New centre for contemporary Indigenous art launches in upstate New York
The Branchline has opened its main gallery with a group exhibitions of works by Raven Chacon, Jeffrey Gibson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and others
Branchline , a new 10,000-sq.-ft arts centre focused on championing contemporary Native American art, opened its main gallery to the public on Saturday (7 November). Located in the town of Katonah in New York’s Westchester County, Branchline is an initiative of the Gochman Family Collection (GFC), a private lending collection established in 2021 by the philanthropist Becky Gochman, who has a longstanding interest in Native art, and the former gallerist Zach Feuer.
Branchline is located steps from the Katonah station on the Metro-North Railroad, around 45 miles from Manhattan, and takes its name from a term for points where railroad tracks diverge and begin. When it is fully completed next year, the complex will span three adjoining buildings, including multiple galleries, a ceramics studio, two apartments, a deck filled with sculptures and a café.
Laura Phipps is Branchline’s inaugural director. A former associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art , she was appointed director of the GFC earlier this year. Phipps is working alongside the creative director and curator Rachel Martin (Tlingít) and several other curatorial consultants.
“Branchline builds on an extension of the ethos and the experience of the GFC, which is centring artists, supporting artists and sharing their work,” Phipps said at a preview of the centre on 5 November. “We were excited about all the ideas that Branchline conjures, both thinking about the metaphor of the train, the metaphor of trees, and what we can do to experiment and grow in this space.”
Organisers seek to explore innovative ways of activating the space in dialogue with the collection. The inaugural programme features a site-specific installation on the exterior of the main gallery building by the artist Matthew Kirk (Diné) that is intended to deteriorate over the course of six months. The four-panel mixed-media work We Start To Think We’ve Got Someplace To Go (2026) features traditional Diné motifs made with construction materials.
The opening exhibition, Line Break , is curated by Branchline’s assistant curator Moonoka Begay (Ndee/Diné) with the collection associate Nicole van Brugge. It explores the concept of lines and borders figuratively and metaphorically through nearly 30 works by 18 artists, including Sara Flores , Jeffrey Gibson , Jaune Quick-to-See Smith , Kay WalkingStick, Marie Watt and Emmi Whitehorse.
A centrepiece of the opening show is the Diné artist Raven Chacon’s Storm Pattern (2021-24). It consists of abstracted musical scores that reference traditional Diné weavings while also evoking the sounds made by drones. The work is accompanied by isolated recordings Chacon captured of drones that hovered above the Standing Rock encampments during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016, with the lines in the work referencing the oscillating sonic waves of their erratic flight patterns.
Before establishing a dedicated exhibition space, some of the GFC’s holdings, totalling around 800 works, were displayed in private residences on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in West Palm Beach, Florida. The GFC has loaned art to more than 100 exhibitions worldwide, with an average of 260 works out on loan per season.
Gochman and Feuer previously co-founded the Forge Project in 2021 , an initiative similarly dedicated to the advancement of contemporary Native art and located around 70m north in Taghkanic, New York. That space also offers year-round exhibitions, artist residencies and workshops. It was converted from a private organisation into a Native-led nonprofit in 2024, when Gochman withdrew from the project and appointed Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) as its executive director and chief curator.
“We started Branchline and the Forge Project for social-justice reasons, and we are now separate from Forge because we got the bug to collect Native art,” Gochman said at the preview. “The Branchline space functions as a free public space, which is a new concept for us. We are consistent, though, with the philosophy that artists and art come first, because we wouldn’t be here without them.”
