A sprawling school building in upstate New York that has been largely abandoned since the 1990s was filled once again with children, adults and dogs in all shapes and sizes when it reopened Saturday (29 June) as The Campus, a new art complex founded by six commercial galleries with locations in Manhattan.
A collaboration between the galleries Bortolami, James Cohan, Kaufmann Repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps and Kurimanzutto, the 78,000 sq. ft complex in the former Ockawamick School in Claverack spans 40 exhibition rooms, large areas devoted to climate-controlled storage and sprawling grounds that include an overgrown American-football field.
“Climate-controlled storage for all six galleries was always the initial and most critical mission, and we very early on realised that we weren’t going to be able to climate control the entire building,” says James Cohan, co-founder and partner in the namesake gallery. “It became an open discussion amongst the partners: what are the possibilities, and how can we collaborate publicly and get out of our silos?” He adds: “It’s a great work in progress.”
The inaugural presentations at The Campus include a large group exhibition featuring more than 80 artists from the participating galleries’ rosters and beyond, organised by the curator and dealer Timo Kappeller, and Double Dow, a showcase of the fifth cohort of artist and curatorial fellows at Nxthv, the art centre in New Haven, Connecticut, founded by Titus Kaphar and Jason Price (both until 27 October).
The installations unfold throughout the 1951 building, playing off its distinctive, time capsule-like character. The stage in the gymnasium is dominated by an enormous neon green sculpture by Andrea Bowers proclaiming “climate change is real” and several hanging tree-sitting chairs. The gymnasium and an outdoor court feature basketball hoops customised by Trenton Doyle Hancock. An irreverent Miguel Calderón video is projected in the shower of the boys’ locker room. Michael E. Smith invested the cupboards of the home-economics classroom with ceramic and assemblage sculptures. The Nxthvn fellow Eugene Macki filled a closet-like space next to the gym with mounds of scrap cardboard several feet deep below his bas-relief wood sculptures. Jingling interactive sculptures by Haegue Yang look all the more like unwieldy physics experiments here, installed in the science lab. William Forsythe has cleared part of the overgrown football field to stage an absurdly complicated outdoor game.
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