For two consecutive weekends at Skinner State Park in Hadley, outdoorsy types can take in a contemporary art exhibition on an incline. “The Summit Show” features works by more than forty artists mostly based between the Berkshires and New York City. Curated Charlotte Kohlmann, co-founder of Mundus Press, the outdoor exhibition is inspired by the Mount Holyoke landscape and its history. “The Summit Show” builds on the concept of their 2021 “The Swamp Show,” a memorable presentation where works installed in an algae-covered inlet of the Connecticut River were accessible by canoe and performances took place on a floating raft. Four years apart, the unruly and fun pair of presentations map onto two opposing perspectives—the worm’s eye and the bird’s eye, respectively— of the u-shaped, “Oxbow” bend where the Connecticut River loops around itself in Northampton.
Visitors comfortable with the demands of a mile-ish uphill hike on uneven terrain can walk three interconnecting trails, where canvases hang on trees and sculptures are found atop decaying stumps, placed on beds of leaves, or stashed in mossy crevices. You don’t have to hunt for these objects. They’re installed at semi-regular intervals and accompanied by a hand-painted sign bearing a number that corresponds to an identifying entry in the exhibition takeaway. The two-sided Xerox sheet features Mundus Press’s signature pastiche of multiple typefaces and naïve hand-drawn lettering and doodles layered over found imagery (see also their distinctive screen-printed merch).
Sissy Williams, Charm, 2025. Cotton, silk, wood, glass, sterling silver, plastic, seashells. Installation view, “The Summit Show,” Skinner State Park, 2025. Photo by and courtesy of Charlotte and Emma Kohlmann.
Many works on the trail, like Margot Bird’s whimsical ceramic and tile maquettes of Woodland Creatures (2025) (including a miniature platypus and a more true-to-scale axolotl), and a cast concrete slab by Cole Lu etched with what appear to be bear paws, play to the woodsy surroundings. Other pieces tease more complicated relationships to their outdoor sites. Pink sequins wrapping a work by Elliot Camarra feel nicely out of place. So do Tauba Auerbach’s blue, poly tarp rosettes and Ficus Interfaith’s Holyoke Oyster Trap (2025). Precariously suspended on a steep embankment, the wire vessel containing pink terrazzo oyster shells scrambles a few material and place references (oyster shells are a vernacular building material but aren’t used in terrazzo; oysters are found in New England but not on a mountain). I welcomed how these works resisted both naturalistic appearances and the idea of a harmonious relationship between art and nature, instead highlighting artifice.
Factoring in time to view each of the forty pieces on the trail, it took about an hour to reach Mount Holyoke’s western overlook where climbers, as well as those who ascend by car, are rewarded with postcard views. Below, the waggling bends of the Connecticut River Oxbow carve through floodplane farmlands and verdant forest. A gods-eye vantage of this scene was made famous by Hudson River School founder, Thomas Cole, in View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836).
The exhibition continues in the Prospect House, a hotel built in 1851, and now a house museum. There, over a dozen works by “Summit Show” participants—including paintings, sculptures, textiles, and a looping video program in a second floor bathroom, “Dizzy TV Presents”—are sometimes confusingly interwoven with a permanent display of historical furnishings, ephemera, and reproductions of landscape paintings that capture the view (including a faded framed poster of the citational work by Cole).
Nods to the curator’s interest in the site’s nineteenth-century context abound. On the Prospect House deck, Autumn Ahn’s urban rain (2025), a sheet of Rives paper pierced with binocular cutouts that viewers are invited to peer through, is meant to reference the coin-operated tower viewers common at scenic overlooks. As it’s animated by the breeze, the piece alternately frames and hides the sublime view below. Elsewhere, angelic figures and divine visions are the subject of works by Will Bruno, Hunter Foster, and Tim de Christopher that conjure Spiritualism’s metaphysics. Other works cannily reference conventions of the Hudson River School: In the weeds (2025), a small canvas by Emma Kohlmann, is centered on a rolling downhill vista as if a composition in plein air still on its easel. Toward the summit, set in a rocky niche, is a tiny gem of a painting by Brooke Hsu. A view of a bending river from above, it reads as an homage to Cole.
These moments invite questions about the exhibition’s seemingly un-problematized relationship to history. Throughout, I found myself grappling with the presentation’s relationship to its historical trappings—the many references to nineteenth-century art and Victorian-era attitudes toward health and the outdoors present both at the site and in the curatorial framing. (A critical examination of the visual codes and religious and cultural norms that fueled the Industrial Revolution has underpinned several recent scholarly accounts of the period’s unchecked resource extraction and its formative effects on climate change.) Do the organizers consider their efforts in continuity with the Hudson River School’s idyllic pastoral representations? The contemporary reception of this era of landscape painting acknowledges how these images inspired nationalism and employed visual conventions of domination (aerial views, for example) to fix the landscape in a settler-colonial gaze. At the same time, these works stirred ecological consciousness and appreciation for the natural world. Animating connections with the environment is a primary objective at “The Summit Show,” too.
“The Summit Show” is on view September 6 and 7 in Skinner State Park and the Prospect House, in Hadley, MA.
