Programs & Events
The LOOM Plein Air Invitational
October 23-25, 2026
The LOOM Plein Air Invitational brings together artists whose work closely attends to landscape through drawing and painting. We understand landscape not simply as scenery, but as the living, built, social, and ecological world around us, where what we call the natural and unnatural are continually entangled.
At a moment when our attention is constantly being pulled elsewhere, paying close attention can itself be urgent and meaningful. To notice something is to acknowledge that it matters.
Over the weekend, artists will spend time in and around Philmont looking, listening, observing, and responding through drawing and painting. We are interested in what artists notice when they spend sustained time with a place, and in how those acts of attention can reveal the ways environment, architecture, infrastructure, human activity, and other forms of life are constantly shaping one another.
Nato Thompson
Director, LOOM
The Invitational and Open Call
Throughout Friday and Saturday, participating artists will work across Philmont and the surrounding area. Visitors are invited to come by LOOM near the Summit Knitting Mill, pick up information about the weekend, and find out where artists are working that day. A private reception will be held for the artists on Sunday from 1-4 PM EST in Hudson, NY.
Participating invited artists include Ellen Altfest, Melissa Brown, Ying Li, and Johnny DeFeo, with additional artists to be announced.
Five regional artists will also be selected to participate through an open call.
Organizing Committee
Ellen Altfest Invited Artist
Ellen Altfest is a painter who lives and works in Kent, Connecticut. She received her MFA from Yale University, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has held residencies at the Chinati Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, and SAGA House in Kyoto. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Museum, White Cube, and the Frist Art Museum, and was included in the 55th Venice Biennale.
Melissa Brown Invited Artist
Melissa Brown lives and works in Brooklyn, where her mixed-media paintings explore remembrance, perception, and the experience of time. Working across airbrush, impasto, silkscreen, stencil, and plein air, she turns familiar landscapes, interiors, and still lifes into surreal tableaus, often asking how a memory captured digitally differs from one held in the body. A Joan Mitchell Fellow, she recently exhibited Window Shopping at Derek Eller Gallery (2026), and her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
Mike Glier Committee Member
Mike Glier is a painter and teacher who draws and paints to explore subjects of common interest. While masculine identity, desire, and violence shaped much of his early work, for the past two decades he has focused on the human relationship with land. His landscape paintings are driven by a love of paint and abstraction, and by a desire to help bring about the shift in philosophy a sustainable future requires.
Nato Thompson Director
Nato Thompson is the Executive Director of LOOM and a curator with more than twenty years of experience. He founded and directed the Alternative Art School, served as Artistic Director of Philadelphia Contemporary, and was a curator at MASS MoCA. He also curated Kara Walker’s A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Factory (2014), a landmark activation of an industrial building through art.
Invited Artists
Ying Li Invited Artist
Ying Li is a painter and educator born in Beijing who immigrated to the United States in 1983 and is the Phlyssa Koshland Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College. Her work has been exhibited internationally and at institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy Museum, and the Hood Museum, and she is represented by Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY. She has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and has received residential fellowships in Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, and France.
Johnny DeFeo Invited Artist
Johnny DeFeo is a painter based in Taos, New Mexico, whose landscape and wildlife paintings depict a dreamlike world full of human emotion but largely empty of people. He studied art in Gunnison, Colorado, and earned his MFA in painting from the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2019 he co-founded Adventure Painting with Aaron Zulpo, a mobile plein air residency that takes studio artists into the wild to advance ecological conservation through art.
Open Call Artists
Selected Artists Announced: October 12, 2026
Come Visit
Friday, October 23 and Saturday, October 24
Philmont, New York
Artists will be working throughout Philmont and the surrounding area.
Visitors can stop by the LOOM information and check-in area near the Summit Knitting Mill for a map, schedule, and information about where artists are working.