Inaugural Medina Triennial Transforms Small Village In Upstate New York The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

In a village of about 6,000 people, a new triennial is testing what contemporary art can look like when it is built around infrastructure, local history, and civic investment. The inaugural Medina Triennial opens June 6 and runs through September 7, 2026, in Medina, a small community in Western New York that sits roughly an hour from Buffalo and Rochester and about two hours from Toronto.

Titled All That Sustains Us, the exhibition brings together 39 artists and collectives and more than 100 works across ten sites within a walkable half-mile radius. Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo curated the project, which was initiated by the New York State Canal Corporation, a subsidiary of the New York Power Authority, as part of a $300 million effort to increase tourism and recreational activity along the Erie Canal. The canal marked its bicentennial in 2025.

The triennial's financing is modest by contemporary art standards: its budget is under $2 million, supported by regional foundations and overseas grantmakers including Outset in the UK and the Mondriaan Fund in the Netherlands. That public-private structure is part of what makes the project unusual. The New York Power Authority's role as a seed funder places a state-backed infrastructure agency in the position of cultural patron, a rare alignment in the United States.

Conte and Laansoo have framed the exhibition around Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the artist whose maintenance art practice has long insisted that the labor sustaining cities and households deserves visibility. Ukeles has served as the unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977, and her 1969 manifesto remains a touchstone for the Medina project's emphasis on care, systems, and collective upkeep.

The exhibition is dispersed across parks, a church, a YMCA, a former high school, and other local sites, while its hub occupies a historic building that once operated as a hotel. Inside, visitors will find furniture made from wood reclaimed from the Erie Canal, along with an art library and a meeting space intended for both residents and visitors.

Many of the commissions were developed with local residents and regional institutions. Tania Candiani's Two Waters, for instance, uses the wordless vocalizations of hundreds of locals to evoke Oak Orchard Creek and the Erie Canal. Mayor Deborah Padoleski has said the project has energized residents and introduced them to unfamiliar art forms.

At a moment when arts funding in the United States is under pressure, Medina offers a compact but pointed experiment: a triennial that treats culture less as spectacle than as part of the civic fabric.

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