Art Stages Built Into A Hillside & An Old School

Upstate New York has architectural charm, especially in the last decade, when new cultural centers like Magazzino and Jack Shainman’s The School have reshaped the visual arts ecosystem, but in Chatham, a hundred-acre campus is proving that landscape can also serve as infrastructure for performing arts. PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance has spent the past several seasons quietly becoming one of the region’s more compelling architectural case studies. Completed in 2018 and designed by Chatham-based architect and sculptor Evan Stoller, the center’s Pavilion Theater was conceived as a building that could change with the seasons—and, increasingly, as an institution that could change with its community.

The organization’s resiliency through the pandemic is, by now, part of its origin story. “One of the things that I think really — and this is well before my time — but that sort of launched the venue into the consciousness of the performing arts scene in New York and elsewhere was COVID, because unlike the theaters in the city, we were outdoors and we could stay open in 2020,” says Vallejo Gartner, PS21’s Artistic and Executive Director. Both the location’s scale and its exposure mattered. “The fact that we’re on a hundred acres of land meant that a whole lot of the activities that were happening — things could happen out here, you could be socially distanced,” Gartner added. That openness and intuitive design language made PS21 not a pandemic-era workaround, but a design and operational template other institutions could learn from.

Core to the multifunctional nature of the institution is the Pavilion Theater. Stoller’s design was built into a natural slope; the 325-seat structure pairs openness with selective enclosure for back-of-house and administration: tapered precast concrete columns carry an exposed blackened steel-framed timber roof, its vernacular-inspired gabled profile lending the space a familiar language with a reverberant acoustic quality as well. Telescoping seating risers fold away entirely, freeing the pavilion for in-the-round staging or non-performance events alike.

An important aspect of the building, though, is its seasonal logic. When temperatures drop, the proscenium doors seal shut, converting the open-air stage into an intimate, geothermally conditioned 99-seat black box — a reconfigurable venue capable of doubling as a recording or rehearsal space. Ground-source heat pumps serve the enclosed program areas, while a lobby, offices, dressing rooms, and rehearsal space complete the stagehouse, framed in steel with concrete infill. Stoller’s detailing — curved fascias concealing rain gutters, integrated bent metal railings, wood paneling folded against tapered concrete — reworks a fairly traditional gabled-roof typology into something distinctly site-specific, shaped as much by topography as by program, a bit of a sweet nudge from a sculptor-architect’s work, like Stoller.

That black box now anchors PS21’s winter plans. “Dark Festival, which happened in February — trying to directly embrace the worst time of year, the darkness, the cold, and make that a feature, not a bug,” Gartner explains. “We kind of cooked up the idea around this time last year [in the summer] and started talking about it.” The festival reflects a broader strategy: rather than going dormant in the off-season, PS21 is leaning into partnerships across the Hudson Valley, positioning the organization — which also includes a Dance Barn, a renovated nineteenth-century structure with a sprung floor, that supports rehearsals and smaller performances, and two artist-residence houses — as a year-round anchor for the region’s cultural infrastructure.

The Campus Upstate

A similar logic is emerging a few miles at The Campus Upstate in Hudson, where six New York galleries (Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, and kurimanzutto) have transformed the former Ockawamick School into a contemporary art destination. For its third annual exhibition in 2026, the collaborative project expanded to include eight UK galleries, including Thomas Dane Gallery and Lisson, filling the 78,000-square-foot, 1951 school with full-room installations that respond to its classrooms, corridors, and institutional history.

Rather than organizing around a core subject, the exhibition uses each former classroom as a self-contained installation shaped by the building’s historically layered interiors, with work by artists including Keith Haring, Sarah Lucas, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Tschabalala Self threaded through the transitions between rooms.

Together, PS21 and The Campus aim for a different cultural model in rural New York, as a decentralized network of cultural infrastructure in which existing buildings, landscapes, and communities become active creators and participants in the contemporary art world. 

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• Cultural
• Infrastructure

• Francisco Brown
• Outdoor and Public Space
• Parks
• Pavilions
• Public Space
• sculpture