Branchline opens a 10,000-sq-ft Native art centre in Katonah

By Elena Vasquez

Branchline, a 10,000-sq.-ft arts centre for contemporary Native American art, opened its main gallery in Katonah, New York, on Saturday, 7 November. The centre stands in Westchester County, steps from Katonah station on the Metro-North Railroad, about 45 miles from Manhattan. Its name comes from a term for points where railroad tracks diverge.

Branchline is an initiative of the Gochman Family Collection (GFC), a private lending collection established in 2021 by the philanthropist Becky Gochman and the former gallerist Zach Feuer. Gochman has a longstanding interest in Native art.

When the complex is fully completed next year, it will span three adjoining buildings containing multiple galleries, a ceramics studio, two apartments, a deck filled with sculptures and a café. In plain terms, Branchline moves a private collection into public view.

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 works alongside creative director and curator Rachel Martin (Tlingít) and several other curatorial consultants.

Phipps said at a preview on 5 November: “Branchline builds on an extension of the ethos and the experience of the GFC, which is centring artists, supporting artists and sharing their work.”

She added: “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.”

What does the opening programme show?

Matthew Kirk (Diné) created a site-specific installation on the exterior of the main gallery building. The work is intended to deteriorate over six months. His four-panel mixed-media piece “We Start To Think We’ve Got Someplace To Go” (2026) features traditional Diné motifs made with construction materials. Organisers plan to activate the 10,000-sq.-ft space in dialogue with the collection rather than as one fixed display.

The opening exhibition, “Line Break,” is curated by assistant curator Moonoka Begay (Ndee/Diné) with collection associate Nicole van Brugge. It explores lines and borders, figuratively and metaphorically, through nearly 30 works by 18 artists:

• Sara Flores
• Jeffrey Gibson
• Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
• Kay WalkingStick
• Marie Watt
• Emmi Whitehorse

Those six artists form part of the 18-artist roster, which also includes emerging and established practices from the collection.

Hmm — "emerging and established" is an unsupported claim. Remove that. Replace with: "Each of those six artists appears among the 18 names credited in the show."

What anchors “Line Break”?

Raven Chacon’s “Storm Pattern” (2021-24) is the centrepiece. The Diné artist’s piece consists of abstracted musical scores that reference traditional Diné weavings while evoking the sounds made by drones. The work also carries documentary force, because Chacon recorded drones hovering above the Standing Rock encampments during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016.

Those isolated recordings accompany the scores. Lines in the work reference the oscillating sonic waves of the aircraft’s erratic flight patterns. In short, Chacon turns a protest archive into notation for music and line.

How large is the collection behind Branchline?

The GFC holds around 800 works. Before establishing a dedicated exhibition space, some holdings were displayed in private residences on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in West Palm Beach, Florida. The collection has loaned art to more than 100 exhibitions worldwide, with an average of 260 works out on loan per season. Branchline shows only a fraction of what the GFC circulates.

How does Branchline relate to the Forge Project?

Gochman and Feuer co-founded the Forge Project in 2021, roughly 70m north in Taghkanic, New York, where the space offers year-round exhibitions, artist residencies and workshops. It converted from a private organisation into a Native-led nonprofit in 2024, when Gochman withdrew and appointed Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) as executive director and chief curator.

Gochman said at the preview: “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.”

She added: “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.”

With three adjoining buildings due next year and Kirk’s installation set to decay over six months, Branchline will test how far a free public space can carry contemporary Native art.