Livingston Manor, NY — Catskill Art Space (CAS) is pleased to announce the opening of three new exhibitions by Richard Barlow, Lisa Craft and Ellen Driscoll. The exhibitions open on Saturday, January 17, 2026, with an artist talk from 3–4 p.m. and a reception from 4–5 p.m. They will remain on view through February 28, 2026. This exhibition brings together three artists whose practices engage the natural world through materially distinct yet conceptually aligned approaches, foregrounding environmental fragility, memory, and responsibility in a moment of ecological precarity.

Richard Barlow will present a large-scale, temporary, site-specific drawing made with chalk on blackboard-painted gallery walls. Rooted in careful observation of the natural world, Barlow’s drawings evoke landscapes that are at once intimate and monumental. The works are deliberately ephemeral: erased at the close of the exhibition, they exist only briefly, vulnerable to time and even to the physical presence of viewers, whose touch or movement may alter or destroy the image. This fragility underscores the work’s environmental and existential concerns, mapping loss, impermanence, and memory onto acts of looking and inhabiting space.

Lisa Craft’s Drive-In Movie for Leaf Litter is an immersive animated installation that draws viewers into the fecund, mysterious world of the forest floor. Combining rear-projected silhouette animation with a revolving sculptural form, the work unfolds as a miniature theater infused with a richly layered soundscape. Positioned at ground level, audiences encounter cycling leaf litter whose shadows cast a hypnotic spell, punctuated by disruptions, disappearances, and shifting winds. Craft’s process begins with observational walks through urban and rural green spaces, filming birds, insects, plants, and fungi encountered along the way. These beings are digitally extracted, manipulated through drawing, painting, sculpture, and animation, and set within time-lapse gardens and animated environments. The soundscape deepens immersion, animating both seen and unseen elements of the leaf-litter world. Craft’s use of silhouettes traces back to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when prolonged darkness transformed everyday objects into animated shadows within flashlight beams.

Ellen Driscoll’s work encompasses drawing, sculpture, and public art, united by a sustained engagement with environmental and social justice. Her drawings, made with walnut ink—a material known for its capacity to remediate environmental toxins—depict plants as both subject and agent, embedding ecological process within representation itself. Her sculptures, fabricated from waste HDPE plastic, transform discarded material into forms that evoke the floods, droughts, and systemic imbalances driven by climate change. Through research-driven practice and close attention to visual detail, Driscoll’s work asks viewers to recognize their own responsibility within these unfolding environmental narratives.

About the Artists

Richard Barlow received his MFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Minnesota and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a two-time recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Drawing and has received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, among other honors. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at the Bellevue Arts Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Fenimore Art Museum, and Landskrona Foto.

Lisa Craft is a multidisciplinary animator and moving-image artist whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Modern, Tokyo’s Image Forum, Tribeca Film Festival, Slamdance, and Imagine Science, and is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and has received support from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and MacDowell. Craft holds multiple Daytime Emmy Awards for her work on Sesame Street and is Professor Emerita in the Film/Video Department at Pratt Institute.

Ellen Driscoll works across sculpture, drawing, and public art. Her recent public commission, Site Woven (2022), was created for the Charles R. Jonas Federal Courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. Recent exhibitions include ReRooted (2024), a solo exhibition at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, and Plasticulture at the School of Visual Arts Gallery, New York. Driscoll has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Bunting Institute at Harvard University, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Long-term Installations

Following a major renovation and expansion, Catskill Art Space reopened in October 2022 with a long-term presentation of James Turrell’s Avaar (1982) in a custom-built gallery on the building’s second floor. A room-sized installation, Avaar is an important example of the artist’s early, wall-based “aperture” works, which function by creating two areas within a room. There is a “viewing space,” where one stands to see and experience the work, and a “sensing space,” which is an ambiguously defined area of diffused light. Avaar is one of the rare examples of Turrell’s aperture works to make use of white lighting only; no colors will be present in the installation. This work is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, which has granted CAS a special long-term loan to exhibit the work. The presentation at CAS marks the first time the work has been shown since the 1970s, giving audiences from the Catskills and beyond the rare opportunity to experience a major Turrell work that has not been seen in nearly five decades.

On the second floor’s central landing, Sol LeWitt’s vibrant Wall Drawing #992 unfolds in three sections, each consisting of 10,000 straight lines drawn in color marker, to create a mesmerizing arrangement of primary colors. On the fourth wall, presenting LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #991, straight, arced, and organic lines will encompass the wall in black marker and pencil. The conceptual, minimalist artist conceived guidelines for his two-dimensional works to be drawn directly on the wall. Much like Turrell’s Avaar, the LeWitt works were realized for CAS’s space; in this instance, they are generously loaned by the artist’s estate. This work was overseen by a draftsperson, who determined the length and placement of the lines, and executed by five artists local to the area over nearly two weeks.

The newly realized performance space on CAS’s second floor hosts British sculptor Francis Cape’s A Gathering of Utopian Benches—an installation of meticulous copies of benches built and used by communal societies. Cape’s installations have always argued that design and craft express belief. Utopian Benches, which has toured extensively throughout the US, was built from poplar grown near Cape’s studio in Narrowsburg, NY. To be considered both as contemporary sculpture as well as furniture that visitors can actively use, the benches reference the societies who first used them, inviting visitors to utilize them for exchange, discourse, and community. The installation, which is meant to be used by visitors both for contemplation and may be used for performance seating, overlooks an expansive wall of windows onto the Willowemoc Creek.

Ellen Brooks inaugurates an intimate gallery space, framed by a partially open staircase, with Hang (2022), an installation suspending over 30 feet of scrolls of film negatives from the ceiling. The artist hangs transparencies and negatives in all formats and from clips attached to the ceiling, mimicking the practice of film photography. Hanging negatives reference the surrounding natural landscaping, evoking a cascading waterfall with coils of film collecting on the ground floor gallery.

About Catskill Art Space

Catskill Art Space (CAS) explores contemporary art practices of emerging and established artists. Through exhibitions, performances, classes, lectures, and screenings, CAS fosters creative community in the Catskills.

Established as Catskill Art Society in 1971, CAS reopened in October 2022 as Catskill Art Space following a major renovation and expansion of its multi-arts center, located in the picturesque hamlet of Livingston Manor in the Western Catskills. CAS presents a rotating slate of exhibitions, performances and other events featuring national and regional talents, alongside long-term installations of works by James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Francis Cape, and Ellen Brooks. Learn more at catskillartspace.org.

Notes to Editor

Opening date: January 17, 2026

Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, January 17. Artists talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm

Exhibition on-view: January 17 – February 28, 2026

Long-term installations on view: Long-term presentation (through 2027) of James Turrell’s light installation Avaar (1982) and two site-specific wall drawings from Sol LeWitt, as well as solo presentations of well-established artists from the local area, Francis Cape (through 2027) and Ellen Brooks (through 2027).