‘Artists Choose Parrish’ Celebrates Museum’s 125th Year

On April 16, the Parrish Art Museum opened “Artists Choose Parrish, Part I,” the first installment of a landmark exhibition series featuring internationally renowned contemporary artists with deep roots on the East End, presenting their work alongside their selections from the Parrish’s permanent collection.

Celebrating the museum’s 125-year history as a leading arts institution in the region, “Artists Choose Parrish” drives a renewed dialogue between the museum’s past and future, revealing fresh perspectives on its collection through the lens of a diverse roster of artists. Organized in three installments through February 2024, the exhibition honors the East End’s artistic legacy, bringing together a total of 41 artists practicing in the region today.

“Artists Choose Parrish, Part I,” highlights 20 artists presented in two overlapping installations: Nanette Carter, Pamela Council, Robert Gober, Mary Heilmann, Sam Moyer, Ugo Rondinone, Cindy Sherman, Leslee Stradford, and Michelle Stuart (on view April 16-August 6); and Tony Bechara, Ross Bleckner, Jeremy Dennis, Eric Fischl, Claude Lawrence, Robert Longo, Eddie Martinez, Enoc Perez, Hank Willis Thomas, Nina Yankowitz, and Joe Zucker (on view April 30-July 23, 2023).

The artists were invited to delve into the museum’s 3,600-volume holdings online and at the Parrish to select works. Many artists reminisce on the relevance of the East End in their lives and approach to art. The result is a multilayered anthology of visual dialogues from unique perspectives, revealing a shared sense of community on the East End and continuing the artistic legacy of the region that radiates in the global art world. By pairing their work in unexpected and creative manners with work by museum collection artists from the past and present, the participants crafted new narratives that explore perception and perspective, place and identity, formal connections, or personal and professional relationships.

As part of the exhibition, on Saturday, April 29, at 7 p.m., the Parrish will host a talk with artists Nanette Carter, Eric Fischl, Nina Yankowtz and Pamela Council in conversation with Corinne Erni, the Parrish’s senior curator and deputy director of curatorial affairs. Admission is $16 ($12 seniors, free for members and students).

“Artists Choose Parrish: Part II” will be on view August 20 to February 4, with participating artists Marina Adams, Alice Aycock, Vija Celmins, Rachel Feinstein, Ralph Gibson, Sheree Hovsepian, Suzanne McClelland, Alix Pearlstein, Ned Smyth, Donald Sultan, John Torreano and Stanley Whitney. “Artists Choose Parrish: Part III” follows from October 29 to February 18, with participating artists Richard Aldrich, Joanne Greenbaum, Virginia Jaramillo, Rashid Johnson, KAWS, Mel Kendrick, David Salle, Sean Scully and Amy Sillman.

“Artists Choose Parrish” is organized by senior curator Corinne Erni with support from assistant curator and publications coordinator Kaitlin Halloran, and assistant curator Brianna L. Hernández. The Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill. For more information, visit parrishart.org.

Eric Fischl explores the relationship between artist and subject in portraiture — specifically, the focus of the subject’s gaze — through his selections, titled “The Painting Stares Back: Portraits of Women from the Parrish Art Museum Collection.” Of the 18 portraits of women and girls selected — painted between 1833 and 1970 — all but two stare back; and all but two were painted by men. Fischl pairs these with his portrait of Joan Didion, three nudes including “April in Paris,” 1998, and “Portrait of an Artist as a Woman,” 1989, where the artist comes face to face with himself as the female subject.

Mary Heilmann chose works as tributes to friends, fellow students and neighbors on the East End, New York, and California, including Louisa Chase, Susan Rothenberg, and Chuck Close with his portrait of her friend Ross Bleckner. A work by William King is a dedication to a longtime resident of the Hamptons and the only teacher at Berkeley who supported her radical departures within a conservative art department. Heilmann shows a single work, “Narrow Lane # 3,” 2001, inspired by the view from her Bridgehampton home.

Sam Moyer selected works by artist Lynda Benglis, whom she credits not only for having a direct and lasting impact on her work, but for introducing her to the North Fork — a place that has inspired Moyer for years. Three works by Benglis — a papier collé, monoprint, and mixed medium sculpture — are shown with Moyer’s work in various media including black slate, marble, and plaster-coated canvas.

Other connections range from tangential to deeply emotional. Ross Bleckner selected Eric Freeman’s “Red Inside Green,” 2005, as an in memoriam to his close friend, alongside his own painting “Ram Dass,” 2020. Claude Lawrence, who is also a musician, chose Jackson Pollock for both his approach to painting and love of jazz. Paired with “Untitled (Extra Buttons),” 1994, Robert Gober opted for a book of Frank O’Hara poems illustrated by 30 artists because he has been reading the poet’s work.

Through myriad topics, periods, and styles, Hank Willis Thomas explores how framing and context influence what and how we see. Two retroreflective prints, inspired by Joseph Albers and Augusto Garau’s color theories, reexamine the charged language of color such as “white balance” and “color correction,” while “Two Dancers,” 2018, created with soccer jerseys, offer new interpretations of Matisse’s work of the same name. “Resistance in Black,” 2021, Thomas’s black Carrara marble sculpture of an outstretched arm and claw evoking a West African resistance movement, is shown alongside Arlene Wingate’s “Eve,” n.d., a portrait in white marble, positing that the definition of “hero” or “villain” depends on who is telling the story.

