Edward Tyler Nahem Talks Race In 'White Hamptons'

Last Wednesday, Edward Tyler Nahem had a perfect sort of day.

He slept in, eventually hitting the beach in Montauk for an afternoon of surfing. Then, he checked out some new boards in Amagansett, walked down the street to the Stephen Talkhouse to catch a show, and was home in Sagaponack by 8:30 p.m., just in time to fix himself a small plate and plop down in front of his television for a rerun of the Yankees game that afternoon—the final score of which he hadn’t yet heard.

This sort of privilege is not lost on the Manhattan-based art dealer. It is a far cry from his upbringing, the struggle to find himself during his 20s, his journey into the collector world he now knows so well, and the recent time he spent in Senegal, as a producer, helping gather footage of the country’s most recent election.

He stayed on location for three weeks, though a team remained for another 3½ months, capturing the tumultuous uprising against former President Abdoulaye Wade in 2012 now explored in the eye-opening documentary “Incorruptible,” which the producer screened at his home on August 23 during his 11th annual Movie Night series, held on the front lawn of his estate.

“It’s just about a Sunday night, sitting back and watching a movie outside,” Mr. Nahem said of the series. “I spent 11 of my childhood summers in a small town in northern Michigan. The highlight of every week was my sister and I getting into our pajamas, getting on the floor of the back seat of my parents’ car with a blanket over us, so our parents wouldn’t have to pay for us, and going to the drive-in. Maybe that’s where this comes from.”

Mr. Nahem was born in “the greatest borough in the world,” he said. “I have this theory in life that all things either come from baseball or Brooklyn. Just talk to my friends in Africa—they think I’m an idiot.”

He moved around as a child but returned to New York for those wonderfully impressionable years of high school. It was then he discovered fine art, having already fallen for music and film in his youth, and knew he wasn’t meant for a nine-to-five existence. “It was a gravitation toward this art. I had never worked for anybody in this business—I just started doing it independently,” he said. “I didn’t come from money—my parents didn’t have money. I’ve been working for myself since I was 14.

“I worked every crap job you could think of,” he continued. “Fortunately, I’m a quintessential kid of the ’60s. So I was liberated from the fate of being in a merchant business like my dad’s, thanks to the advent of proverbial sex, drugs, and rock and roll. By the age of 17, I was thinking, ‘God, I don’t want to do any of this—I just want to explore the world and get stoned.’”

And he did—travel, that is. From age 19 to 20, he lived in Los Angeles. Then, it was Israel for two years, Norway for eight, and back to New York in 1986. The art world, he said, was luring him. By this time, several of his professional endeavors had crashed and burned—particularly in the restaurant industry—but he had found success in running his own gallery, shooting from the hip.

“I’m just somebody, you get a notion, you get an idea, and you run with it,” he said. “I’m not one for doing a lot of topographical research. I didn’t have a plan, and I wasn’t really thinking long term. I just really loved doing it and that’s all that mattered.”

He said he was fascinated not only by the art itself, but the ability for it to engage, make viewers think and change the way they see and experience their surroundings. “I don’t get involved with anything that doesn’t have what I call ‘RSVP’: redeeming social value potential,” he said. “I don’t care about making the next ‘Star Wars.’ That’s fun for somebody else, but I don’t think it’s uplifting the world or changing anything socially. I’m not critical of ‘Star Wars,’ but it’s entertainment.”

“Incorruptible” came on the heels of the circa-2008 documentary Mr. Nahem produced, “Youssou NDour: I Bring What I Love,” which traced the Senegalese superstar’s musical career and social activism. It was three years later when the singer announced he was making a run for president against Abdoulaye Wade, who was pushing to change the country’s constitution to allow him to sit for a third term, Mr. Nahem explained.

Mr. Nahem urged his friend to reconsider, but he refused, so the producer chose his second-best option: film it. When NDour was found to be an invalid candidate—thanks to a corrupt court made possible by Wade—Mr. Nahem said he saw this was an even bigger crisis than he had imagined.

“If Wade could do something like that, what else was he capable of doing?” Mr. Nahem said. “And what followed was this grassroots youth organization rising up and basically saying f--- you to the president, ‘This is not going to happen in our country.’ It really set the tone for what democracy can be in Africa and the rest of the world.”

On the home front, Mr. Nahem’s latest project is producing the film adaptation of Walter Dean Myers’s young adult novel “Monster,” which tells the story of Steve Harmon, an African-American teenager, and his trial for felony murder in New York. Race, and the “uneven playing field for a young, black, urban male today,” Mr. Nahem said, is on the tip of everyone’s tongue in America. He said he hopes this film “upsets the apple cart. Everybody’s so comfortable.”

“As much as I sit here in a very white Sagaponack, it’s something I’m aware of. I’m sensitive to it. I’m close to it,” he said of racism. “I am continually baffled by race and the politics of race in this country. I don’t know what the solutions are. I don’t know if anybody does. It’s so ingrained.

“Here we are. in the great white Hamptons, at a poshy-enough estate near the ocean and the stars,” he continued. “What’s so daunting for anybody and everybody is, ‘Who am I? I’m too powerless to make change anywhere, because everything is so overwhelming. I’m in no position to change anything.’”

He shook his head. “But change comes in so many ways. You think you don’t have it within you to make certain changes, or impressions, on people. But you do. I never forget that.”