Join us for a special Artist Open House marking the close of Scenic Vistas, our sweeping exhibition featuring the work of leading contemporary Hudson Valley artists. This is your chance to engage directly with the artists in a casual, free-flowing setting, hear about their creative processes, and gain insight into the ideas and techniques behind their work.
Explore the exhibition at your own pace, enjoy the scenic surroundings, and take the opportunity to ask questions, share impressions, and connect with the artist who made this exhibition possible.
Your ticket includes admission to the artist open house, full exhibition, and Boscobel’s gardens and grounds. Members at the Partner Level ($150) and above receive 20% off.
Scenic Vistasexplores how landscape depictions shaped domestic life, design, and identity in New York well before the rise of the Hudson River School in the mid-19th century.
On view across the Historic House Museum, Visitor Center Gallery, and Great Lawn, Scenic Vistas brings together pre-1850’s decorative arts alongside contemporary works to reveal the enduring role of the Hudson Valley’s landscapes in art and culture. Objects on display include ceramics, furniture, wallpaper, and textiles by artists living and working in the Hudson Valley.
Contemporary artists in dialogue with these historic objects include Kat Howard, Betsy Jacks, and James McElhinney, with new commissions by Alison McNulty and Jean-Marc Sovak. Their installations respond directly to Boscobel’s site and history, layering perspectives on landscape, memory, and preservation.
Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Thomas Cole’s formative Hudson River journey, Scenic Vistas underscores how early landscape imagery helped establish aesthetic ideals later embraced by the Hudson River School. The exhibition reminds us that the artistic impulse to frame, idealize, and interpret the Hudson Valley has deep and lasting roots.
Participating Artists
Kat Howard makes fiber art that addresses the history of the persecution of women, through which, she interrogates her own identity as a survivor of abuse and sexual violence. She uses abstraction, the innate emotional language of texture, and the repulsion/attraction of touch in her visual work to capture the fight to break free from trauma.
Howard’s pieces either have a physicality to them that feels almost human, or they are expressionist representations of landscapes where the individual is noticeably absent. There is an emphasis on the sense memory we collectively have with textiles. Her material choices are integral to her tactile artistic concept—ranging from silkworm cocoons and merino wool roving to handspun yarn, raw cotton, leather, and muslin.
Howard’s artwork is an intimate exploration of gender and gender roles, sexism, and oppression, asking the questions: what happens to the body when it is forced to become a vessel for trauma? In what ways do we physically carry pain? How is the self altered afterwards?
Kat Howard was born in Rochester, New York. She earned a BA in Creative Writing and Art History from Brandeis University in 2006, and worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art until 2010, when she left the museum world to pursue MFAs in Studio Art and Poetry, which she received from Mills College in 2013. Since graduating, Howard has been working as an independent artist exhibiting her art, mentoring, and teaching. She lives in Kingston, New York.
Betsy Jacks is a visual artist, writer, and Executive Director Emerita of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York City and in the Hudson Valley, and her written work has been published by both academic and commercial presses.
Jacks’ artistic career began with her degree in both art history and studio art at Duke University. After moving back to New York, she studied and exhibited at the Art Students’ League and was included in the Whitney Museum staff exhibition in 2000, 2001 and 2002. She established a practice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she held open studio events, exhibited in local venues, and sold work to private collectors. Since moving to the Hudson Valley, she has exhibited at the Arkell Museum, Lyndhurst Mansion, Joust, Spencertown Academy, CREATE, Brik Gallery and LABspace, and her work is in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art.
