A new centre devoted to contemporary Native American art has opened its doors in Katonah, a town in New York's Westchester County about 45 miles from Manhattan. Branchline, a 10,000-square-foot space steps from the Katonah station on the Metro-North Railroad, opened its main gallery to the public on Saturday 7 November, with the rest of the complex due to be completed next year.

The centre is an initiative of the Gochman Family Collection, a private lending collection established in 2021 by philanthropist Becky Gochman and former gallerist Zach Feuer. When finished, the site will span three adjoining buildings with several galleries, a ceramics studio, two apartments, a deck filled with sculptures and a cafe. Laura Phipps, a former associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was appointed director of the collection earlier this year and is working with creative director and curator Rachel Martin, who is Tlingit.

The opening exhibition, Line Break, was organised by assistant curator Moonoka Begay, who is Ndee and Dine, with collection associate Nicole van Brugge. It brings together nearly 30 works by 18 artists, including Sara Flores, Jeffrey Gibson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, Marie Watt and Emmi Whitehorse, exploring lines and borders literally and metaphorically. Outside the main building, Matthew Kirk, a Dine artist, has made a site-specific installation of four mixed-media panels combining traditional Dine motifs with construction materials.

A centrepiece of the show is Raven Chacon's Storm Pattern, made between 2021 and 2024, which turns abstracted musical scores into a visual echo of traditional Dine weaving and of the drones that hovered over the Standing Rock encampments during the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The collection itself holds around 800 works, of which 260 have been lent to more than 100 exhibitions worldwide. Gochman and Feuer previously founded the Forge Project, a similar initiative in Taghkanic, New York, which became a Native-led nonprofit in 2024. Unlike that project, Branchline is conceived as a free public space, a new step for the collectors.