The exhibition continues an ongoing collaboration between Wassaic Project and Troutbeck, rooted in a shared commitment to supporting artists, fostering public engagement, and advancing cultural exchange in the Hudson Valley. Together, both institutions have cultivated a space where contemporary art, history, education, and community are brought into active conversation, extending the legacy of creative and civic exchange that has defined both places. In Echoes in the Margin, Delano Dunn reimagines how Black identity and desire have been shaped and seen, and what it might look like to see them anew.

Curator Mickalene Thomas writes:

The work of Dunn unfolds as a layered meditation on memory, identity, and the unstable terrain of historical narrative. The presentation brings Dunn’s distinct visual language into dialogue with a site long shaped by cultural exchange, intellectual gathering, and the complexities of American history.

Dunn’s practice draws from a vast personal archive of found imagery culled from advertisements, art history, and vernacular photography which he reassembles into densely composed paintings and collages. These works operate as both excavation and intervention. Figures emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure across his surfaces, refusing singular interpretation. Through this process, Dunn disrupts conventional hierarchies of representation, foregrounding how Black identity, desire, and presence have been constructed, consumed, and often obscured.

A gathering place for writers, artists, and thinkers for over two centuries, Troutbeck has been a place of literary community, civil rights organizing, and encounters between some of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century American life. The estate hosted the landmark Amenia Conferences of 1916 and 1933—pivotal early NAACP gatherings organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and hosted by Joel and Amy Spingarn, with Joel serving as Chairman of the NAACP Board. Over the years, Troutbeck also drew writers, artists, and thinkers including Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sinclair Lewis, and Lewis Mumford to its grounds. Today, Troutbeck operates as a celebrated historic estate hotel, and through its ongoing partnership with Wassaic Project, serves as a living site where that history and contemporary art continue to meet.

In her curatorial statement, Thomas continues:

At Troutbeck, these concerns resonate with particular clarity. The site itself, steeped in histories of retreat, discourse, and privilege, becomes an active context for Dunn’s reimagined narratives, reframing from its archive. His works challenge the presumed neutrality of such spaces, inserting bodies and stories that complicate inherited frameworks of belonging. What is remembered here, and what has been omitted? Dunn’s compositions ask viewers to sit within that tension and take it in.

Delano Dunn’s work amplifies these inquiries, emphasizing materiality, sensuality, and the politics of looking. My longstanding engagement with representation and Black subjectivity finds a compelling counterpart in Dunn’s improvisational, collage based approach. Together, our perspectives shape an exhibition that is both intimate and expansive, attuned to the personal while insistently addressing broader cultural histories.

Rather than offering resolution, Dunn invites a kind of active viewing: one that embraces fragmentation, contradiction, and multiplicity. In this space, images are not fixed but in flux, charged with the possibility of being re-seen, re-read, and reimagined.

Special thanks to Montague Contemporary.

Artwork: WEB DuBois, 2026
Paper, wood, wallpaper, shoe polish, spraypaint, enamel paint, on board, 24 in x 18 in

About Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas debuts her first curatorial exhibition in collaboration with the Wassaic Project at Troutbeck, the historic estate hotel in Amenia, New York. The exhibition features works by Delano Dunn under the title Echoes in the Margin, marking a continued expansion of Thomas’s curatorial practice, which spans more than 15 exhibitions and projects across museums, galleries, and independent spaces over the past two decades.

Her curatorial work includes notable exhibitions such as Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space, co-curated by Keely Ogreman, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery; The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum; and Brand New Heavies, first presented at Collette Blanchard Gallery in 2009 and later at Pioneer Works in 2021. She also developed the long-running, multi-venue exhibition MUSE: tête-à-tête, co-curated with Leslie Martin, editor at Aperture, which has been presented at major institutions across the United States, including Aperture Gallery, New York; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; and Dayton Art Institute, OH, among many others.

Thomas is a globally celebrated multidisciplinary artist renowned for her spectacular rhinestone-studded portraits that boldly reimagine representations of Black Life in contemporary art. Her work unapologetically challenges traditional beauty standards while amplifying narratives often excluded from mainstream art spaces. In addition to major exhibitions, Thomas’s pieces are held in the permanent collections at major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA), and the Smithsonian. Mirroring her artworks’ ability to overcome traditional boundaries in visual arts, Thomas became the first Black femme with a scholarship endowed in her name at Yale University in 2023, and the first Black woman to hold a major solo exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2025 with All About Love. Other accolades include the Center for Photography at Woodstock Vision Awards 2026, Clio Awards 2026, Help USA Art of Resilience Artist of the Year Award 2026, Torchbearers: Carrying Change Award 2026, TIME 100 Most Influential People 2025, Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Rutgers University-Camden 2025, Hirshhorn Museum’s National Arts Award 2023, and Gordon Parks Foundation Award 2020.

Beyond her studio practice, Thomas is a visionary curator, mentor, and educator as a visiting artist at Columbia University. She actively supports emerging artists—through mentorship, community engagement, and inclusive curatorial work. She co-founded Pratt>Forward, a postgraduate professional development program, and serves as creative director of Art Arena, a media group that connects artists, athletes, and brands to create impactful cultural experiences. Mickalene Thomas continues to break boundaries and elevate underrepresented voices through her bold visual storytelling, cultural leadership, and unwavering commitment to justice and representation.