TREADWELL - The road curves quietly through the hills between Franklin and Treadwell, past weathered farmhouses, old barns and pockets of forest where cell service fades long before the art does.
For three decades that stretch of western Delaware County has transformed each summer into one of New York’s most enduring rural arts trails: the Stagecoach Run Art Festival, a self-guided tour where artists open their studios, homes, galleries and converted barns to the public.
This year’s festival, scheduled for July 11 and 12, marks its 30th anniversary.
“It was the first one in New York,” said artist Jane Carr, one of the festival’s co-founders, speaking recently from her studio on county Route 14 in Treadwell, where she will once again welcome visitors during the event.
The festival draws visitors from across the state and beyond, offering an unusually intimate encounter with artists working in the western Catskills. But its beginnings were far more improvised.
At the time, she had recently relocated to the area and was astonished by the concentration of artists living quietly among the farms and hills.
“There were all these artists that lived in the vicinity, I’d say 16 or 17, and I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
That impulse - to make visible an artistic community often overlooked outside rural New York - became the foundation of the festival itself.
This year’s event will feature artists working across a range of mediums, including painting, ceramics, sculpture and photography, with most participating venues located along the former Catskill Turnpike stagecoach road connecting Franklin and Treadwell.
The festival’s mission, organizers say, remains centered on strengthening relationships between artists and their communities while demonstrating the cultural and economic value artists bring to rural areas - a goal that has taken on renewed significance as Delaware County has seen an influx of newcomers since the Covid pandemic.
Carr, now in her 80s, no longer organizes the event she helped build. But she still paints regularly and continues to open her studio to visitors.
“I paint in series,” she said. “Usually I start around the fall.”
Over the years, those series have included landscapes, cows, skies, shadows and, most recently, an “underwater series” inspired by her daughter and son-in-law, both marine biologists.
The collection, completed only weeks ago, contains more than 10 paintings rendered in egg tempera, one of the oldest painting techniques in Western art history.
“Egg tempera is really the oldest way of painting,” she said.
Egg tempera is a historic, fast-drying painting medium made by mixing dry colored pigments with egg yolk and water. Prized since ancient times and famously used during the Renaissance, it doesn’t yellow or fade, drying to a permanent, matte finish.
Carr’s paintings are layered through painstaking crosshatching, allowing colors to build gradually beneath one another.
“You see color behind color,” she explained.
Her studio practice has long been tied to the Wednesday Painters, an informal collective of regional artists who have met weekly since the 1990s to paint and critique one another’s work.
“We all have different eyes,” Carr said. “Sometimes somebody will say, ‘That tree doesn’t look connected to the ground very well,’ and you realize they’re right.”
The collaborative spirit of those gatherings mirrors the atmosphere visitors encounter during Stagecoach Run itself - less formal exhibition than conversation.
Artists often demonstrate techniques in real time, allowing visitors to see works in progress rather than only finished pieces.
“We have people that give demonstrations,” Carr said. “I’m going to be painting in egg tempera as people come in.”
Over the years, she estimates 200 - 300 visitors have passed through her studio each year during a typical festival weekend.
What keeps people returning, she believes, is the rare opportunity to encounter art where it is actually made.
“Good art stops you,” Carr said.
Even after 30 years, the festival continues to operate less like a commercial arts fair than a community tradition stitched into the landscape itself - a trail of studios, conversations and open doors winding through the Catskill hills.
For more information and a full list of participating artists and venues, visit stagecoachrun.com