From 2003 through 2024 she was the Executive Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site — an art museum and historic home of a 19th-century artist in New York’s Hudson Valley that she transformed from an unknown house museum with no professional staff into an international destination with 20 staff, a campus of six buildings, and an annual budget of nearly $2 million. During her two decades at the historic site, she oversaw the curation of twenty-five art exhibitions, publication of thirty books, restoration of three 19th-century buildings and construction of two new ones. Her essays and forewords have been published by The Monacelli Press in New York, Hirmer Publishers in Munich, Yale University Press, Cornell University Press, and The Artist Book Foundation. She has presented at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, The New-York Historical Society, the American Association of Museums annual conference, The Albany Institute of History & Art, and many other museums and societies. She is frequently featured in documentary films, TV news, print media and radio programs and is an annual guest on WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
In 2020 she was appointed to the New York Museum Regents Advisory Council, which offers advice and consultation on issues of policy and service to museums across the State. She is also the Vice-Chair of the Hudson River Valley Greenway, created by New York State to develop a regional strategy for preserving scenic, natural, historic, cultural and recreational resources; and she is on the Management Committee for the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, which collaborates with government agencies, non-profit groups and private partners to interpret, preserve and celebrate the nationally significant cultural and natural resources of the Hudson River Valley.
Between 1999 and 2003, Jacks was Director of Marketing at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1997 she earned an MBA in Marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she received the Dean’s Service Award for creating a new student-run organization, Culture Connection, which brought business school students to cultural events in Chicago. Prior to attending Kellogg, she managed exhibitions at a 57th Street gallery of contemporary art and worked with the start-up non-profit, GEN ART, now a leading arts and entertainment company. She currently lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her husband and two daughters.
James Lancel McElhinney is a published author and visual artist focused on topics related to travel, history, and art, and the environment. McElhinney is a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alumnus with a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA in painting from Yale.
He is the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Grant, and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include James McElhinney:Discover the Hudson Anew at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY, On the Water: The Schuylkill River, at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. PA, and American Nocturnes at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe.
McElhinney is an Arthur Miller Foundation Artist & Industry Council member, and a Trustee of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. Website: www.mcelhinneyart.com,
Alison McNulty is an artist, educator, curator, and gallery director based in Newburgh, NY. Her interconnected roles serve a collective spirit of community and co-mentorship that tends to the margins, values diversity and nuance, and includes the non-human world. Through all aspects of her work, Alison prioritizes embodied practices in knowledge and culture-making, offers an expansive and inclusive vision of where and how art might be experienced in the world and who it’s for, and works to compel meaningful engagements with art, each other, and the environment through deep modes of attention and care.
Alison’s interdisciplinary research across and outside the arts is characterized by a poetics that strives to weave intellectual rigor with the somatic and mysterious. Through ephemeral and site-responsive artwork, Alison reveals layered histories, ecological entanglements, beauty, violence, loss, and playful absurdities embodied in ordinary reclaimed materials and precarious places.
Using fragile material and structural traces as a starting point, Alison confronts socio-ecological issues and value systems related to notions of progress, resources, permanence, and individualism. She hopes instead to approach an ethics guided by relationship, reciprocity, flux, and belonging. The ephemeral nature of her work is meant to reveal or reimagine the ways we participate in cycles of human and geological time. Emerging from research curiosities across the natural sciences, archeology, poetry, diverse writers and thinkers, and place-based research, Alison’s projects are accomplished through meditative ritual processes, literal explorations of landscape, experimentation with materials, and collaboration with natural processes. She is interested in the potential of art toward invoking long, overlapping, and discordant experiences of time and place, generating relational awareness beyond the human, and affirming our ability to find both awe and meaning in the mundane.
Alison’s work has been presented at museums, galleries, conferences, farms, historic sites, forests, performance spaces, and abandoned and neglected spaces throughout the US and in Europe and Columbia. In 2023 she was awarded an Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Commission and received the 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University in St. Louis and the Empowered Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson in support of her “House Project Newburgh,” in partnership with the Artist in Vacancy initiative of the Newburgh Community Landbank (2023).
