A series of exhibitions in neglected or humble buildings afford art the space to slack and slouch
Class portraits of children wearing matching cardigans, sunglasses and deadpan frowns lined the entrance of Ockawamick School. These were not pictures of the student body, however, but cheeky inkjet prints by artist Miguel Calderón. The one-storey school building and its nine-hectare property in Claverack, a town of fewer than 6,000 residents in the Hudson Valley, fell into disuse in 1999 and was jointly acquired by six New York art galleries for $1.2 million during the pandemic. The grounds reopened this summer as an exhibition venue under a new moniker, The Campus.
The venue’s first, untitled show was predictably uncanny: rooms in a midcentury American high school, with their disintegrating amenities left untouched, given exhibition labels and filled with objects from the city. In the gymnasium, for instance, were two monumental nylon-skinned divas and a fabric collage by Lara Schnitger that had been displayed in her most recent show at Anton Kern in Manhattan. The late Lee Mullican’s oil painting Kachinas (1948) hanging in a nearby classroom, which depicts four ceremonial dolls rendered diagrammatically on a frenetic blue and green ground, had been part of a 2023 exhibition of the artist’s estate at James Cohan. Kern and Cohan co-own The Campus alongside partners at Andrew Kreps, Bortolami, Kaufmann Repetto and Kurimanzutto.
The schoolrooms’ former functions were evinced by obvious material artefacts – epoxy countertops, a cabinet of rock samples and an eye-rinsing station, for example, identified the science lab where Bendt Eyckermans’s paintings and Haegue Yang’s sculptures harmonised in a particularly lovely way – and further corroborated by the observations of my fellow visitors on the Sunday of Upstate Art Weekend, a sprawling festival that’s taken place since 2020 in towns 200 kilometres north of New York City, whom I could count on to gleefully point out, in each successive space, “This was the home-ec room”, or, “This was the principal’s office”. (These rooms now house works by Michael E. Smith, Spencer Finch and Renée Green.) Aside from the remarks, however, nothing in the building coherently articulated Ockawamick School’s 50-year history.
While The Campus’s mission to repurpose an educational facility places it in a lineage with New York art spaces such as MoMA PS1 and Jack Shainman’s The School, its derelict aesthetic chimes with that of concurrent one-off shows in the city like Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run, a self-funded survey mounted in a vacant Financial District office where graffiti and work permits left on the walls happened to share the colour scheme of the wire sculptures, silkscreen paintings and photographs the artist added, and MiCasa, a pleasantly junky group exhibition curated in Amalia Ulman’s unrenovated Upper West Side walkup, the perfect backdrop for works like Maggie Lee’s stolen nail polishes, Bruno Zhu’s Control-brand condoms and Hito Steyerl’s Lovely Andrea (2007). These shows lean into the perception of abandoned edifices as unsupervised, unruly zones of free play. As a result, the art on view is afforded the space to slack and to slouch.
In Ockawamick’s gymnasium, suspended on a stage where the school’s former students might have put on plays or received awards, were some of Andrea Bowers’s porch-swing assemblages. One was adorned with a blue banner that read, ‘Save Our Last Wild Places’, which seemed to reference the site of The Campus itself. What gets us to pay attention to these ‘wild places’ is perhaps the same romance of ruins that spurred the New York artworld to rent cars en masse in July – in short, a sense that one could see without knowing, could be immersed in history without having worked to crack it open.
