Four Big Exhibitions To Open Simultaneously At Guild Hall

Guild Hall has a busy weekend ahead.

On Saturday, October 27, four diverse exhibitions will open simultaneously in four different galleries—Frank Wimberley, 2010 winner of the annual Guild Hall Members Show, in the Spiga Gallery; “Abstraction: Selections from the Guild Hall Museum Permanent Collection” next door in the Woodhouse Gallery; more than 100 album covers by former Columbia Records Art Director John Berg down the hall in the Wasserstein Gallery; and “Our Town,” featuring vintage village photographs by Fritz Leddy across the way in the Moran Gallery.

As the result of the four big exhibits opening this weekend, not one corner of the East Hampton museum will look the same as it usually does.

“I think it’s really going to appeal to a wide audience. There are so many different things,” Guild Hall Museum Director and Chief Curator Christina Strassfield said during a telephone interview last week. “There’s a wonderful synergy between all four of the exhibitions.”

Frank Wimberley:
An Abstract Expressionist

The year was 1987 when Ms. Strassfield and Mr. Wimberley first met, and she was smitten with the Sag Harbor painter immediately.

“I loved his work and I loved him. He and his wife are the most adorable couple you’ll ever meet,” Ms. Strassfield said. “He does wonderful abstract works that are very heavily layered and textured with a wonderful sense of color, a wonderful sense of energy to them. Some are very subtle, some are very vibrant. The work just stands out. I was thrilled when he won. Everyone was thrilled that he won.”

But no one was more thrilled than the artist himself.

“I loved the win. I was very excited about winning and I knew that one of the prizes would be a one-man show at the Guild,” Mr. Wimberley said at his home last week, excitedly tapping his fingers on his dining room table. “Now, I’ve been after that awhile, never really expecting to get it.”

The two year delay between his win and resultant exhibit was “horrible,” Mr. Wimberley smirked, but the wait allowed him to create a fresh body of work—including “Western Wall,” “Snare” and circular pieces “Sphere” and “Oilstick,” two older paintings that the artist retooled—that will hang alongside eight additional paintings in the Spiga Gallery on Saturday night.

“I was so excited I got busy, started working, and decided I wanted all my paintings in this show to be new. But then Christina came in and she immediately saw something on that wall that was done in, like, ’87, and wanted it. So I thought, ‘Well, at least she likes it,’” he said. “It’s called ‘Pastorale,’ 60 [inches] by 60. I always wanted to be able to cover an entire wall. It’s a pale beige painting, underpainting of very subtle reds. Not bright reds, very soft reds. There’s bits of brown in it. But it’s large enough for you to look at it and let your eye run from top to bottom and across the way you should look at various paintings and see it all, and then go back and see it some more.”

For the most part, Mr. Wimberley creates in his Queens studio, where the admittedly sloppy artist is free to “flick paints around,” he said. While he isn’t silently painting, his workspace is humming with jazz or classical music.

“That’s one of the things that drives me, to hear some good music,” said Mr. Wimberley, who used to play trumpet himself. “I can go to a concert and come back and I’m moved to put the same thing on canvas.”

But any time Mr. Wimberley is working with wood, the artist can be found outdoors on the East End, soaking in his surroundings.

“Gee whiz, 40 years it’s been. What brought me out here?” he pondered. “Juanita, what first brought us out here?”

His wife poked her head around the corner and came into the room. “What brought us here? A place where you could work.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Mr. Wimberley mused. “Definitely wasn’t going to be my answer.”

“Well, give your answer,” his wife fired back with a playful smile.

“My answer was going to be,” he paused, “yeah, someplace where I could work.”

“Oh,” she rolled her eyes.

“Actually, I heard about the area and that it was surrounded by a lot of friendly artists—at least they turned out to be,” he said. “You know, there are a lot of abstract painters in this area and that’s what draws me, mostly.”

“All the artists that you truly loved, you know?”

“I just said that.”

“You just said that? And you named them?”

“No, I didn’t name them.”

“Oh, okay. I’m not butting in,” she laughed, heading back to the other room.

