The New York Times: Art to See on Day Trips From New York City This Spring

The busy calendar of fairs and auctions in May makes New York City an attractive hub of activity for the art crowd. But if a breather is needed or desired, a day trip may be in order. Here are a few art destinations worth considering.

Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, N.Y.
Meaning “warehouse” in Italian, Magazzino was founded in 2017 by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu to share their collection of Italian postwar and contemporary art with the public. Visitors arriving by Metro-North Railroad can take a quick shuttle ride that Magazzino provides for $3 from the station to its campus.

The 20,000-square-foot main building, an elegantly retrofitted former industrial space, houses Magazzino’s core collection by Arte Povera (meaning “Poor Art”) artists such as Mario and Marisa Merz, Alighiero Boetti, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Jannis Kounellis, who rebelled against the art market in the 1960s and ’70s and used humble objects and natural materials in their work.

In a smaller pavilion that opened in 2023 for temporary exhibitions, “Maria Lai. A Journey to America,” on view through July 28, is the first North American survey of Lai, a cult figure who was widely recognized in Italy and rarely traveled outside her native Sardinia (she died in 2013). “She did make one very influential trip to New York in 1968, and that’s the premise of this show,” said the Magazzino director, Adam Sheffer. Seeing constructed and collaged works with found objects by artists including Louise Nevelson and Robert Rauschenberg “had such a huge impact” on Lai’s vein of abstraction, Sheffer said. “She came back and rediscovered what was available to her in Sardinia, using textiles and sewing and looms.”

Lunch is served in the pavilion’s Café Silvia, with a picture window onto Magazzino’s garden and resident donkeys — a staple of the landscape in Sardinia where the founder Spanu is from.