Artist Deborah Geurtze adjusts one of her paintings outside the gates of her new garden gallery in Saranac Lake. (Photo provided)

SARANAC LAKE — The new Abstract Adirondack art gallery will host its inaugural “Join Us in the Garden” exhibition at the McClellan Cure Cottage, 391 Park Ave., Saranac Lake, today from 4 to 7:30 p.m.

Works will be displayed in the gardens and open porches of this historic home. The pop-up art gallery events will continue every Thursday afternoon through the summer.

Abstract Adirondack is the creation of painter-printmaker Deborah Geurtze and theatrical designer Michael Friedman of Saranac Lake. With help from Geurtze’s son Peter Bird, also of Saranac Lake, the pair transformed their backyard from an overgrown tangle of hemlocks and rotting birches into a series of winding paths and garden beds interspersed with easels for paintings and etchings and pedestals for sculptures.

“We have spent the past three months flat-out working on the project — tilling, landscaping, planting and mulching the ornamentals, fruit trees and vegetable beds,” Geurtze said in a press release.

The weekly Abstract Adirondack garden gallery was inspired by the monthly Saranac Lake Art Walks, now on hiatus, and outdoor sculpture gardens such as Frederick Franck’s “Pacem in Terris” in Warwick. “We wanted to help keep the Saranac Lake art scene vibrant and alive as we emerge from the pandemic lockdown,” Friedman said.

This week’s exhibit will include Geurtze’s paintings and etchings as well as paintings by Tim Fortune of Saranac Lake, jewelry and paintings by Bird, assemblage by William Evans of Jay, and paintings and prints by George Dirolf of Loudonville. Other artists’ work will be added as the season progresses.

“This help keeps the exhibitions fresh and ever-changing,” Geurtze said.

Geurtze is a longtime New York artist who will also be showing work at Lake Placid Center for the Arts, Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts in Blue Mountain Lake, Cooperstown Art Association’s Smithy Gallery and North Shore Arts Association in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Friedman has designed lights and sound locally for the past two years as well as in Gloucester and throughout western Massachusetts over the past three decades.

More information will be available at Abstract-ADK.com.