Peculiar Manufactures at the Catskill Octagon House
organized by Marie Catalano
Upstate Art Weekend
July 17-21, 2025

Anna-Sophie Berger, Fashion is Fast, 2013. Installation view, MAK Exhibition View, 2023. MAK Geymüllerschlössel © kunst-dokumentation.com/MAK

Peculiar Manufactures, organized by Marie Catalano for Upstate Art Weekend 2025, will reimagine the Historic Catskill Octagon House through the lens of a 16th-century Kunstkammer. This varied group exhibition will feature a broad range of artists engaging with craft and trades, the politics of display, ritual, material affect, oblique talismans, and charged domestic objects. Appropriating the logic of heterogeneous, nonhierarchical display that marked these early museums, the exhibition will recreate the house as an oversized cabinet of curiosities incorporating sculptures alongside decorative objects, furniture, textiles, clothing, crafts, vessels, carpets, jewelry, and naturalia in tightly organized arrangements and dialogues with the architecture and one another. Prioritizing visual, spatial and material relationships, the installation will integrate artworks and objects within various lineages of making.

The Catskill Octagon House, itself an artifact of utopian innovation, was built by a local farmer in 1860 according to the design popularized by Orson Squire Fowler’s 1853 book The Octagon House: A Home for All. Fowler’s DIY manual touted the structure’s benefits of light, space and airflow, and inspired a short-lived surge of several thousand octagonal houses across the United States that corresponded with the Spiritualist Movement in the mid-19th century. Similar to how Kunstkammers were sometimes organized according to the four points of the compass, the Octagon House was built in alignment with the cardinal directions.

Makers include Anna-Sophie Berger, Violet Dennison, CFGNY, Jesse Darling, Gina Fischli, ektor garcia, Hardwares, Sylvie Hayes Wallace, Elizabeth Jeager, Heidi Lau, Zoé Mohm, Dosia Sanford, the Weaver’s Croft, and others.