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Medina Triennial unveils list of 39 artists and collectives for upcoming arts initiative

Posted 13 April 2026 at 1:04 pm

Photo courtesy of Medina Triennial: This is a production still for Two Waters, 2026, by Tania Candiani. It is a new commission for the Medina Triennial.

Press Release, Medina Triennial

MEDINA – The Medina Triennial is pleased to unveil the full list of artists of its inaugural edition, All That Sustains Us, taking place June 6 to Sept. 7 in the Western New York village of Medina, along the Erie Canal.

Co-Artistic Directors Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo have invited 39 artists and collectives from across five continents to create a free, walkable, village-wide exhibition featuring over 100 works, including new site-specific commissions by 18 artists shaped in response to Western New York’s communities and ecosystems—many created in collaboration with local residents.

Following a year of on-the-ground research, Conte and Laansoo developed a curatorial framework rooted in the intersection of art, ecology, architecture, and rural contexts, while prioritizing local production to minimize carbon-intensive shipping.

Bringing artists from across the globe into dialogue with Medina and Western New York, the Triennial unfolds amid the histories, materials, and social worlds of the region. The works on view approach maintenance through linked themes: land relations and extraction, waterways and water stewardship, labor and repair, public life and community building, and the visible and hidden systems that shape everyday life.

Moving across different scales, the exhibition brings together building blocks and ruins, folklore and industry, farming and food security, interspecies kinship and ecological grief, as well as broader questions of conflict. Throughout Medina’s buildings, canalfront, parks, and former industrial sites, visitors encounter works that embody both endurance and fragility.

“All That Sustains Us echoes a question artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles posed in 1969 and never stopped asking: what does it take to keep things going? The Medina Triennial asks what forms of labor, knowledge, and commitment sustain civic life, ecological systems, and the built environment, especially under conditions of strain,” said Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo, co-artistic directors of the Triennial. “The works gathered here emerged from research and dialogue with artists and offer many distinct positions. What connects them is a shared attention to the forces, materials, and ideas that hold communities together, and to the conditions under which those structures begin to break down.”

The Triennial’s sites span the full breadth of the village. Situated in a former sandstone hotel overlooking the canal, the Medina Triennial Hub will serve as a welcome center, a home for education and residency programs, and a site for two major commissions—48 Collections from the Erie Canal by Futurefarmers and Reflection by Asad Raza.

The main exhibition site is 25,000 square feet of the Catherine Street Old Medina High School building, which has been closed to students and the public for more than three decades and recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, where new commissions include A Good Wall by James Beckett, Two Waters by Tania Candiani, INT. HOME(S) by Ash Arder, THE TELL by Matt Kenyon, and Between Blossom and Core by Kärt Ojavee.

Works will also be presented at the Medina Railroad Museum, Orleans County YMCA, Medina Memorial Hospital, Rotary Park, State Street Park, and Sacred Heart Church, as well as installations directly on the Erie Canal.

Anchoring the outdoor program is a new site-specific commission by Lina Lapelytė, Faithfully Recording, a durational performance where singers and construction workers collaboratively build a public sculpture from reclaimed Medina sandstone on the Medina Railroad Museum’s grounds.

Scott Hocking presents a new commission in the empty lot beside the historic Medina Theater on Main Street. Further highlights include Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s water purification sculpture I travelled 66 million years to be with you and then you came, to be shown at State Street Park; Community Toolshed for the Birds by Richard Ighby & Marilou Lemmens, an interspecies collaboration installed at Rotary Park; Jane Jin Kaisen’s Sorrow Waters This Land; and Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s multimedia installation All the hours, presented at the Medina Memorial Hospital.

The Triennial also marks the first U.S. presentation of works by Deirdre O’Mahony and Tokyo-based collective SIDE CORE, whose large-scale installation at Sacred Heart Church brings their distinctive engagement with construction infrastructure and public space to an American audience for the first time.

New works were produced under the Medina Triennial Fieldwork Residency, an initiative that gives artists time, space, and resources within Medina—including a cohort of local scientists, architects, farmers, and small business owners from across Western New York—to support research, foster collaboration, and deepen community connections. The program is designed to tailor commissions to the region through immersion in the village and its surroundings.

Photo by Tom Rivers: Mary Mattingly is shown in September on a canal barge that she will be turning into a floating garden that should bear fruit this summer as part of the inaugural Medina Triennial. Mattingly will transform the 27-by-80-foot barge into a showcase for plants and nature. She led a similar initiative in New York City, and that repurposed barge drew 350,000 visitors and more than 900 guided tours.

In Fall 2025, Mary Mattingly and James Beckett began their residencies to create new commissions for the Triennial. Mattingly developed Floating Garden, a barge-based living artwork built with local residents and students from the Rochester Institute of Technology led by architect Amanda Reis, while Beckett explored how architecture carries local history, material intelligence, and slow instability, in collaboration with the University of Buffalo.

This Spring, Selva Aparicio and Michael Wang are in residence in Medina—Aparicio at work on Maintenance, a broom carved from anthracite coal, while Wang develops Future Sugarbush, a nascent sugar bush grove planned by the artist, and Sugarbush Energy, a canned maple sap drink that will be available for free throughout the Triennial, and at select businesses across Medina.

The Triennial also creates a space for recontextualization of existing works. Alice Bucknell’s Staring at the Sun, a sci-fi documentary about solar geoengineering and the limits of rendering the atmosphere as something wholly knowable, will be shown in the U.S. for the first time.

