Inaugural Medina Triennial brings global contemporary art to Erie Canal
The New York State Canal Corporation operates, maintains, improves, and promotes the state’s 524-mile network of canals. The most famous of these being the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, connecting Buffalo, NY and Lake Erie in the west with the Hudson River to the east. Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes, offers shipping access to the nation’s heartland with its vast grain and mineral resources. The Hudson River takes boat traffic to New York City, the Atlantic Ocean, and the world.
After multiple expansions, the Erie Canal today runs nearly 350 miles at depths averaging 12 to 15 feet and a width up to 200 feet. Those dimensions are puny on the scale of contemporary global shipping. In the mid-20th century, the St. Lawrence Seaway was constructed to replace the decidedly 19th century Erie Canal.
What was once an industrial juggernaut, the Erie Canal today feels quaint. Nostalgic. Designed in an era when mules pulled barges. The towns along its route, likewise, feel quaint. Nostalgic.
That’s fine for tourists and retirees, but what of the young people, the families, the futures of these post-industrial small towns whose fortunes were established on the Erie Canal 150 years ago, then faded as global commerce outgrew it? The New York State Canal Corporation thinks about this. Many years ago, it began thinking of testing culture as a catalyst. Culture as a catalyst for keeping and attracting residents. As a catalyst for attracting economic development. For attracting more visitors.
The Canal Corporation put a steering committee together composed of preeminent cultural institutions in western New York: the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the University at Buffalo, Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, and the Corning Museum of Glass. The committee was tasked with envisioning a cultural project to spark interest, energy, and economics along the Erie Canal.
It considered an annual art festival. It considered an art museum. Ultimately, it landed on a triennial – an every-third-year art festival.
It also landed on Medina as the location, a town of 6,000 between Buffalo and Rochester at the widest spot on the Erie Canal.
Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo were selected as curators for the inaugural Medina Triennial after a global search.
“When I first came there, I felt like a tourist,” Laansoo told me about her first visit to Medina in late 2023. “I knew nobody. I was like a random tourist there for a day just looking around.”
Laansoo had lived in Rochester, 45 miles east, since 2019 after 15 years in New York City. Still, she’d never heard of Medina.
“It’s very cute. Even in November, it was adorable,” Laansoo remembers. “A small town in the U.S., you may think, ‘Oh, it has a traffic light, a gas station, and a pizza joint.’ This didn’t look like that. It almost has a European feel to it. A lot of restored historic buildings.”
Laansoo would know. She’s from Estonia.
“The canal is incredibly charming,” she continued. “The main street and canal run almost parallel… there’s this incredible waterfall there. For a town that size, you can eat really well and you can find a really good hotel to stay.”
Medina also claims one of the oldest opera houses in the United States and one of the largest electric train setups at its railroad museum.
Put all that together with a major private funder for the event from Medina and off you go.
Welcome To Medina
No two small towns are the same, but they all have this in common: they don’t like outsiders coming in and telling them what to do.
“Before you can do anything, you have to understand a little bit about the local. I don’t want to say small town politics, but you want to understand what are you getting yourself into. What do (residents) like,” Laansoo said. “We quickly realized that building relationships doesn’t start with talking about art.”
In order for Medina to show up for the Triennial, Laansoo and Conte knew the Triennial – which at that point was only them – needed to show up for Medina.
“If you come into such a small community, you feel enormous responsibility because you’re not anonymous anymore. Whatever you promise, you have to do,” Laansoo said.
To begin with, the curators gave more than they asked.
“I really dislike this attitude of I just come and I need this and this and this and can you make it happen? Can you help me? Can you deliver this? Can you introduce me to this person? That’s not gonna fly there,” she explained. “It’s gonna get you exactly nowhere. You have to be willing to give back a lot.”
The curators helped the railroad museum with a grant. They’re making the Triennial Hub building available to community members for events and celebrations for free. The entire Triennial is free. Regional artists as well as local residents were invited to participate in projects. Those include Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden, a barge-based living artwork built with residents and students from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“You just spend time with them and you listen. That’s the thing that matters,” she added.
From past experience with biennials and triennials, Laansoo knew she had to satisfy a “triangle of ambitions.” That triangle included the funders and sponsors, the event’s international aims, and the local community.
“The community is the key part,” she said. “You can have the funding, you can get all the metrics right, you can bring in the biggest (art) stars you can reach, but if you fail the community, you fail.”
‘All That Sustains Us’
Opened on June 6 and on view through September 7, the Medina Triennial positions small towns as vital sites for cultural and critical imagination rather than a peripheral backdrop. Presented across10 sites, including locations on the Erie Canal, the event strengthens local cultural infrastructure while establishing Medina as a destination for contemporary art.
The Triennial’s largest exhibition site, the historic Medina High School, has been unoccupied for decades and was reopened especially for the exhibition; it hosts works by more than 30 artists. The Medina Triennial Hub, situated in a former sandstone hotel overlooking the canal, serves as a welcome center, a home for education and residency programs, and a site for two major commissions. Start your visit there. Pick up an exhibition map, learn about participating artists and projects, and speak with engagement guides before heading to walkable sites across the village.
The presentation’s title, “All That Sustains Us,” comes from a question artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) posed in 1969 and never stopped asking: what does it take to keep things going? The Medina Triennial asks what forms of labor, knowledge, and commitment sustain civic life, ecological systems, and the built environment, especially under conditions of strain.
“She wrote this text in the middle of night. She was an exhausted young mom who had a day job as well,” Laansoo explained. “Why is my labor not valued? I’m not creating anything new, but I’m taking care of this small baby. I’m trying to work and nobody pays any attention to me. It’s still contemporary to this day.”
Artwork from Ukeles is included in the Triennial.
Jean Shin’s Everyday Monuments (2009-2026) speaks to Ukeles’ question by transforming sports trophies into a gleaming collective monument heralding acts of unseen everyday labor such as cleaning, care work, food service, and postal work—the work that sustains us.
“She took hundreds and hundreds of donated sports trophies and made new labels for them, so instead of golf, you’re like the best bread baker or stroller pusher,” Laansoo explained. “It’s not some highbrow, academic, white cube. It’s something that really spoke to people. We’re doing this work every day, year after year.”
And now every three years in Medina.
