CATSKILL, NY — When artist Stef Halmos moved to New York City in 2012 with a master’s degree in fine arts, she tried unsuccessfully to find a decent and affordable studio space. “The sprinklers weren’t working, there was no natural light, there was a curtain over a door — that’s what you would get,” Halmos said. “I just knew I could do better.” It helped to start a family in the real estate business.
With the support and mentorship of her father, Fort Lauderdale-based developer Steve Halmos, the young artist began exploring the boroughs for a warehouse to renovate into studios for herself and her colleagues. The search eventually led her to the Hudson Valley, following in the footsteps of so many artists who have emigrated from the city in search of a better all-round deal.
Halmos ate an ice cream cone on the edge of a creek with her wife, McKenzie Raley, an artist and doula, and saw a beautiful boarded-up mill on the Catskill coast, across the water. “I just fell in love with it,” said Halmos, who persuaded the owner, Rob Kalin, an Etsy founder who had gotten stuck with the plans for the property, to sell it in 2017. “I didn’t know what a mess it was.”
Halmos spent 18 months structurally stabilizing the red-brick behemoth, which manufactured Union army uniforms during the Civil War and has been vacant since 2005, when Oren’s Furniture there closed after 86 years.
Last month, the 38-year-old artist-cum-developer completed the renovation of the last of three adjacent industrial buildings totaling 85,000 square feet, creating a triangular art complex she named Foreland. It opens July 1 with a month-long series of gallery exhibitions in the village of Catskill (once home to Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painters).
The $12.5 million project was funded largely through family-owned Halmos Holdings, with $1.5 million in grants from New York State for historic waterfront restoration and revitalization. It includes 31 individual private artist studios, a cooperative workspace, four public galleries, a restaurant and event spaces available to rent. Halmos collaborated with Emily Jockel of David Bers Architecture and Liam Turkle to design the spaces.
Halmos guided a visitor through her commercial venture with the pride of a new mother (she gave birth to her first child during construction and her wife is now expecting their second). She named her project after the geological term for a cliff that borders water—the reflection she saw of the mountainous mill in the creek. “I realized I’m kind of on the cliff,” Halmos said.
She has now rented out all the studios to artists, including Native American filmmaker Sky Hopinka, and painters Laleh Khorramian and Steve Locke, with a growing waiting list. Halmos reached out directly to acclaimed photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, who she knew lived nearby in Germantown.
“It was a courtship,” says Harris, who likes the look of the past in his Foreland studio, equipped with climate control and internet but retaining an industrial rawness. “There is diversity in the artists that come here. Stef cultivates a certain community, without it being forced on.”
One studio is fully subsidized for an annual six-month grant to an outstanding color artist: the painter Henri Broyard was selected by a jury composed of Halmos, Ebony Haynes, director of the TriBeCa gallery 52 Walker and Lumi Tan, senior curator of The Keuken . Broyard will have a solo exhibition in one of the public galleries on the ground floor of Foreland from August 5 to September 25.
As part of the Foreland Gallery Coalition, the art center hosts a month-long exhibition starting on Friday with Situations, New Discretions, Document and JAG Projects. For a monthly membership fee ranging from $385 to $550, dealers can use one of Foreland’s galleries for two months a year to expand their own programs without the initial cost of an art fair, which can cost $20,000 or more.
“You show up, you put on your shows, you make your sales,” says Halmos, who gives a tutor from her staff to help. Without a huge sticker price, she said, “the pressure of sales goes down and you can do shows that might be a bit riskier.”
Sara Salamone, the co-founder and director of Ms. Gallery, was invited last summer to collaborate on a group exhibition with dealer Rachel Uffner on a trial run of Halmos’ coalition idea. It overlapped with the New Art Dealer Alliance meeting hosted by Foreland and the Upstate Art Weekend. “Pedestrian traffic was incredible,” Salamone said. “This was a very economical way for us to participate in something in the state. We have met some new customers who have continued to support our program.”
The crowds flocking to Foreland’s events over the past year have also paid off for Main Street in Catskill, which, like so many small towns, had suffered the arrival of large retail stores but is now growing again. “The store owners are very happy because Foreland is generating business,” said Marietta Fagan, a longtime Catskill resident and barista at the recently opened coffee and vintage store Citiot (the nickname for new people moving to the region, derived from “city idiot.” “). ‘Do you want to see a dead city,’ Fagan asked, ‘or a city that is flourishing?’
When Mike Ragaini started as a building inspector for Catskill in 2006, rocks fell from the old factory on Main Street and he had to chase the former owners to clear violations. “Stef converted this building into a beautiful structure,” says Ragaini, who remembers Catskill as a thriving village in the 1950s and 1960s. While locals tend to complain about city folk trying to tell them how to run their city, he said, “Stef is down to earth. She kind of made herself part of the local population.”
Halmos joked that not everyone was “super excited about a brass lesbian coming to buy a huge building” at first. But after presenting her business model at city rallies, she felt support from her neighbors. “They want their tax base expanded,” she said. “They want their city’s infrastructure to be improved.”
Over the past five years, the average price of a single-family home in Catskill has increased by 77 percent. Ruth Adams, co-executive director of Art Omi in Ghent, has seen this trend in the Hudson Valley for two decades, exacerbated by people moving out of the city during the pandemic. “Many local residents are concerned about the cost of housing,” she says. “Their children can’t grow up and necessarily have a house near them.”
Adams has watched Hudson, Catskill’s sister city across the river, become a magnet for artists and collectors, with art organizations like Basilica Hudson and Hudson Hall taking up residence in repurposed spaces and dozens of antiques and new stores popping up on Main Street. “Gentrification is the story of the arts,” she said. “The question is: what do you do with your space? Invite your community, and is it really the community at all levels and levels?”
Halmos has started experimenting with outreach outside the art world. Foreland subsidized the rent of painter Caitlin MacBride’s studio space in exchange for teaching a five-session self-portrait class for people in Catskill ages 12 and older. Halmos thinks of events that can appeal to the high school students who walk past the building every day.
Ceramicist Nicole Cherubini moved from Brooklyn to Hudson seven years ago and worked in isolation in a barn before settling last year in one of Foreland’s 2,000-square-foot corner studios with sweeping views of the village, mountains and water. “I was in Brooklyn for so long and didn’t know there were other artists working around me,” says Cherubini, who now meets people at Willa’s, the ground-floor cafe, and abuses Foreland’s email list for community messages.
“Community here is harder to find, just because we all live so far from each other,” she said. “Foreland is like Stef’s giant social art project.”
Foreland
From July 1, 361 Main Street and 111 Water Street, Catskill, NY; forelandcatskill.com. The current exhibitions run until 24 July.
