Livingston Manor, NY — Catskill Art Space (CAS) is pleased to announce the opening of three new exhibitions by Kat Chamberlin, Mia Brownell, and Lexa Walsh. The exhibitions open on Saturday, November 1, 2025, with an artist talk from 3–4 p.m. and a reception from 4–5 p.m. They will remain on view through December 28, 2025. Working across painting, installation, ceramics, and social practice, the three artists each present deeply immersive and thought-provoking projects that examine power, value, identity, and cultural symbolism.

Mia Brownell’s still-life paintings of food reference both 17th-century Dutch realism and the swirling forms of molecular imaging. Her work considers food as more than sustenance, examining how it is grown, processed, marketed, and consumed, and how it functions as a cultural signifier. Through illusionistic depictions, she probes questions of identity, values, and the parallels between microbiology and the social constructs that shape who we are.

Kat Chamberlin presents a large-scale installation that transforms the gallery with yellow carpet and suspended glass sculptures, paired with a film featuring her own daughter in exploration in play, authority and domesticity. Her work explores motherhood as a metaphor for authoritarian governance and the negotiation of intimacy and individuality. Using relational materials such as, fragile glass, soft bronze, supple walnut, sharp aluminum; her installations invite touch, intimacy, and confrontation, asking viewers to consider vulnerability, power, and dependence.

Lexa Walsh’s new body of work, Breathe with Me Grieve with Me Heave with Me, responds to the fraught simultaneity of the 2024 Summer Olympics and ongoing global conflict. Grappling with nationalism, loss, and resistance, Walsh creates ceramic and mixed media works that serve as both memorials and provocations. Her Epitaph series evokes mausoleum covers made of glazed ceramic, while her Black Cloud series presents poufy ceramic forms, some dripping with chandelier crystals. Blending humor, grief, and resilience, Walsh reflects on decoration, mourning, and the persistence of joy in dark times.

About the Artists

Mia Brownell is a New York-based artist whose paintings merge the illusionistic traditions of food still-life with contemporary scientific imagery, simultaneously referencing Dutch realism and molecular biology. Her “sci-fi still lifes” examine cultural, environmental, and scientific questions around the industrial food complex and consumerism. Brownell has received awards and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the U.S. Department of State. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with work included in collections such as the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. She is currently a professor of art at Southern Connecticut State University.

Kat Chamberlin (b. 1981, Amsterdam, NL) lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and is a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and the Toby Devan Lewis Award. Her installations, sculptures, and films have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and numerous alternative spaces. Chamberlin’s films have screened at international festivals including the Seoul International New Media Festival (NEMAF), Antimatter Film Festival in Canada, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her work often combines performance, film, and sculpture to explore the tensions between intimacy and power.

Lexa Walsh (b. 1968, Haverford, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes site-specific projects, exhibitions, performances, and socially engaged works. Drawing from traditions of social practice, institutional critique, and “radical hospitality,” she creates platforms for dialogue across hierarchies and communities. Walsh holds an MFA in Art & Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts. She has received awards from CEC Artslink, Southern Exposure, the de Young Museum, and Kala Art Institute, among others. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Exploratorium, as well as in public and DIY contexts.

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 determines 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: November 1, 2025

Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, November 1. Artist talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm

Exhibition on-view: November 1 – December 28, 2025

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).

Instagram: @catskillartspace

For media inquiries, please contact:

Sally Wright, Executive Director

sally@catskillartspace.org

646-696-1044