Medina Triennial announces key artists, commission sites

100 artworks by 35 artists and collectives will be featured June 6 to Sept. 7

Press Release, Medina Triennial

MEDINA – The Medina Triennial, a new contemporary art triennial centered in the Western New York village of Medina along the Erie Canal, is pleased to announce key artist commissions, sites, and the theme for its inaugural edition taking place June 6 to Sept. 7.

Co-Artistic Directors Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo have invited artists from across five continents to present site-responsive installations and public programs.

Titled “All That Sustains Us,” this ambitious, free, village-wide exhibition features more than 100 artworks by 35 artists and collectives. It marks the first recurring exhibition of this scale to take place in a U.S. community of this size, positioning small-town geographies as vital sites of cultural and critical imagination.

Grounded in place and shaped through deep community engagement, the Triennial features new commissions alongside recent and historical works across 12 indoor and outdoor sites.

The curatorial framework of the Triennial sits at the intersection of art, ecology, architecture, and rural contexts and considers maintenance not only as a physical act of upkeep, but also as a social, political, and environmental process shaped by fragility and resilience. The Triennial brings together artistic practices that examine how civic and ecological systems are structured by labor, regulation, extraction, and repair. At its core, the Triennial asks: What essential efforts and commitments are required to sustain life in our fractured world?

Commissioned artworks include:

• Ash Arder’s INT. HOME(S) (2023/2026), an expanded sculptural installation made from parts of a 1987 Cadillac Sedan de Ville—her family’s childhood car—salvaged from a local junkyard and wrapped in gold. Reconstructed as an interactive vessel and a domestic space, the work features a new multi-channel video that traces the artist’s Detroit childhood and her relationship with the automobile, which served many roles as home, guardian, and safe space in a factory town.
• Tania Candiani’s Two Waters (2026), a large-scale filmed performance created with 1/4 composer Rogelio Sosa and hundreds of local volunteers, inspired by Medina’s aqueduct, where the Erie Canal crosses above Oak Orchard Creek—two waters that never touch.
• Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini, Michael Swaine, and FS Bàssïbét) present 48 Collections from the Erie Canal (2026), a three-part installation that begins with a local legend and expands outward through collective memory. Working with residents, the artists gathered oral histories and archival fragments, translating them into sound and video works, as well as a series of glass sculptures that encase canal sediment.
• Matt Kenyon’s The TELL (2026) reimagines a champagne tower using glass, Medina sandstone, and roses of Jericho—plants that revive with just a drop of water. A custom atmospheric water generator suspended above the tower draws moisture from the air and releases it unpredictably, creating a fragile, living system in which renewal is never guaranteed.
• Asad Raza imagines a site-specific new work, Reflection (2026), redirecting the Erie Canal’s water into the Medina Triennial Hub. By physically rerouting water that once powered extraction and trade, the work confronts the canal’s histories of labor and environmental transformation. The installation foregrounds the canal as a living system shaped by human intervention, repurposing its infrastructure for the play of bodies and light.
• Kärt Ojavee collaborates with local farmers on Between Blossom and Core (2026), an installation exploring scent extraction from Honeycrisp apple blossoms and scent-mapping of Medina’s orchards, soils, and industrial sites.

Triennial sites range from post-industrial buildings to public spaces and locations on the Erie Canal. The Medina Triennial Hub, located in a former sandstone hotel overlooking the canal, will serve as a welcome center as well as the home of the Triennial’s residency and education programs.

The main exhibition site is 25,000 square feet of the historic former Medina High School building, which has been closed to students and the public for more than three decades and recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. Artist’s works will be presented at the Medina Railroad Museum grounds, Medina Memorial Hospital, Rotary Park, State Street Park, and Sacred Heart Church, as well as installations directly on the Erie Canal.

“Thinking with artists through a small town like Medina gives us a sharp lens for considering how our shared futures are built and carried forward, and shows why places often seen as peripheral are, in fact, central to responding to the crises shaping our world today,” said Co-Artistic Directors Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo. “By bringing artists from across the globe into dialogue with the Erie Canal and Medina’s post-industrial histories, the Triennial fosters new artistic gestures and shared work with local partners. The Triennial invites neighbors and visitors to come together and reflect through art on a time shaped by ecological breakdown and social division—while holding space for hope.”

The Medina Triennial, initiated with major support provided by the New York Power Authority and the New York State Canal Corporation, was conceived as part of a broader strategy to showcase the Erie Canal as active civic infrastructure.

For more information on the Triennial and to sign up for the official newsletter, please visit medinatriennial.org.