Candace Hill Montgomery Has a Lot To Say in Her Exhibition at Quogue Library

Iconic East End artist Candace Hill Montgomery, who is known for her brilliant storytelling through her art, has an exhibition on view right now titled “Dothan in the Hamptons” at the Quogue Library’s newly restored gallery. The show launched June 24 and will remain on view until July 26.

Montgomery, of Bridgehampton, has had a storied career as a writer and artist. She was one of just a few high-fashion African American models working in New York City throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She has also written seven books and was an art teacher in Harlem for years before coming to the East End. Her parents were creatives and encouraged her to pursue art. She took art classes from a young age, spending some of her childhood in Queens before her parents purchased a home in one of Sag Harbor’s historic African American communities.

She’s earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, along with an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant, and her work has been featured in New York City at the Studio Museum in Harlem and in the lobby of the World Trade Center where it was shown in the 1980s. Her work is also in the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum, among others, and Montgomery recently finished an artist residency at The Church in Sag Harbor.

Her work consists of weavings and watercolor paintings, using elements of African American history as key components of her art, resulting in highly personal as well as historical and political pieces. Montgomery described the works in the show as a “variety.” The weaves are based on the names of some of her favorite musicians, she said, with the letters of their last name incorporated abstractly into the weave.

“I wanted to really make their names into a poetic kind of configuration,” she said. “The name turns into something else as you’re looking at the weave.”

One of those weaves is centered on the musician Bruno Mars, who she chose in part because of the planet that shares his name. She said she views the weave as a “small poem,” which, while she was working on it, had no idea what it would turn into.

Another musician she focused on in a piece was Tom Petty.

“His name is on one, but I was actually thinking of Clarence Thomas and how petty he is,” said Montgomery. “These are the things that happen as you’re making something, they never exactly turn out to be what you expected in the long run.”

That spontaneity, when something happens in art that you don’t expect to happen, is what keeps Montgomery making art, she said. She also loves to use an existing painting and make it into a “double,” or replica. The magic of these duplicates, she said, is that they often look similar, but simultaneously manage to be completely different.

“The difference is mind blowing,” she said. “It’s the same thing, but completely different … I think that’s a metaphor for life.”

The Quogue Library exhibition’s title “Dothan in the Hamptons,” refers to the city in Alabama where Montgomery spent her childhood summers with her grandmother at the peak of segregation. Montgomery, along with her brother and sister, would take the train from Queens, and stay in Alabama from June until September, while their mother worked. She and her siblings stopped going to Dothan after 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and lynched by a white mob in Mississippi in 1955. Her experience in the South is a key part of her life story, but it’s her beloved time in the Hamptons that has “infused” the “northern side” of life into her.

“If I hadn’t had to live through segregation, and the horror of those times,” she said, “and not been able to go certain places and have my grandmother watch out for us so you’re not killed as a child, the pleasant part of my life wouldn’t mean as much to me.”

Also on view in this show are Montgomery’s watercolor paintings that center on the current war in Ukraine.

“When the war began, I was so horrified at what was going on, it consumed me,” said Montgomery.

One of her pieces is based on Ukrainians fleeing on a train. Created with Indian ink, which adds symbolism to the black and white scene, the contrast infers right and wrong in terms of the war. The painting depicts a woman standing on top of a train.

“She could be screaming about the situation, or she could be on top of the train because she couldn’t get inside the train,” Montgomery said. “There’s also wool, dyed orange coming out of the side of the train, symbolizing the Trump administration. I use orange to deal with him.”

Montgomery’s passion for sharing thoughts about Ukraine through her artwork came through a long-standing commitment to peace, as shown in her work.

“I’m not Ukrainian, but I’ve always had some horror about war,” Montgomery said. “Throughout my artistic life, I have been dealing with the peace movement and figuring out how we could live in a peaceful world alongside war.”

It’s a personal passion and connection to libraries that made Montgomery want to have her show in Quogue.

“Libraries are really under siege right now,” she said.

She recalled the story of her mother, an English professor in Oklahoma, trying to enter a library and being denied admission because she was Black. At the time, Montgomery’s father was about to head off to Germany to fight in World War II. Coming from the North, it was one of the only times her mother talked about experiencing segregation. Despite the unpleasant incident, her mother still had a lifelong love of libraries.

When Montgomery first moved to the East End full-time, her first show was at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, and whenever she was asked to do an exhibition at a library, she always agreed.

“I always say ‘yes’ because it came from this love from my mother and her feelings about [libraries],” she said. She also loved the overall ambiance of the Quogue Library, from the children’s room to the new gallery.

Marissa Bridge, who is on the art committee at the Quogue Library and co-curated the show with Victoria Sartorius, is a friend of Montgomery’s through a fiber art class at the Parrish Art Museum. Because most of the artists who show at Quogue Library are from west of the Shinnecock Canal — from Quogue, Westhampton and East Quogue — Bridge wanted to bring in an East End artist from a bit farther afield to show there. She pitched a few names, but all along wanted Montgomery to “raise the bar a little bit.”

“I think she’s an incredible artist,” Bridge said of Montgomery. “She’s had a long career. And she’s getting a lot of recognition now, finally, by the community out here.”

Bridge especially loved the artist’s Ukraine-inspired work, as well as pieces in the collection about mother-daughter relationships and racism.

“She takes a kernel of an idea and then she improvises on it and really has fun with it,” Bridge said. “And as an artist myself, my work is kind of controlled, and I really admire that breaking out, and having that confidence and that freedom to just go with it. And her weavings especially, it’s not easy to be improvisational while you’re weaving.”

The library was very supportive of the idea to give Montgomery an exhibition, and Montgomery was very agreeable to it as well, Bridge said.

“They have treated me so nicely, “ Montgomery added. “I wish life could always be this easy.”

Montgomery is also happy to show her watercolors along with her woven works, having started her career as a painter. Her grandmother taught her to weave, but she always saw it as a hobby before moving to the East End. It was at that time the textile movement took off, she said, and she began incorporating her weaving work into the mainstream of her art.

As a writer, Montgomery’s books of epic poems were also on view at the opening of the exhibition. While the poems are abstract and not for children, per se, they have elements of children’s poetry, like rhymes and puns. She hopes the artwork will show her audience what’s on her mind on another, visual level.

“I have a trigger when writing something that I know how to get to, that you can’t do visually,” she said. “There’s a lot you cannot do visually that you can do with writing and vice versa. So this show shows the public the different ways one can show an artist’s mind at work. I wanted the public to see not just one way of doing things.”

This show is another example of how Montgomery has enjoyed sharing her work throughout the East End for the past several years.

“I originally came out here to retire,” she said with a laugh, noting that she intended to still make art here, but professionally take a step back.

“It’s been interesting,” she added of her experiences in the East End art world. “It’s not like the art world of New York, but it is an art world for sure. I think it’s great. I’m having a good time. And it’s very heartening to see that the artists out here also have strong convictions and know exactly what they’re doing and why.”

Candace Hill Montgomery’s “Dothan in the Hamptons” is on view at the Quogue Library, 90 Quogue Street, Quogue. Visit quoguelibrary.org for details.