawings on paper by Brooklyn-based artist Catherine Haggarty is a welcome tonal shift to the monumentality of many of the exhibitions on this list. Haggarty’s intimate snapshots of her life unfold in the gallery like Polaroids on a coffee table. “Using a floor (wood grain or tiles) as a location but also as a subject lets me invite the viewers into a thinking space but also a physical space that they may recognize,” the artist writes. “This nod to physical material which often frames our home experience is personal but also universal.” June 8-July 28

9. “Tall Shadows in Short Order”
Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY
Wassaic Project’s annual summer exhibition is always a large one —-30 to 40 artists present their work in Maxon Mills, the organization’s seven-story, 8,000-square-foot historic grain elevator. If the setting isn’t enough to entice you to check out “Tall Shadows in Short Order,” the work of these three participants may be. Argentinian artist Luciana Abait will be featuring a site-specific version of her installation “The Maps that Failed Us,” an imposing, geographically illogical, and impassable mountain range that alludes to arbitrary borders and displaced migrants. Katie Peck, a summer 2024 artist-in-residence, will be creating a nearly life-sized felt semi-truck driven by Midge Gertrout the Rainbow Trout, a character Peck created to bring awareness to “all creatures’ and plant life’s future living in a quickly escalating carbon filled atmosphere.” And Robin Crookall’s sophisticated black-and-white photographs are actually images of miniature models the artist constructed to challenge viewers’ preexisting notions of reality, memory, and place. May 18-September 14

“Rabbit Hole Singularity” by Peter Hamlin. 2023, acrylic ink on canvas, 74 x 60 inches

10. “Octopus’s Garden”
Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT
Rounding out this road trip with a return to the theme of our natural world is an exhibition featuring four artists interested in the relationship between organisms and ourselves, and in artificiality that mimics and expands the vocabulary of observation. Envisioning the future, where technology will be indistinguishable from life, Peter Hamlin uses painting, drawing, printmaking, and prefabricated objects informed by elements of storytelling and mythmaking. Michiyo Ihara’s meticulously crafted pen drawings explore the profound connection between the fleeting moments of blossoming flowers and the evolving essence of the soul. Catherine Latson’s gorgeously organic wall-mounted sculptures blur the lines between animal and plant, realism and fantasy, sculpture and specimen. And Julie Maren’s “Biophilia” installations of natural, artificial, and recycled materials — such as acorn tops, glass beads, and glitter — conjure an engineered symbiosis or connectedness of nature and the artificial. July 13-August 25