Selected exhibitions include Casas Riegner, Bogota, Columbia; Maguire Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Garden, Stone Ridge, NY; Metro Studios, Bridgeport, CT; Basilica Hudson, Hudson, NY; Kube Art Center Beacon, NY; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY; Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY; WAAM, Woodstock, NY; PS21, Chatham, NY; International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Santo Tirso, Portugal; Art Lot, Brooklyn, NY; Terrain Biennial, Newburgh, NY; and the Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY. McNulty has attended residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, and STONELEAF Retreat, and created House Project, a self-made residency in an abandoned house in Gainesville, FL.
Alison earned her BFA from Washington University and received the Alumni Fellowship from the University of Florida, where she completed her MFA. She is a Part-Time Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design and a union steward for the ACT-UAW Local 7902. She has also taught part-time at Brooklyn College and Marist College, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whitman College and the University of Florida. She served three years on the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee, where her work focused on creating free public programming centering the work and voices of Indigenous artists and cultural producers.
Alison’s curatorial projects at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY include Listening to Land: Imaginal Technologies, Material Conduits, & Landscape Translations Toward Perceiving Place (2023); Back and Forth, Between Names, an exhibition about bodies of water (2024); and From the Ground UP, an evolving exhibition and series of public gatherings co-curated with Jean-Marc Superville Sovak commemorating those buried in what was historically known as Newburgh’s “Colored” Burial Ground (2023-2024).
Since 2023, Alison has served as the Gallery Director of Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY, a contemporary art space thriving under the umbrella of Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a mixed-use, non-profit housing and arts redevelopment project. At Ann Street Gallery, Alison leads a six-month Emerging Artist Fellowship Program in collaboration with a broad network of regional mentors and community partners and directs a six-month Artist Researcher in Residence program focusing on community-driven interdisciplinary creative research projects. In her role as director, Alison works to create arts programming and exhibitions that are challenging and accessible, serve disenfranchised artists and community members, provide tangible support to artists, highlight underrepresented perspectives and experimental practices, and ground conversations around art in embodied creative practices, diverse communities, and physical places.
Jean-Marc Superville Sovakis a multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator whose work critically fabulates around silent histories absent from dominant historical narratives.
Jean-Marc’s current projects include There Are NO Black Shakers; A Contemporary Folk Opera, supported by a NYSCA Support for Artists grant, directed in collaboration with violinist Gwen Laster, and performed at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, New York. A reprise performance funded by Arts Mid-Hudson’s Arts & Culture Project Grant is currently being scheduled for Spring 2025. His a-Historical Landscapes, 19th-century landscape engravings altered to include images from contemporaneous Anti-Slavery publications, have been included in the permanent collections of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.
Jean-Marc’s participatory performance works includeFreeborn Trails, tracing steps on the Underground Railroad at Hudson Valley historic sites, and a Burial for White Supremacy. Jean-Marc has also earned a reputation as a Reparative Consultant, guiding institutions like Ramapo College of New Jersey in considering its founding family’s fortune in refining sugar and enslaved labor and setting the stage for considering how future scholarships could benefit students of Caribbean descent with a project titled Stolen Sugar Makes the Sweetest Books.
Jean-Marc’s public sculpture, Six of the First, a memorial to some of the first Africans to arrive in Rhode Island, is now part of the Newport Historical Society’s permanent collection. His monuments to Afro-Dutch pioneers, a Rockland County percent-for-art public art project titled Blauvelt Blues, will be unveiled in 2025.
Jean-Marc works as Studio Assistant to Marilyn Minter and as an Educator at the Dia Art Foundation and has been a Visiting Artist/Lecturer at Bard College, SUNY New Paltz, Columbia University and Vassar College. In 2020, he was guest curator for “We Wear the Mask: Race and Representation at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art.” He lives and works in Plattekill, NY.
This event is part of a larger programming series to celebrate our ongoing exhibition, Scenic Vistas: Landscape as Culture in Early New York, now on view until November 16, 2025. Scenic Vistas is made possible thanks to generous loans from partnering museums and private collections as well as support from:
