{"id":766899,"date":"2026-06-28T14:25:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T14:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/766899\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T14:25:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T14:25:18","slug":"how-a-dead-hudson-valley-mall-became-an-art-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/766899\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Dead Hudson Valley Mall Became an Art Exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

The heyday of the Hudson Valley Mall\u2014and indeed the American shopping mall itself\u2014is long gone. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sprawling complex just north of Kingston housed as many as 77 stores and businesses, including Kmart, JCPenney, Sears, and a bustling food court. Today, long stretches of empty storefronts are punctuated by a handful of practical holdouts: a hair salon, a movie theater, two gyms, and a lone Target.<\/p>\n

For curator Marly Hammer and the creative collective Jasper Richmus, founded by Kate Asmus and John Richey, that atmosphere of decline doesn\u2019t signal an ending; it\u2019s an invitation.<\/p>\n

Their project, The Mall<\/a>, inserts contemporary painting, sculpture, installation, video, photography, and design into the architecture of the shopping center, transforming former storefronts and little-trafficked corridors into temporary exhibition spaces while embracing the mall\u2019s history as a site of commerce, community, and self-invention.<\/p>\n

The exhibition is open through Sunday as part of the seventh edition of Upstate Art Weekend<\/a>, the annual summer event that has blossomed into a vital cultural pilgrimage, with more than 160 exhibitions, open studios, performances, and installations unfolding across the Hudson Valley and Catskills.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

The former Hot Topic houses pop-up shops by Brooklyn\u2019s Lagoon and Kingston\u2019s Everywhere Shop, and a group exhibition about nostalgia and teen angst titled \u201cOff Topic.\u201dPhoto: Nick Carder<\/p>\n

For the curators, the mall was never simply a place to shop. Long before algorithms and influencers, it functioned as a laboratory of identity. They were places of makeup counters and record stores, bookstores and food courts, back-to-school shopping trips and long afternoons whiled away promenading with friends. You went there not only to buy clothes but to figure out who you wanted to become.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to lean into the history of the mall,\u201d Hammer says during a walkthrough of the exhibition: \u201cConsumerism, pop culture, nostalgia, and community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea for the project came after the three attended a movie at the mall\u2019s NCG Cinema last year and began imagining the vacant storefronts as exhibition spaces. Months of persistent calls to mall management eventually secured access to three empty stores, which the team spruced up with fresh coats of paint and a scrub of years of accumulated dust from the abandoned interiors.<\/p>\n

However, they refused to sweep out the building\u2019s ghosts. The former GNC hosts a group exhibition, \u201cGallery New Contemporary<\/a>,\u201d devoted to consumer culture and featuring Dina Cline\u2019s miniature ceramics, among them a Tamagotchi and a Game Boy. Nearby, Jeffrey Augustine Songco\u2019s larger-than-life Friendship Bracelets dangle near the ceiling, turning the humble woven token of adolescent friendship into something unexpectedly architectural.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The heyday of the Hudson Valley Mall\u2014and indeed the American shopping mall itself\u2014is long gone. During the late…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":766900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,21762,343],"class_list":["post-766899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-textabovecenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/766900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}