Nina Yankowitz takes over an entire gallery to literally offer alternate perspectives for experiencing art: Reclining lounge chairs invite viewers to look up at works by Tara Donovan, Rashid Johnson, Louisa Chase, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins; a 7-foot platform allows a view from above of a visual sound score woven into a rug. Seated in a heavy chair with tiles, viewers confront Chuck Close’s self-portrait, while small works hang at tilted angles in the distance. Yankowitz chose works relevant to life in America today, including Jackie Black’s “Last Meal (Series), 2001-2003, 24 photographs of meals requested by death-row inmates, paired with Yankowitz’s uncanny sculptural paintings of body parts protruding from the wall to imagine “what’s on the other side.”

Pamela Council felt an affinity for Dan Flavin through their practice involving neon — pairing “Auntie,” 2021, with Flavin’s “the nominal three (to William of Ockham),” 1963 — and through place: Council’s family was deeply involved in the Baptist Church in Bridgehampton, now Dia Art Foundation’s Dan Flavin Art Institute. Shinnecock Nation member Jeremy Dennis juxtaposes his version of the desecrated indigenous burial grounds in Southampton with a painting by William Merritt Chase. While the latter’s “Shinnecock Landscape,” 1894, was devoid of any Shinnecock people, Dennis’s photograph “The Sacredness of Hills,” presents an Indigenous woman in traditional dress, looming large over a pristine landscape to affirm the continued presence of Indigenous people.

Installed as a grid on the four walls of a single gallery, Ugo Rondinone’s “the alphabet of my mothers and fathers,” 2022, is a 26-panel work comprising preindustrial farming and kitchen tools he found on farms and at garage sales on Long Island, gilded and arranged on white painted plywood. In a juxtaposition both contradictory and complementary, he selected Alan Shields’ “Devil, Devil, Love,” 1970 — a grid of colorful painted belting, beads, and dowels that will hang from the ceiling.

Joe Zucker’s installation on red burlap is a nod to the former Parrish building and, in particular, “A Museum Looks at Itself,” a 1992 exhibition that surveyed the museum’s collection and history. Zucker paired his large scale works “Sailboat Box & Lid,” 2005, and “Regatta 8,” 2016, with a wide range of works that point to the importance of life on water, including Harunobu Suzuki’s Japanese woodblock print “Cutting the Lotus,” ca. 1760; James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Thames Warehouse, Hobbs Wharf,” 1859; J. Turner’s “Untitled (River scene, couples seated and strolling),” 1889; Betty Parsons’ “Untitled,” 1927; John Button’s “SS Cristoforo Colombo,” 1961; and peter campus’s “Passage at Bellport Harbor,” 2010.

Nanette Carter identified works dating from the mid-1900s until today that are rooted in abstraction — which she defines as a form of liberation — by artists including Perle Fine, Mary Heilmann, Theo Hios, Betty Parsons, and Esteban Vicente. Showing her large-scale abstract collage work “Cantilever #53,” 2020, alongside Romare Bearden and her Sag Harbor neighbor Frank Wimberley, Carter also pays tribute to two African American artists who greatly influenced her practice as a collage artist.

Michelle Stuart based her selections on a shared feeling she describes as “alone with the universe.” Three late-1800s paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and William Merritt Chase — all of whom she first encountered as a child at Los Angeles County Museum of Art — are presented with two never-before-shown works from her Women’s Series, comprising multiple photographs that reveal poetic narratives. “Emaline Had Childhood Incidents,” 2019, addresses how women have been historically misunderstood; “Gothic Tale: Adeline,” 2020, points to the disassociation felt by young people today.

In Paris, 1988, Robert Longo saw Frank Stella’s monumental works of brutally twisted metal evoking a car crash. Inspired by the artist since then, he selected Stella’s “Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya: Back Cover,” 1982-1984, which Longo describes as a collision and explosion through shapes and color. Likewise, Longo’s charcoal drawing “Untitled (Nascar Crash, Daytona),” 2021 depicts a self-destructive American pastime.

Cindy Sherman pairs two works from her groundbreaking photo series Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) where she casts herself as characters from film archetypes and female stereotypes, with portraits of women from the 1950s. In dialogue with his tondo “Random 39 Colors,” 2010, Tony Bechara selected works that defy the rectangular shape, including Leon Polk Smith’s oval painting and a tondo by Ilya Bolotowksy; Leslee Stradford paid homage to Robert Motherwell through her four large-scale abstracts; Eddie Martinez found common ground with artists of previous generations, highlighting largely unfamiliar, pre-1970 collection works by artists including Wilfred Zogbaum, Abraham Hankins, and Frederick Stuart Church. Enoc Perez connected Hans Hoffman’s “Image in Green,” 1950, with his abstract yet realistic work “Dorado Beach Hotel,” Puerto Rico, 2023 — describing both as full of promise.