The recent opening of a world-class arts institution in Midtown Kingston promises to raise the city's arts profile to a whole other level. The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), three years after re-locating to Kingston from its namesake town, drew an opening night mob scene on Jan. 18, packed subway tight with more high net-worth individuals per square foot than any Ulster County event since the last time Peter Buffett was alone in a shower.

That's a fine portent for the local economy. But it wouldn't be the case were it not that CPW's standards are so high. The first exhibitions are of a quality equal to that of any of the nation's or the world's other major photo arts institutions. And as a bonus, CPW has shown a deep commitment to engaging with the local community: No Beamer, no brie, no designer couture required.

Mary Ellen Mark headlined the evening. The most well-known of the debut shows’ artists, her “Ward 81” project mines the same challenging territory for which she is known, documenting the intimate, often awkward moments of outsiders, in this instance in several rooms' walls of large-scale black-and-white photographs taken at a high-security, all-female wing of an Oregon state mental hospital in the late '70s. It was the same hospital where Mark had previously spent a month doing set photography for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” befriending a number of the hospital's residents. “They are the women we might have been or one day become,” Mark has said.

Revelatory is a good word for “My Sister, My Self: Photographs by Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon,” an overview of the lives and work of the Ulster County-born and raised identical twin sisters among a new wave of American photography in the 1970s through their 20 years as directors of CPW in Woodstock. Almost inevitably, themes of twins, twinning and femininity run through the show. Overflowing with sensually exciting, formally inventive approaches, both women leaned deeper into abstraction and surrealism (and Kathleen into collage) as they evolved.

“The Kenyon Sisters got sidelined and largely forgotten,” CPW Director Brian Wallis, formerly deputy director and chief curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, told Kingston Wire in an interview. “They both died just a little while ago and when I was first working here, I think it was just a few months into my tenure, I learned one was this woman who used to be a director and I'm like, ‘What? She was so important!’ And then I went online to put together her obituary, and there was almost nothing. And I was like, come on, she was amazing. And so we worked with the family and the folks who controlled the estate to put together the show, and we had these two fantastic art historians from Bard who came on board to curate the show, and they just dug into it, and like made sense of this massive material that was just in boxes and files and put together the chronology and rebuilt the work these two had done that had just largely disappeared.”

“Keisha Scarville: Recess” is a mystery box of hidden imagery, an installation of black-and-white photographs in a space broken up by hanging cloth, the play of shadow and light in the photographs glistening an uncanny 3-D or beckoning ghost-like. The child of Guyanese immigrants, Scarville has described her work as “dealing with loss, latencies and the elusive body.”

CPW's fourth current exhibit, “Free, For All,” is the first for the institution's Community Gallery, which will, as its name indicates, be dedicated to month-long shows of work from CPW members, local artists and students and projects by local nonprofits. The open call includes all artists from Kingston and the greater Hudson Valley who are working with photography and, as it happens, response to the first call has been so great that a second “Free, For All” opens on Feb. 22.

Our chat with Wallis touched on real estate and speculation about the price tag for an equivalent structure to house CPW in Manhattan, say. “I love the old buildings in SoHo, the cast iron architecture and the industrial uses of the building. And I love the industrial history of these little buildings around here. As you probably know, Midtown Kingston was the industrial center of the city and the working-class center, and that's why I felt like this was where we needed to be located.”

“Our space in Woodstock was tiny, 2,500 square feet,” Wallis said. “This is 40,000 and the board immediately said, ‘What are we going to do with all that space?’ But having worked in museums in New York for 30 years I knew that that's always the problem with cultural organizations, running out of space — and in New York especially.”

“This is phase one, which will occupy a couple of years,” Wallis said. “This second floor is permanent, but the first floor is just temporary, and the gallery ultimately will move up to the fourth floor, which has higher ceilings. What we want to do is have more exhibition space, more space for artists’ studios, more production space and on the ground floor, more public spaces: a community meeting space, a bookstore and a café. That master plan has yet to be devised, but we're aiming to be complete by September 2027 which is our 50th anniversary.

“The thing is, it's not so much about ambitions,” Wallis concluded. “What really attracted me was the community basis of this organization, the grassroots nature of it. The most important thing to us is gaining a foothold in the Hudson Valley and forming partnerships.”

The Center for Photography at Woodstock is located at 25 Dederick St. Gallery hours are Thursdays-Sundays from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Call 845-679-9957 or visit https://cpw.org/about/mission-history/ for more information.