Gardiner Foundation Awards $50,000 Grant To Guild Hall To Digitize Permanent Collection

Nov 7, 2017 1:43 PM

The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation has awarded Guild Hall, the arts and culture institution in East Hampton Village, $50,000 to support the digitization of the Guild Hall Museum’s permanent collection.

The grant will fund building a publicly accessible, searchable online database of more than 2,400 artworks that serve as a critical resource for understanding Eastern Long Island’s legacy as an artist colony, according to Guild Hall, which stated that the permanent collection is composed of works by artists with ties to the East End and includes masterworks from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, encompassing paintings, sculpture, prints, watercolors, photographs, and drawings by internationally distinguished artists.

“Artists represented in the Guild Hall Permanent Collection, all of whom have an association with our region, have contributed significantly to American art,” Guild Hall Executive Director Andrea Grover said in a statement. “Many of them have produced work that altered the course of art history, not only in America but around the world. By having the collection online, our region’s historical resources will become globally accessible.”

Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Winslow Homer, Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel are among the artists represented in the permanent collection.

Kathryn M. Curran, the executive director of the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, called Guild Hall one of Long Island’s premier cultural resources. “The project will readily allow researchers access to the treasures of their collections,” she said. “This venture highlights Long Island’s artistic heritage and its place within the historic content of American art.”

Photography for the digitalization project will begin in January 2018, managed by Jess Frost, the Guild Hall associate curator and registrar of the permanent collection, and will be completed by June 2018. Museum Director Christina Strassfield will supervise each stage of development.