![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/19_Tania-Candiani.-Photo-by-Mark-Thomas-Duggan-_-Courtesy-of-Medina-Triennial-1230x820.jpg\")
Largescale international fests have dominated the artworld in recent decades. A series of new exhibitions attempt something more local, but what, Jenny Wu asks, does it mean to be a local in the first place?
\n\n\n\nIn the window of a café in Medina, New York, was a canvas on a brass easel depicting two hummingbirds kissing a floral arrangement, a framed gel-pen drawing of a dragon curled around a yin-yang symbol, a painted Christmas ornament. The occasion: the opening of a popup exhibition devised by artist Amy Mayne, who’d painted the flowers, to coincide with that of the inaugural Medina Triennial, a capital project of the New York Power Authority and New York State Canal Corporation for which two curators and 39 artists and collectives from five continents were brought in to commingle with the postindustrial canal town’s population of 5,800.
\n\n\n\nWaiting at the counter, I saw a political cartoon by an artist named Arthur Barnes titled Stop STAMP (n.d.), in which a data centre was represented as a Trojan horse branded with words like ‘lower taxes’, ‘clean energy’, ‘economic growth’ and ‘jobs’. On the drive in from the airport in Cheektowaga, I had passed yard signs protesting STAMP, the ‘Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park’ being developed adjacent to nearby Indigenous lands. Barnes, I learned, was also a landscape painter and considered the backbone of the local arts community. After being introduced to him, I began seeing his idyllic paintings of historic Medina gracing the sides of buildings all over town.
\n\n\n\nBarnes wasn’t exhibiting in the triennial. Neither were any artists born in or based in Medina. “I’m glad to see art being brought in, but there wasn’t a lot of support for local artists,” he told me. “We do welcome visitors,” said Rhonda Parker, a filmmaker who has lived in Medina on and off throughout her life. But as for the artists in the maintenance-themed triennial, titled All That Sustains Us, “The art they’re offering”, she said, “might not be accessible to the average person in such a small town.” As we spoke, the party I’d come from, down the street at what was once an auto shop and was now the Medina Triennial Hub, with its guest list and cocktails and international aplomb, began to feel as though it were on another planet.
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To be sure, the show itself was a thing of elegance. Aside from some art displayed in the two gallery spaces attached to the Hub, works were embedded throughout the four-kilometre-wide town, including in its church, park, YMCA, hospital and decommissioned high-school, creating a constellation of antimonuments out of what were in many cases locally sourced plants, stones and junk metal. But apart from some evocative commentaries on Medina’s waterways, such as a single-channel video by Tania Candiani in which a chorus of local residents imitated the sounds of the Erie Canal and Oak Orchard Creek, there were also artists – from Lina Lapelytė to Harun Farocki to Alice Bucknell – whose inclusion seemed to tether the triennial to other international surveys and centres of cultural power rather than to the material conditions of the town around it. And its conceptual root, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969), carries such strong associations with New York City – Ukeles is, lest we forget, still the New York City Department of Sanitation’s official artist in residence – that it felt out of place on a monitor on the wall of a rural high-school.
\n\n\n\nIncidentally that same weekend a different recurring exhibition with a similarly sized roster was inaugurated in Ridgefield, Connecticut: the Aldrich Decennial. Its title, I am what is around me, like that of the Medina Triennial, spoke to the relationship between individuals and their social, civic and natural surroundings. A commuter town of 25,000, Ridgefield is more affluent than Medina; it has its own art museum, the Aldrich, whose vision for a recurring exhibition was funded by more predictable artworld sources – philanthropic foundations, patron groups – and whose in-house curators took the opposite approach to the Medina Triennial’s when it came to their selection process: artists had to live in-state to be included.
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The criterion of course did not exclude Connecticut-based artists with ties to major art metropolises, such as Dominic Chambers, Julia Wachtel, Tammy Nguyen and Aki Sasamoto, who showed paintings, artist books and kinetic sculptures representative of their internationally exhibited work. But it also ensured that some aspects of hyperlocal history were foregrounded, such as in Storrs-based artist and Connecticut ‘lifer’ Emily Larned’s pamphlet and prints about K.D. Codish, the feminist theatre director who became the head of training and education at the New Haven Police Department during the 1990s, where she introduced progressive teaching techniques to the entry-level police academy.
\n\n\n\nStill, though, there was something I missed about perusing the paintings and drawings at the scrappy popup in Medina, a sense, as Lucy Lippard describes in The Lure of the Local (1997), of ‘“foreignness”… that, on further scrutiny, may really be an unexpected familiarity’ that makes so-called regional art particularly ‘interesting and energetic’. What the decennial didn’t convey, I realised, was a sense of local identity. “Connecticut’s largest struggle is being so close to New York City,” Larned told me over the phone. “When you’re in the shadow of a large city, there’s this understanding that you need to go to the big city if you’re serious [about art]. It’s harder with that mindset to invest locally.” She and her neighbour, another Storrs-based exhibitor, Enrique Figueredo – who caught my eye with an intricate woodcut of the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro peeking out of a car window in front of a Venezuelan airplane graveyard – both described their localities contra ‘the big city’. “I don’t have nearly as many studio visits here, compared to when I was in New York,” said Figueredo. He moved to Connecticut only two years ago.
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What does it mean to be a local in the first place? Elsewhere in her book, Lippard notes, as an aside, that this has partly to do with class. She compares someone who recently moved to Maine to work at the shipyard (who will quickly come to be considered a local) to someone who has summered in Maine all their life (who will always be ‘from away’). Thus, the ambiguous nature of cultural labour becomes part of the equation.
\n\n\n\nAs anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in Modernity at Large (1996), locality – ‘as a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community’ – is fragile and ephemeral and must be ritually maintained, especially in the ‘deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational’ world we now take for granted. Acts of maintenance, or as Appadurai calls them, ‘rites of passage’, can include ‘ceremonies of naming and tonsure, scarification and segregation, circumcision and deprivation’ meant to inscribe locality onto individual subjects. We don’t often talk about artistic labour like it’s a rite of passage into a community (maybe because it’s less extreme and bodily). What if we did? Perhaps then we wouldn’t rely so much on artists’ biographies, the genealogy of their materials, or curators’ and stakeholders’ professed sentiments towards a site, but on something else – perhaps the art’s integrity, or its intensity – to determine who earns a place in town.
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