Gochman Family Collection Opens Branchline, a Free Katonah Art Space

A free public exhibition space for one of the world's leading collections of contemporary Indigenous art opened on Friday evening in Katonah, New York, less than two blocks from the Katonah train station.

The venue, named Branchline, occupies a gray two-story building on one of the Hudson Valley town's main drags and presents the Gochman Family Collection (GFC). The collection, established just five years ago, already holds more than 850 works and has become one of the world's foremost collections of contemporary Indigenous art.

Until now, most of those works hung in the New York apartment of founder and custodian Becky Gochman and her family. Some 200 works are typically on loan to institutions worldwide at any given time, and the GFC has opened the home to museum groups, schools and artists for tours and events. The organization's stated ambition has always been maximum accessibility. A gallery two blocks from a Metro-North station is the collection's answer.

Who runs it, and why a train name?

GFC creative director and curator Rachel Martin (Tlingít) framed the project in terms of accountability at a press preview on Thursday. "It's one thing to articulate a mission, but what matters to me," she said, "is if I'm putting that language out into the world [then] I'm making sure that our organization is following that with action."

She described Branchline as a place for "bringing community together, which means making the Native community feel like they are very much a part of what the decision-making parts of this are, and then also inviting the community of Katonah to come in and learn about new artists that they might not have heard of."

GFC director Laura Pipps explained the name, drawn from the rail term "branch line," or the place "where paths diverge and new paths begin." "We were excited about all the sort of ideas that 'branch line' conjures—both thinking about the metaphor of the train and the metaphor of trees—and what we can do to experiment and grow in this space," she said.

What does the opening actually include?

Branchline is not finished. The space will eventually total 10,000 square feet across four buildings on an L-shaped plot running from the Parkway entrance to Katonah Avenue. Friday's inauguration unveiled the first completed building: a three-room gallery on the ground floor, two bedrooms for an informal artist-in-residence program upstairs, and a nearly operational ceramics studio downstairs.

Architectural renderings show more to come:

• A back door opening onto a small sculpture deck
• A yet-to-be-built barn for large-scale works (the original barn was torn down)
• The Annex, a more experimental space still under construction, with exposed plywood and jerry-rigged lightbulbs
• A patio leading to Twig, a retail store and café

The inaugural exhibition, "Line Break," fills the modest, nearly 2,000-square-foot gallery with 28 works by 18 Indigenous artists, curated by GFC assistant curator Moonoka Begay (Ndee + Diné) with collection associate Nicola van Brugge. "Lines are a core facet of all visual language," the introductory wall text begins. The curators treat the line less formally — as a metaphor for lineage and bloodlines, borders and cartographic marks, horizons and sound barriers.

The show pairs artists across generations and mediums. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's The Spaniard (1988), a semi-abstract aerial view of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, hangs beside Sara Flores's Untitled (Shao Pei Maya Kené), 2024, painted in the geometric abstract language of the Shipibo-Conibo people, whose designs, per the exhibition brochure, "map the community's local worldview, environmental understanding, and cosmology."

Nearby hang two brightly colored meditations on landscape: Teresa Baker's Echoes (2024), in acrylic, yarn, willow and artificial sinew on AstroTurf, and George Morrison's Night Shadows. Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape (1994), acrylic on canvas on board.

Two works by Nadia Myre from her "Code of Construction" series arrange strung ceramic cylinders into squares depicting ground-to-air distress signals for "Require Map and Compass" and "Not Understood" — a medium that draws on the wampum belt tradition of the Northeast Woodlands. Faye HeavyShield's the red line II (2025), a hand-strung strand of red beads displayed in a flexible coil, offers a quieter counterpoint.

The exhibition centers on Raven Chacon's Storm Pattern (2021–24), a handwoven wool textile paired with a multichannel sound piece whose low hum fills the gallery. In 2016, Chacon noticed the sounds of police surveillance drones mingling with protesters' countersurveillance drones over the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock, where demonstrators opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline. He recorded that harmonious dissonance as a score and translated it into a textile charting the drones' erratic flight patterns in traditional Diné weaving style.

What will change, and when?

Two elements of the opening will likely look drastically different within months. The GFC commissioned Matthew Kirk to make a site-specific collage of painted tar paper across three plywood panels on an exterior alleyway wall; the paper had already warped in light rain by Thursday morning. Down the alley, the unfinished Annex currently hosts a small show of drawings by Shuvinai Ashoona, who maps imagined scenes onto the Arctic landscape of Nunavut, Canada, where she lives. The team acknowledged it has not figured out how the space will look even once the build-out is complete; that will depend on how artists respond to a prompt giving them full autonomy.

"What GFC is doing is not trying to become an institution," Martin said. "It's trying to just meet where things are needed, and a space is definitely needed for art that is outside of the white box that you're used to seeing, so that's what we're offering."

Whether a private collection can stay this deliberately unfinished — with an incomplete building, an unfixed program and free admission — will be tested as the remaining 8,000 square feet take shape over the coming months.