Art to See on Day Trips From New York City This Spring

The busy calendar of fairs and auctions in May makes New York City an attractive hub of activity for the art crowd. But if a breather is needed or desired, a day trip may be in order. Here are a few art destinations worth considering.

Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J.

Located at Rutgers University, about an hour from Penn Station by train, the Zimmerli — with a substantial collection strong in American, European and Soviet nonconformist art — has long been overshadowed by New York City institutions. But the museum has drawn record attendance since “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” opened in February. The show is a broad survey of 97 well-established and emerging Indigenous artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Terran Last Gun, Wendy Red Star and Marie Watt. It was curated by the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who was honored with a Whitney Museum retrospective in 2023 and died at 85, a week before the Zimmerli show opened.

On view through Dec. 21, it is the largest of more than 30 exhibitions that Smith organized throughout her career in the United States. “Jaune helped define Native art history based on the artists she gave a platform to over the years,” said the Zimmerli director, Maura Reilly. Rather than apply an authoritative curatorial style, Smith asked each artist “how they wanted to be represented,” Reilly said, “very different from how I’ve worked typically.” Smith called the show “a celebration of life,” Reilly recalled: “She said it was about ‘kinship, community, survivance, solidarity and resilience.’”

Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, N.Y.

Two centuries ago, the artist Thomas Cole took a momentous boat ride up the Hudson River to Catskill, where the scenery inspired him to found the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He also fell in love with Maria Bartow and moved in 1836 to her family home in Catskill, painting the view from their porch of the Catskill Mountains more than any other.

At the artist’s home and free-standing studio, under two hours by train from New York City, the exhibition “Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora & Contemporary Responses” opens Saturday, juxtaposing botanical watercolors and painting on porcelain by Cole’s daughter Emily, an accomplished artist in her own right. It also includes works by eight female artists working today.

“We engaged them in a call and response,” said the chief curator of the historic site, Kate Menconeri, who curated the show with Amanda Malmstrom, the associate curator. “There’s a huge resurgence of artists working with ceramic arts and flowers, so it’s this timely moment to recognize how vital these practices are.”

Ann Agee, Valerie Hegarty and Francesca DiMattio were inspired to make new works, while Jacqueline Bishop, Courtney M. Leonard, Jiha Moon, Michelle Sound and Stephanie Syjuco made site-responsive installations. These are all in lively conversation throughout the house and studio with Emily Cole’s china wares (originally produced and exhibited in the same studio where her father once worked).

A new visitor center, which opened last year and serves light food, unites the historic site’s grounds and gardens. “We want visitors to go out into the landscape that inspired this work,” Menconeri said, “and see these peonies and lilies and irises that Emily painted in the 19th century still growing here today.”

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, N.Y.

Tucked away on the campus of the State University of New York at New Paltz, about a 45-minute drive south of Thomas Coles’s house, the Dorsky Museum is presenting an exhibition that also uses the bicentennial of the Hudson River School founder’s boat trip as a departure point. “Landmines: Dawoud Bey, Christina Fernandez, Richard Mosse, Rick Silva,” on view through July 13, “is a show that takes issue with its own impetus,” said the Dorsky curator, Sophie Landres. The 19th-century movement, which put the Hudson Valley on the map in the canon of art history but also presented the landscape as an unpopulated wilderness, “was so complicit in promoting Manifest Destiny and so fraught with the erasure of Indigenous cultures,” she said.

Interested in how the earliest landscape photographs also date back 200 years, Landres has selected four contemporary artists who have camera-based practices and explore landscape as something that can conceal or reveal social history. Mosse’s huge, surreal colorful prints use advanced photography techniques to expose environmental devastation around the Amazon basin affected by colonial conquest and a history of mining and industrial agriculture. Bey’s poetic black-and-white images of former plantations seem haunted by the trauma of slavery embedded in the bucolic landscape.

While the issues may be weighty, the exhibition is visually sumptuous. “It’s bright, it’s vibrant, it’s weird,” Landres said. “There are surprises in it.”

Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, N.Y.

Meaning “warehouse” in Italian, Magazzino was founded in 2017 by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu to share their collection of Italian postwar and contemporary art with the public. Visitors arriving by Metro-North Railroad can take a quick shuttle ride that Magazzino provides for $3 from the station to its campus.

The 20,000-square-foot main building, an elegantly retrofitted former industrial space, houses Magazzino’s core collection by Arte Povera (meaning “Poor Art”) artists such as Mario and Marisa Merz, Alighiero Boetti, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Jannis Kounellis, who rebelled against the art market in the 1960s and ’70s and used humble objects and natural materials in their work.

In a smaller pavilion that opened in 2023 for temporary exhibitions, “Maria Lai. A Journey to America,” on view through July 28, is the first North American survey of Lai, a cult figure who was widely recognized in Italy and rarely traveled outside her native Sardinia (she died in 2013). “She did make one very influential trip to New York in 1968, and that’s the premise of this show,” said the Magazzino director, Adam Sheffer. Seeing constructed and collaged works with found objects by artists including Louise Nevelson and Robert Rauschenberg “had such a huge impact” on Lai’s vein of abstraction, Sheffer said. “She came back and rediscovered what was available to her in Sardinia, using textiles and sewing and looms.”

Lunch is served in the pavilion’s Café Silvia, with a picture window onto Magazzino’s garden and resident donkeys — a staple of the landscape in Sardinia where the founder Spanu is from.

Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.

For the art-minded, a trip to the East End of Long Island should always include a visit to the Parrish, particularly now with “Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire” on view through Sept. 1. It’s the first New York-area museum show in more than 20 years of this internationally acclaimed Iranian-born artist and filmmaker, who lives in exile in the United States.

The 30-year survey includes Neshat’s large-scale photographic series “Women of Allah,” which brought her to art-world attention in the 1990s, exploring the role of women and their resilience in restrictive Iranian society after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. More recently she’s turned her lens to her adopted country in “Land of Dreams” (2019), creating more than 100 images of individuals forming a collective portrait of America from the vantage point of an Iranian living in the United States.

“She just captures what’s going on in the world, and it’s always beautiful no matter how intense or how serious these issues are that she approaches,” said the Parrish chief curator, Corinne Erni. “It’s about men and women, about East and West, about darkness and lightness, and good and evil. It’s about the ambiguity.”