The couple celebrated their 65th anniversary in August.

Abstraction:
A Slice of East End History

By way of coincidence, several of Mr. Wimberley’s artistic heroes will be sitting one gallery away from his show at Guild Hall. Or at least their paintings will be.

Ms. Strassfield hand-selected 23 paintings by 23 local artists—including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Ibram Lassaw and Robert Richenburg—to feature in “Abstraction: Selections from the Guild Hall Museum Permanent Collection,” which will open on Saturday night in the Woodhouse Gallery.

“There is a connection between myself and the other painters,” Mr. Wimberley mused. “There’s a couple de Koonings that’ll get me started. If you come away from a de Kooning exhibit and nothing is happening, you need to go home and stay home,” he laughed.

By definition, abstraction is nonrepresentational art, Ms. Strassfield explained. Traditionally, it is unplanned and executed on the spot, in sync with the energy and movement of the artist—from their minds to their hands to their canvases.

“People are still drawn to this era because of its history,” she said. “It’s so important. It’s one of the first international movements that started in America. Why not showcase that and show how it’s evolved today with an artist such as Frank Wimberley? It’s a nice continuation, showing the continuity.”

The curator narrowed down her selection from more than 800 abstract paintings, she said, which makes up about 40 percent of the permanent collection of 2,100 pieces.

“These are first and second generation abstract expressionists,” she reported. “We’re paying homage to Guild Hall and the abstract expressionist movement. They showed Pollock and de Kooning when they weren’t superstars yet. People said, ‘Oh yeah, anyone can do that. Anyone can drip paint.’ We’re very proud of the fact that we always supported them, aware of how important their art was going to be. This is a great part of our history and a great part of art history.”

John Berg:
A Music Art Legend

In the recording industry, there is a point where music and art collide. And at their crossroads is John Berg.

From 1961 to 1985, Mr. Berg—who was the Columbia Records art director—and his team created more than 5,000 12-inch vinyl album covers for the biggest musicians of the day, from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Barbra Streisand and the group Chicago, earning him four Grammy Awards and 29 nods.

A selection of approximately 100 album covers will be on display in the Wasserstein Gallery, Ms. Strassfield said.

“His work is so different from us,” she said. “We’ve never done something like this before. I had an album of his, a Santana album. I remember seeing that album, seeing it in the store. It was so striking. I can’t remember the music on the album, but I remember that cover. And that was him.”

For any given album, Mr. Berg would begin with a blank piece of paper, the East Hampton resident recalled during an interview in the gallery last week. They were problems, he said, and every one had a solution. It was his job to find it and create something no one had ever seen.

“Solving the problem is the name of the game. Sometimes it doesn’t actually happen. Like this one,” he gestured to Billy Joel’s “52nd Street.” “This is lousy. I don’t really like this very much. Eh, it’s got a certain Billy Joel look to it, but I don’t think it’s anything spectacular. But this, to me, is spectacular.”

He walked to the other end of the shelf and pointed to “Byrdmaniax,” the tenth studio album from The Byrds.

“We were sitting in the Black Rabbit café one afternoon, half loaded,” Mr. Berg continued. “‘What are you gonna do for our next album?’ I said, ‘Oh, how ’bout chromium life masks?’ ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ That’s how it worked.”

In other instances, the cover came to him, as was the case with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” in the form of contact sheets by photographer Eric Meola. It then becomes Mr. Berg’s job to steer the musician down the right path.

“Bruce, he sees himself as John Updike, an author, you know, and serious. He had a bunch of pictures, author-like headshots, he picked out, circled in red,” Mr. Berg sighed. “I went through them and I found the picture of him and Clarence—maybe six more of the same gesture but not the same charm. It would have been good enough for somebody else, but not for me. This was the one.”

He sold the idea to run the photo—which depicts Springsteen leaning on his saxophonist, Clarence Clemons—across a two-pocket spread to product management, but bumped into a problem. The format would cost 50 cents more per copy, he recalled.

