As New York lurches into full-blown swamp mode—teetering between torrid heat, high humidity and sudden, moody summer storms—city dwellers resume their annual search for cooler air and greener pastures. As ever, pastoral upstate destinations offer the promise of both respite and a tightly curated slate of exhibitions across museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and an increasingly robust network of biennials.
One of the best ways to experience the full sweep of this programming is by visiting Upstate Art Weekend, which returns from Thursday, July 17 and runs through July 21 with a densely packed lineup of cultural initiatives in the Hudson Valley and beyond. Launched in 2020 with just twenty-three participants, the event has ballooned to include more than 155 exhibitors.
Still, Helen Toomer—the brains behind Upstate Art Weekend—asserts that keeping your itinerary simple is key: you can’t see it all, and that’s okay because you can always come back later in the season.
“This event isn’t about rushing,” she tells Observer. “It’s about slowing down, soaking in the journey between stops, and experiencing the natural beauty of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley along the way.” At its heart, Upstate Art Weekend is a celebration of community, collaboration, art and the outdoors—four elements Toomer considers essential to our collective well-being. “It was created to spotlight the incredible organizations, artists and cultural spaces that make this region so special, and to help forge lasting connections between visitors and locals alike.”
We combed through the official lineup and the programming of some of our favorite independent spaces to put together a curated guide to this season’s must-see upstate art shows.
Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun
Edward Hopper House and Museum
Through October 5, 2025
Japanese-American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama (Matsu) engages in a thoughtful dialogue with the enduring legacy of Hopper’s psychologically charged imagery, centering his exhibition on the iconic 1952 painting Morning Sun. Themes of solitude and life in a globalized, consumer-driven world—long central to Matsu’s work—resonate with Hopper’s sense of psychological stillness and urban isolation, often expressed through the quiet detachment of the individual in the American everyday. At the heart of the show is Matsu’s new large-scale painting Morning Sun Dance, which depicts a solitary woman caught in a moment of introspective stillness, echoing the quiet gravity of Hopper’s original figure. Yet in Matsu’s version, the subject is immersed in a vibrant, layered field of cultural references—his signature visual language—underscoring the tension between solitude and the overwhelming saturation of contemporary life. In a world awash with data, images and colliding geographies, these layers can forge connections but also evoke a dislocation from any rooted sense of self.
Within this framework, Matsu’s invocation of Hopper’s use of light takes on added complexity. As in Hopper’s work, light isolates the subject, heightening her emotional distance from the surrounding cascade of products, advertisements and aesthetic traditions. “What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house,” Hopper once said. Yet in that sunlight, he captured the anxious stillness of twentieth-century American life. Through this visual and conceptual exchange, Matsu draws out the continued urgency of Hopper’s psychological and formal investigations, reminding us how powerfully his work still speaks to the human condition in today’s global, media-saturated world.
