One June evening in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Esopus, N.Y., 51 artists took over an abandoned dollar store.

For some, the crowded, colorful pop-up was bittersweet: Neighbors initially resisted this 9,100-square-foot building’s development. In 2019 it opened anyway, becoming one of four Dollar Generals within about a nine-mile radius. By spring 2025, it had shuttered. It’s been vacant since.

When the founders of the local arts nonprofit Site Seen approached the store’s listing agent, Dennis Cooper, he and the property owner agreed: Why not let them fill it with paintings, sculpture and site-specific installations for a night? After all, “it’s just sitting there,” Mr. Cooper said.

The sculptor Aleksandra Scepanovic co-founded Site Seen, which hosts art takeovers in vacant spaces, last August with her friend Jennifer Miller. Ms. Scepanovic worked in real estate for 25 years in New York City before relocating to the Kingston, N.Y., area full-time in 2020. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she previously worked as a war reporter in Bosnia.

“When I walk into a space, for me to think that it’s beautiful, it has to be somewhat ruinous,” she said. “Brutalist architecture, a lot of destruction of space, a lot of rubble — that’s kind of my inner landscape.”

But when she saw the fluorescent-lit Dollar General in Esopus, she said she felt an emotional connection to the building, appreciating its “psychological honesty.”

In the June show, some installations offered a commentary on the commercial space itself: One artist arranged a weather balloon to represent the connection between society and capitalism; another filled a display freezer with ice cream made from the excesses of consumption (water bottle caps, shopping bags and plastic wrappers); and another painted penguins — harbingers of climate change — over the faces on dollar bills.

In the Dollar General’s crisp desolation, Ms. Scepanovic and Ms. Miller beheld a different kind of ruin. A building like this one is “typecast into a role” that it will struggle to break out of, Ms. Scepanovic said. “It becomes identified with its last use, to an extent that people can’t even imagine it as anything else,” she explained, adding that that’s a heavy burden for a piece of real estate to carry.

Ms. Scepanovic and Ms. Miller, who splits her time between Manhattan and Woodstock, N.Y., aren’t the only regional artists who have turned an eye to the potential of disused retail.

For last month’s Upstate Art Weekend, an annual blitz of events, a group secured permission from a leasing office to turn a stretch of abandoned stores in the Hudson Valley Mall, like Hot Topic and GameStop, into a three-day art fair called “The Mall.” When the exhibition ended, the artwork migrated from storefronts to an online store (a familiar progression).

One side effect of this artistic exploration has been deal activity. For a year, Erik Serras had not had serious offers on a vacant real estate office he owns on South 4th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But days after Site Seen hosted a three-hour art show there in May, which saw hundreds of attendees, he said he received a wave of inquiries, including a leasing deal that is now in its “final stages.” He said he also has two applications in reserve.

For Ms. Scepanovic, that show brought things “full circle,” she said: “Real estate displaced a lot of artists in Brooklyn. Now artists are doing a pop-up art show in a real estate office.”

And in the Hudson Valley, the broker Win Morrison said he fielded several new offers on a marina on the Rondout Creek, listed at $3.5 million, after Site Seen took over the 15,600-square-foot space for a show in October. The duo turned oil buckets into pedestals and laid out black tablecloths to create a Jackson Pollock-esque canvas with the pigeon droppings that fell from the rafters.

Mr. Morrison said the flurry of inquiries about the Rondout Creek marina also inspired two other listed local marinas to consider throwing their own art exhibitions.

While the market exposure is unintentional, it’s not surprising. An art show “gives people the opportunity to look again” at a space they thought they knew, or that they had put out of mind, Ms. Miller said.

Brokers and friends have offered them spaces for potential use, but she and Ms. Scepanovic are picky. “People want to give us the polished sites,” Ms. Miller said, but she prefers “the grimy ones.”

In Esopus, the vacated Dollar General building, listed at $1.45 million, is “like new” and zoned for “just about anything,” according to the broker, Mr. Cooper. It was one of 96 stores the chain shuttered in the United States in 2025 — even as it opened around 575 more. Mr. Cooper did receive two inquiries resulting from the art show, though neither progressed to a sale.

While a temporary art activation isn’t going to fill an empty storefront forever, Ms. Scepanovic said, “it can interrupt this psychological effect that vacancy has on the local town,” inspiring people who had disengaged with the area. “What happens next,” she added, “is a matter of who really takes that and flies with it.”