By Holland Cotter
New York Times

This is a killer weekend for new art in New York City. Three contemporary art fairs – The Armory show, Scope New York, and the DiVa Digital and Video Art Fair – are in town for a few cash-crazed days. A show of sculptures called Art Rock is parked in Rockefeller Plaza. And “Greater New York 2005”, survey of some 150 young artists living in and around the city, opens at P.S.1 in Long Island City on Sunday.

The debut version of the P.S.1 show in 2000 wasn’t great exactly, but it felt hot-off-the-burner in a way that Whitney Biennials usually don’t. It was a hit, and many of the artists – average age was 32 – were signed by Chelsea galleries.

In the intervening years, as the number of galleries in that neighborhood has grown exponentially, so has the diaspora of artists, pushed by rising rents farther and farther outside Manhattan. Less than a third of the people featured in “Greater New York 2005” live there. And the rest don’t just live in Williamsburg. They’re in Red Hook, or the Gowanus area, or New Jersey, or Westchester.

What do you find there? Below is a tour of five of the many communities that have formed throughout and beyond the city, from the formerly burned-out factories of the South Bronx to a historic working-class town north on the Hudson. Some are defined by a museum or gallery; others revolve around an apartment building or even a single loft. But all of them are examples of the new ways that art is being made in New York today.

Peekskill, N.Y.

Finally, for some artists, “alternative community” means an alternative to urban life and a relocation to greater New York’s outer limits. Peekskill, in Westchester, about an hour from midtown Manhattan by Metro North, fits the bill. An old, working-class Hudson River town, it has an interracial history and a large African-American and Latino population. After local industries failed in the 1960’s, the downtown emptied out; drugs moved in; middle-class whites left. In the 1990’s, the town passed an ordinance stipulating that second-floor space in commercial buildings would be made available, cheap, to artists, and many moved in – some local, some New York City transplants, including a former Balanchine set designer-turned-painter (Alain Vaes); a virtuoso printmaker and art historian (Carol Wax); and a sculptor whose work brings Herman Melville together with Hildegard of Bingen, and Emily Dickinson with Marcel Duchamp (Carla Rae Johnson). Last summer, the collectors Marc and Livia Straus opened the Hudson Vallery Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, which mixed works they owned with loans in a large thematic show.

Eventually, maybe, the glamour of nearby Dia:Beacon will filter downstream to Peekskill, or the glamour of Manhattan will filter up. But for a day-tripper from the city, the present pace is slow, which seems to be what many artists here, a fair number of them at midcareer, are after. One, Lori Nozick (who just finished a sculptural commission for P.S. 58 on Staten Island, executed by Peekskill-area craftsmen and women), has even found an alternative to the Peekskill alternative.

She lives several miles out of town at Mohegan Colony, a community of cottages built mostly in the 1920’s by New York political radicals – anarchists, communists, socialists — as a summer camp. Cottages were custom-made; Ms. Nozick’s was built by a sculptor and a musician and has windows high and low. Even on warm summer nights far away from Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, the conversation must have been lively, the creative thinking intense. For New Yorkers, artists or not, no matter where they are, anything less is just not an option.

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