Partner Spotlight: Denniston Hill

Since 2004, Denniston Hill has been quietly doing the kind of work AFMAC believes in most: building durable cultural infrastructure outside the logic of the market. An artist residency and cultural platform set on 220 acres in the southern Catskill Mountains, on the ancestral territory of the Esopus people of Lenapehoking, it has welcomed more than 400 artists into a practice grounded in care, shared resources, and a slower rhythm that makes room for rest and reflection. Co-founded by architecture historian Lawrence Chua alongside artists Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer, the organization treats land not as a backdrop but as a collaborator in the creative life of its community.

This spring, that two-decade history took monumental form at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Chimera (2026) is a large-scale, multidisciplinary installation in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini, presented as a Special Project within In Minor Keys, the exhibition curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. Reimagining the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse as a mythical beast assembled from many bodies, the work stitches together sculptures, drawings, video, sound, painting, and photography by 153 Denniston Hill alumni into a single room-sized group portrait. Designed in collaboration with architect Koray Duman, the installation reassembles its fragments, drawn from histories of migration, displacement, and artistic friendship across borders, into an animated forest of totems, anchored by a stepped ziggurat built for gathering, rest, and public conversation.

What makes this moment especially resonant for us is the company Denniston Hill keeps. Kouoh invited six artist-founded institutions she called "Schools", including blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Ghana, the G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria, the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya, and RAW Material Company in Dakar, to exhibit alongside individual artists. Denniston Hill is the only North American or European organization among them, named for its commitment to trans-local network building and a world shaped more by diasporas and the cultures they carry than by the scarcity model of nationalism. It is a vision of institution-building as a collaborative, custodial act, forms that emerge, as Chua puts it, from the alignment of disparate hands, voices, and worlds. That is precisely the kind of commons AFMAC exists to tend.

Chimera is on view May 9–November 22, 2026.