Download the New Folk gallery guide

Featuring twenty-nine local artists, New Folk is a vibrant exploration of craft, cultural heritage, and community in the Hudson Valley. Folk is where old cultural traditions meet contemporary conditions. Folk art affords insight both into our collective cultural heritage and into the unique expressions of individual makers. New Folk showcases artwork that distinctively captures the spirit of contemporary folk practice in the Hudson Valley today. It offers a vision of what folk art can be—highly skilled, locally-sourced, idiosyncratic, and resourceful.

New Folk is also a catch-all for the long history of visitors and immigrants to the Hudson Valley, from early European colonizers, enslaved people, and settlers, to agricultural migrants, Catskill tourists, city weekenders, and many other kinds of “new folk” who have journeyed to this area. With them comes creative and sometimes contentious shifts in our cultural landscape. Some of the artists in the exhibition invoke these regional histories, others draw on the inherited traditions and memories from homelands that new folk carry with them.