One June evening in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Esopus, N.Y., 51 artists took over an abandoned dollar store.<\/p>\n
For some, the crowded, colorful pop-up was bittersweet: Neighbors initially resisted this 9,100-square-foot building\u2019s 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\u2019s been vacant since.<\/p>\n
When the founders of the local arts nonprofit Site Seen approached the store\u2019s 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, \u201cit\u2019s just sitting there,\u201d Mr. Cooper said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I walk into a space, for me to think that it\u2019s beautiful, it has to be somewhat ruinous,\u201d she said. \u201cBrutalist architecture, a lot of destruction of space, a lot of rubble \u2014 that\u2019s kind of my inner landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
But when she saw the fluorescent-lit Dollar General in Esopus, she said she felt an emotional connection to the building, appreciating its \u201cpsychological honesty.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 harbingers of climate change \u2014 over the faces on dollar bills.<\/p>\n
In the Dollar General\u2019s crisp desolation, Ms. Scepanovic and Ms. Miller beheld a different kind of ruin. A building like this one is \u201ctypecast into a role\u201d that it will struggle to break out of, Ms. Scepanovic said. \u201cIt becomes identified with its last use, to an extent that people can\u2019t even imagine it as anything else,\u201d she explained, adding that that\u2019s a heavy burden for a piece of real estate to carry.<\/p>\n
Ms. Scepanovic and Ms. Miller, who splits her time between Manhattan and Woodstock, N.Y., aren\u2019t the only regional artists who have turned an eye to the potential of disused retail.<\/p>\n
For last month\u2019s Upstate Art Weekend<\/a>, 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 \u201cThe Mall.\u201d When the exhibition ended, the artwork migrated from storefronts to an online store<\/a> (a familiar progression).<\/p>\n 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 \u201cfinal stages.\u201d He said he also has two applications in reserve.<\/p>\n For Ms. Scepanovic, that show brought things \u201cfull circle,\u201d she said: \u201cReal estate displaced a lot of artists in Brooklyn. Now artists are doing a pop-up art show in a real estate office.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While the market exposure is unintentional, it\u2019s not surprising. An art show \u201cgives people the opportunity to look again\u201d at a space they thought they knew, or that they had put out of mind, Ms. Miller said.<\/p>\n Brokers and friends have offered them spaces for potential use, but she and Ms. Scepanovic are picky. \u201cPeople want to give us the polished sites,\u201d Ms. Miller said, but she prefers \u201cthe grimy ones.\u201d<\/p>\n In Esopus, the vacated Dollar General building, listed at $1.45 million<\/a>, is \u201clike new\u201d and zoned for \u201cjust about anything,\u201d according to the broker, Mr. Cooper. It was one of 96 stores<\/a> the chain shuttered in the United States in 2025 \u2014 even as it opened around 575 more<\/a>. Mr. Cooper did receive two inquiries resulting from the art show, though neither progressed to a sale.<\/p>\n While a temporary art activation isn\u2019t going to fill an empty storefront forever, Ms. Scepanovic said, \u201cit can interrupt this psychological effect that vacancy has on the local town,\u201d inspiring people who had disengaged with the area. \u201cWhat happens next,\u201d she added, \u201cis a matter of who really takes that and flies with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One June evening in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Esopus, N.Y., 51 artists took over an abandoned dollar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":792897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1029,228,226,227,229,68444,88,336906,21335,275023],"class_list":["post-792896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-dollar-general-corp","tag-entertainment","tag-hudson-river-valley-ny","tag-new-york-state","tag-real-estate-commercial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}