"Gherao: A Group Response for the Fall of Freedom"

“Gherao,” a two-site pop-up exhibition in Hudson and East Chatham (362 1/2 Warren Street in Hudson and 137 County Route 24 in East Chatham), brings together 30 New York artists in a coordinated artistic response to what organizers describe as the current administration’s political overreach. Curated by George Lawson, the show is part of artist Dread Scott’s Fall of Freedom campaign, a nationwide call for creative acts of resistance across disciplines. Painter David Becker initiated the project after learning of the campaign and asked Lawson to assemble a group whose work could meet the moment.

The exhibition’s title, "Gherao"—a Bengali word meaning “to encircle”—comes from a radical labor tactic in which management is surrounded until worker demands are addressed. That sense of pressure, encirclement, and collective agency animates the show’s approach. Many artists take on the American flag directly, reworking its iconography into forms of protest: Becker’s head-bag flag, Beth Davila Waldman’s Our Flag Was Still There, Wendy Miller’s State of (Dis)Union, and Hugh Biber’s inverted distress flag.

Other works opt for overt messaging—Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Pedophile and Christopher Griffith’s Free—or deploy blunt symbolic objects, like Dan Devine’s A Frottage of Handcuffs, Arnold Lieberman’s shattered globe Political Sphere, and Stephen Whisler’s ominous Walking the Bomb. Still others probe the moment through more oblique or sensate gestures: Deborah Dancy’s Resistance, Virginia Reath’s The Girl Who Made a Mistake, and George Lawson’s own Where the Light Enters and Kill.

The cumulative effect is a dense, multi-voiced reckoning—one that fuses nostalgia, surrealism, and political urgency. From Adam Parker Smith’s critique of gilded excess to Barbara Kilpatrick’s Goya-infused Mommy’s Smock, the exhibition frames artmaking as a form of civic pressure, its own kind of encirclement. A reception for the artists will be held November 22 at the Hudson location.