How a Dead Hudson Valley Mall Became an Art Exhibition

The heyday of the Hudson Valley Mall—and indeed the American shopping mall itself—is 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.

For curator Marly Hammer and the creative collective Jasper Richmus, founded by Kate Asmus and John Richey, that atmosphere of decline doesn’t signal an ending; it’s an invitation.

Their project, The Mall, 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’s history as a site of identity formation, commerce, and community.

The exhibition is open through Sunday as part of the seventh edition of Upstate Art Weekend, 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.

For Hammer, Asmus, and Richey, the mall was never simply a place to shop. Long before social media turned self-fashioning into a permanent public performance, malls functioned as laboratories of identity. They were places of makeup counters and record stores, bookstores and food courts, back-to-school shopping trips and long afternoons spent promenading with friends. You went there not only to buy clothes but to figure out who you wanted to become.

“We wanted to lean into the history of the mall,” Hammer says during a walkthrough of the exhibition: “Consumerism, pop culture, nostalgia, and community.”

The idea for the project came to the three organizers after they attended a movie at the mall’s NCG Cinema last year and began envisioning the vacant storefronts as exhibition spaces. Months of persistent calls to mall management eventually secured access to three empty stores, which the team transformed with fresh coats of paint and a scrub of years of accumulated dust from the abandoned interiors.

However, they refused to clear out the building’s ghosts. The former GNC hosts a group exhibition, “Gallery New Contemporary,” devoted to consumer culture that features Dina Cline’s miniature ceramics, among them a Tamagotchi and a Game Boy. Nearby, Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s larger-than-life Friendship Bracelets dangle, turning the humble woven token of adolescent friendship into something unexpectedly architectural.

Elsewhere, the former Hot Topic has been reborn as “Off Topic”, an exhibition that revisits alternative teen mall culture through tributes to 1990s music, movies, and adolescent angst. A wall of VHS Girl’s hand-painted VHS cases replicating those of beloved ’80s and ’90s films hangs near Jennifer Sullivan’s paintings of Courtney Love and Richey’s own digitally printed T-shirts based on watercolor reproductions of vintage graphic tees—imagery that will feel immediately familiar to anyone who spent time in a Hot Topic circa 1998.

Richey notes that Hot Topic occupied a unique place within mall culture, often attracting those who viewed themselves as outside the mainstream. “Hot Topic was a space for identity research and for subcultures and countercultures,” he says. “You’d walk by this store that was all black and blaring super-loud music and, being 13 or 14, think: What is this?”

The space also hosts pop-ups from the Bed-Stuy sustainable-fashion boutique Lagoon and Kingston’s queer- and trans-owned gift-and-stationery store Everywhere Shop. (Hammer, gesturing toward a Troll doll for sale, observes that her curatorial instincts may have begun with the carefully assembled Troll collection of her childhood.)

The slatted walls of a former GameStop, meanwhile, hold “Pharmakon,” an exhibition organized by Watercolour Society that explores the slippery boundaries between consumerism and desire. There are Linzi Silverman’s tarot decks, Kian McKeown’s trompe l’oeil cardboard boxes crafted from heavy wood, and Johannah Herr’s Skittles-colored rugs that interrogate American gun violence.

Beyond the repurposed storefronts, the exhibition spills into the mall’s common areas, where works speak to American consumer life on a larger scale. Adjacent to the food court sits Stuart Lantry’s Ferris wheel of food and consumer goods, surrounded by sculpted hot dogs, Doritos bags, and stacks of McDonald’s sandwich boxes (referencing President Trump’s infamous fast-food banquet for the Clemson Tigers in 2019). At the opposite end of the corridor, Linda Colletta’s immersive installation TV Dinners re-creates her childhood living room with period furniture, TV Guides, and the 1984 film Johnny Dangerously playing on the TV. (Colletta tells me it was the only VHS tape her family owned; she still knows every line by heart.) Between the two sit Marianna Peragallo’s houseplants, growing inside shopping bags made of thermoplastic—a material recalling the Shrinky Dinks of many millennial childhoods.

The organizers hope the audience mirrors the peculiar democracy of the mall itself: collectors and art-world visitors arriving for Upstate Art Weekend sharing space with families headed to the movies, gymgoers passing through, and teenagers wandering in simply because they noticed something unusual in the window. The ambition is not merely to exhibit art but to collapse the distance that often separates contemporary art from everyday life.

“People may be comfortable in the mall, and then we’re introducing them to art, which they might not feel comfortable with,” Richey says. "We’re encouraging them to come into these spaces and experience something they might not normally do.”

For one weekend at least, browsing becomes looking, collecting becomes curating, and the mall becomes, once again, a place to imagine other possibilities.