NEW PALTZ, NY.- The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz presents “Jean-Marc Superville Sovak: Open for Unfinished Business,” an exhibition that reexamines the overlooked histories of freedom, labor and place-making among the Hudson Valley's early Black communities through art, archival research and years of community collaboration.

On view Sept. 9 through Dec. 6, 2026, the exhibition brings together newly commissioned installations, site-specific works, and rarely seen historical loans, some on public view for the first time, to imagine a multivocal past and a more restitutive relationship to the present.

"Open for Unfinished Business"

Working simultaneously as artist, researcher and curator, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak transforms the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art into a speculative site for rewriting regional histories of place-making and labor. By presenting his own artworks alongside historical materials and archival loans, he invites visitors to reconsider how the Hudson Valley's history is told, imagining a multivocal past and a restitutive relationship to the present.

Displacing the authorial voice of the artist, the aura of the "art object," and the museum as a colonial repository, Superville Sovak synthesizes years of community work, oral histories and relationships with local historians, archivists, organizers and descendants of New Paltz founding families. The exhibition spans more than two decades of his practice, grounded in sustained community engagement and place-based research throughout the Hudson Valley.

For Superville Sovak, the son of a Trinidadian immigrant and an Eastern European political refugee, the project is grounded in an ongoing exploration of race, national identity and the complexities of displacement and belonging in an increasingly migratory, multi-ethnic world. With an investigative focus on archival gaps in early American Black history, uneven experiences of freedom in the Hudson Valley, and the enduring myth of a progressive North Country, Superville Sovak's body of work collapses time periods, images and media to highlight collectively authored histories existing outside the dominant canon.





Early works centered on cultural access and relational camaraderie as a generative creative process lay the groundwork for his use of narrative history and insurgent humor as tools of inquiry. Newly commissioned works and site-responsive installations simultaneously complicate artistic authorship and the singularity of the original object by layering New Paltz-specific source materials. Drawing on local legends and storytelling, these works center New Paltz's early Black community, sometimes provocatively referred to as "the Black Huguenots," particularly during the era of gradual emancipation, focusing on the spaces of freedom they inhabited, the communities they built, and the livelihoods they carved out under restrictive conditions throughout the nineteenth century.

Superville Sovak draws on archival materials and objects sourced from local historical repositories such as the Margaret Wade Lewis Center, Historic Huguenot Street and Newburgh's Ann Street Gallery. Presented alongside his own works, this vibrant collage of objects disrupts linear narratives of history while bringing forgotten names and perspectives back into view. These materials anchor Superville Sovak's interpretive gestures in individual personhood and practices of place-making. Spanning video and sound, sculpture, print, drawing, research interventions, and documentation, Superville Sovak's work, together with locally significant historical materials treated as totems of power, intervenes in the Eurocentric legacies of New Paltz.

By working collaboratively with local knowledge sources, both living and material, Superville Sovak takes a corrective and fabulatory approach to land, labor, and life. “Open for Unfinished Business” proposes alternative modes of remembering and refashioning the past while reconsidering the artist's responsibility to the public as art becomes a lived commitment to the present.

“Jean-Marc Superville Sovak: Open for Unfinished Business” is guest curated by Sofia Thiệu D'Amico.