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.
The former Hot Topic houses pop-up shops by Brooklyn’s Lagoon and Kingston’s Everywhere Shop, and a group exhibition about nostalgia and teen angst titled “Off Topic.”Photo: Nick Carder
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 imagining the vacant storefronts as exhibition spaces. Months of persistent calls to mall management eventually secured access to three empty stores, which the team transformed by painting the walls and clearing years of accumulated dust from the abandoned interiors.
However, they refused to sanitize the building’s ghosts. The former GNC hosts a group exhibition, “Gallery New Contemporary,” devoted to consumer culture. Dina Cline’s miniature ceramics include 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.
