This Must Be The Place

This Must Be The Place, Wassaic Project’s 2025–2026 Winter Exhibition, presents eleven artists throughout the seven floors of Maxon Mills whose practices converge around four shared concerns: personal and cultural histories; material transformation and visual symbolism; the sacred and the speculative; and immersive, reflective encounters.

Meli Bandera, Danny Dobrow, and Mark Fleuridor each turn toward personal and cultural histories. Bandera grounds their work in ancestral fiber techniques and Chicano tattoo traditions, weaving together Mexican and Catholic histories with their own familial legacy. Dobrow’s ceramic vessels playfully unsettle cultural hierarchies between craft, pottery, fine art, and design. Fleuridor celebrates his Haitian American family’s life in Miami through collaged textile portraits that are at once intimate and expansive.

Heidi Johnson, Deborah Simon, and Kim Mullis explore material transformation and visual symbolism. Johnson indulges in kitsch and high culture with large-scale paintings modeled on Dutch still lifes, where unexpected species of flora and fauna share a single stage. Simon examines our shifting perceptions of the animal world, embodying the tension between the wild and the tame, the beautiful and the grotesque. Mullis reprocesses visual icons—netting, bricks, storm-like swirls—investing them with new symbolic weight to create spaces of hyper-reality and fantasy.

Thea Gregorius and Antonio Scott Nichols investigate the sacred and the speculative. Gregorius’ handmade paper reliefs manipulate light and shadow through thousands of pin-punched perforations, evoking the hidden patterns of both nature and human existence. Nichols’ work romanticizes escape and autonomy through a Black futurist lens, affirming that new futures emerge when we dare to imagine them.

Beverly Peterson, Gerardo Pulido, and Stephanie Santana each work to create immersive and reflective encounters. Peterson’s projection mapping generates a dreamlike environment where personal memory merges with collective experience. Pulido’s paintings, by turns irreverent and serious, seduce the eye with their layered playfulness. Santana’s screen-printed quilts honor Black ancestral matriarchs as keepers and transmitters of knowledge, carrying memory forward across generations.

Together, these artists transform Maxon Mills into a site where histories intertwine, materials are reimagined, rituals take form, and new imaginaries emerge.

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