Jane Creech & Michael Arnaud Capture A Region Alive in Upstate Now

Living, Making, and Dreaming in the Hudson Valley

By   |  Photos by Michel Arnaud  |     |  Books

Michel Arnaud

Coffee-table books about the Hudson Valley tend to lean either toward aspirational fantasy—spreads of immaculate modernist barns with no evidence of human life—or nostalgic elegy for a vanished rural past. Upstate Now, by photographer Michel Arnaud with text by Jane Creech, manages a rarer trick: it documents a region fully alive in the present. Published by Princeton Architectural Press, the 288-page volume surveys the creative, domestic, and working lives of the people who shape this place right now, without romanticizing or flattening the landscape into lifestyle.

Organized into four sections—Place, Art, Design, and Food/Farms/Flowers—the book moves from studios to homesteads to river towns to fields, weaving together a portrait that feels both rooted and restless. Arnaud’s natural-light photography favors atmosphere over perfection. A Shaker broom barn appears with the same quiet dignity as Ivan Navarro’s neon-lit water towers at Art Omi. A plate of scrapple at Hudson’s Cafe Mutton receives the same close attention as a Steven Holl structure in Rhinebeck. The message is implicit: Culture here is not stratified; it grows in many directions at once.

DeWitt Godfrey’s Picker Sculpture (2005) was installed between two trees at Art Omi in Ghent. The sculpture and architecture park is featured in Michel Arnaud and Jane Creech’s Upstate Now. Photo by Michel Arnaud

Some profiles excavate history as raw material for new work. In Watervliet, artist Julia Whitney Barnes reinterprets Shaker spirit drawings in cyanotype and herb studies that flutter like devotional texts against whitewashed walls. Painter Caitlin MacBride, working in a similar vein, uses Shaker design motifs as launchpads for modern abstraction. Others represent reinvention as a form of local evolution. The Roxbury Motel, a candy-colored fantasia in Delaware County, recast a forgotten roadside lodge into an engine of cultural revival—and helped fuel the town’s $10 million downtown revitalization effort along the way.

Designers Chase Booth and Gray Davis embody another Hudson Valley archetype: the restless builder. Since arriving in 1994, they’ve constructed five homes, their current one a 1792 farmhouse on Copake Lake updated with crisp modern additions and playful watercraft parked at the dock. Steven Holl appears not as a visiting starchitect but as a neighbor whose T Space in Rhinebeck hosts concerts, exhibitions, and lectures under the trees.

A bedroom at Kinderhook Farm. Photo by Michel Arnaud

Foodways get equal footing. At Cafe Mutton, Shaina Loew-Banayan subverts both diner nostalgia and farm-to-table preciousness with a menu of scrapple sandwiches and lamb-neck stew. At Damsel Garden in Stuyvesant, floral arrangements read more like wild sculpture than decor, petals falling like punctuation.

Is the book a bit of a fetish object? Of course—and it knows it. But in Arnaud’s hands, beauty is not an escape from reality. It is evidence of life being lived with intention.

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