Buffalo-based Nigerian artist Victoria-Idongesit Udonian, also presenting at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, will show a new configuration of her large three-part installation, exploring the links between bodies and transit within global labor economies. AKI INOMATA presents How to Carve a Sculpture—an ongoing series of wood carvings produced by beavers enlisted by the artist’s collaborators at zoos across Japan. The Triennial will also honor Jay Carrier—an essential presence in Western New York’s artistic community, who passed away in 2025, presenting three of his mixed media works, The Children Will Heal Us (2018), American Landscape (2015), and Night Dancer (2019) throughout the Catherine Street main site.

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

Further programming and event details forthcoming. For more information and to sign up for the official newsletter, please visit medinatriennial.org.

Medina Triennial 2026 Artists

  • Ash Arder (she/they) b. 1988, Flint, MI; lives in Detroit, MI
  • Selva Aparicio (she/her) b. 1987, Barcelona, Spain; lives in Alfred, NY, and Chicago, IL
  • James Beckett (he/him) b. 1977, Harare, Zimbabwe; lives in New York, NY and Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Taysir Batniji (he/him) b. 1966, Gaza, Palestine; lives in Paris, France
  • Alice Bucknell (they/them) b. 1993, London, UK; lives in Los Angeles, CA
  • Tania Candiani (she/her) b.1974, Mexico City, Mexico; lives in Mexico City, Mexico
  • Jay Carrier (he/him) Onondaga/Tuscarora Nations, Wolf Clan; b. 1963, Six Nations reservation in Ontario, Canada; d. 2025, Niagara Falls, NY
  • Harun Farocki (he/him) b. 1944, Nový Jičín, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czechia); d. 2014, Berlin, Germany
  • Jeneen Frei Njootli (they/them) b. 1988, Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada; lives in Old Crow, Yukon, Canada
  • FIBRA – est. 2019, Lima, Peru; Lucia Monge, b. 1983; Gianine Tabja, b.1983; Gabriela Flores del Pozo, b. 1979
  • Futurefarmers – est. 1994, San Francisco, CA; including Amy Franceschini, b. 1970, Patterson, CA; Michael Swaine, b. 1971, Buffalo, NY; and FS Bàssïbét, b. 1997, Elmina, Ghana
  • Terike Haapoja (she/her) b. 1974, Helsinki, Finland; lives in Berlin, Germany
  • Greg Halpern (he/him) b. 1977, Buffalo, NY; lives in Rochester, NY
  • Carole Harris (she/her) b. 1943, Detroit, MI; lives in Detroit, MI
  • Scott Hocking (he/him) b. 1975, Detroit, MI; lives in Detroit, MI
  • Gözde İlkin (they/them) b. 1981, Kütahya, Türkiye; lives in İstanbul, Türkiye
  • Richard Ibghy (he/him) & Marilou Lemmens (she/her) b. 1964, Montreal, Canada; lives in Durham-Sud, Canada b. 1976, Ascot Corner, Canada; lives in Durham-Sud, Canada
  • AKI INOMATA (she/her) b. 1983, Tokyo, Japan; lives in Tokyo, Japan
  • Anne Duk Hee Jordan (they/them) b.1978, South Korea; lives in Berlin, Germany
  • Jane Jin Kaisen (she/her) b. 1980, Jeju, South Korea; lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, and New York, NY
  • Matt Kenyon (he/him) b. 1977, Baton Rouge, LA; lives in Buffalo, NY
  • Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge (she/they) b. 1981, Maria, Quebec, Canada; lives in Rochester, NY
  • Dionne Lee (she/her) b.1988, New York, NY; lives in Columbus, OH
  • Lina Lapelytė (she/her) b. 1984, Kaunas, Lithuania; lives in London, UK, and Vilnius, Lithuania
  • Matthew López-Jensen (he/him) b. 1980, CT; lives in Bronx, NY
  • Cathy Lu (she/her) b. 1984, Miami, FL; lives in Richmond, CA
  • Mary Mattingly (she/her) b. 1978, Rockville, CT; lives in New York, NY
  • Deirdre O’Mahony (she/her) b. 1956, Limerick, Ireland; lives in Cork City, Ireland
  • Abraham O. Oghobase (he/him) b.1979, Lagos, Nigeria; lives in Toronto, Canada
  • Kärt Ojavee (she/her) b. 1982, Rakvere, Estonia; lives in Tallinn, Estonia
  • Asad Raza (he/him) b. 1974, Buffalo, NY; lives in Berlin, Germany
  • Gamaliel Rodriguez (he/him) b.1977, Bayamón, Puerto Rico; lives in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico
  • Selma Selman (she/her) b. 1991, Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina; lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Finnegan Shannon (they/them) b. 1989, Berkeley, CA; lives in New York, NY
  • Jean Shin (she/her) b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea; lives in Hurley, NY
  • SIDE CORE – est. 2012, Tokyo, Japan; based in Tokyo, Japan
  • Victoria-Idongesit Udondian (she/her) b. 1982, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria; lives in New York, NY, and Lagos, Nigeria
  • Mierle Laderman Ukeles (she/her) b. 1939, Denver, CO; lives in New York, NY and Jerusalem, Israel
  • Michael Wang (he/him) b. 1981, Olney, MD, USA; lives in Upper Grandview, NY