“They said, ‘Go ahead, if you can sell it to Bruce. Go ahead,’” Mr. Berg said. “So then I went to Bruce and said, ‘Listen, CBS really wants this to look like this.’”

He laughed, and continued, “I’m shameless. ‘And they’re willing to pop the extra 50 cents to do this, but you’ve gotta give up this office picture thing, eh? Because this is really charming. This is great. And you get Clarence, besides, you know? And he’s not on the front cover, just his shoulder’s on the front cover.’ So I sold it to him, and the rest is history. It’s really now an icon.”

Many of Mr. Berg’s creative choices carried a cultural impact, including Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” vertical cover, which folded down and split his body in half—an album design first.

“We loved Bob Dylan. We in the art department, you know, because we’re all crazy, long-haired kids and stuff like that,” Mr. Berg said. “If you wanted an album cover done, you came to me. Because that’s how it worked. A lot of this was personal relationships. They didn’t necessarily trust management, the recording artists, but they trusted the art department.”

At one point, Barbra Streisand wouldn’t talk to anyone but him, Mr. Berg chuckled.

“I was the only one she trusted,” he said. “I was the only one who was not intimidated by her because we went to the same high school together. I was 10 years ahead of her but, you know, we grew up in the same neighborhood together.”

Mr. Berg worked his way around the room, stepping over to the next wall in front of “The Barbra Streisand Album,” which won the Grammy for Best Album Cover in 1963.

“For that, if you can believe it,” Mr. Berg jokingly scoffed. “But I really love that picture. And nobody would do that, put their face in shadow. I could do that, and she trusted me. And that was her first Grammy. Actually, it was my Grammy, but the first one that she won. She got a few other ones along the way.”

That win was just the start of Mr. Berg’s career. He picked up many more awards and countless stories as the years ticked on, which he will tell during a gallery talk on Saturday, November 17.

Fritz Leddy: 
A Chief Photographer

Not all of Guild Hall’s featured artists are alive to tell their stories, including former East Hampton Police Chief Fritz Leddy. He died in his sleep at age 80 on May 18, 1987.

But his photos live on to speak for him.

On Saturday night, the second installment of Mr. Leddy’s photographs—featuring 15 new scenes chronicling events and people around the village—will open in the Moran Gallery for the first time since their debut in 2006.

More than 400 people turned out to the inaugural reception, according to guest curator and freelance photographer Doug Kuntz, who stumbled across the black-and-white photos about 15 years ago. Nearly 2,500 negatives were rescued from a trash-hauling bin behind the police department by East Hampton historian Averill Geus in 1990, who passed them on to Mr. Kuntz in 1998.

“My jaw kind of dropped,” Mr. Kuntz said of first seeing the negatives during an interview in the gallery last week. “I sort of got curious. I went back to the police station and went down into the basement. There was another bunch of them.”

After developing a number of the negatives, Mr. Kuntz couldn’t believe his eyes. In front of him were long lost fields, families, architecture and memories.

“I’ve been here for almost 50 years and, certainly, the place has changed in the last five years. The place has changed in the last 10 years,” he said. “The place has changed in the last 20 years. But 50 years? This place is gone. You might as well be on another planet. It’s totally, totally different.”

Equipped with a large-format camera, Mr. Leddy—who served as police chief from 1937 to 1968—once roamed his jurisdiction on his own time, taking photos of everyday life by the village pond, beaches, farms and at community gatherings. People would say, “Oh, here comes Fritz,” Mr. Kuntz recalled.

“I do remember him. I was a little kid,” he said. “This was the mid ’60s. It was a totally different time. There were very few police and he was always out on the streets, walking around. That’s why he has these pictures. We live in this static, sterile, digital world now. These are all large-format negatives that have to be developed one at a time. He had a dark room in the basement of the police station. He did this all himself, so he really cared about it. He certainly had a feeling for what he was doing.”

Mr. Kuntz paced around the room, bouncing from one photo to the next, spilling anecdotes about each one.

“That’s Further Lane looking east where Two Mile Hollow Road is. You can see some houses in the distance, but not too many,” he said, pointing to a photo propped against the gallery wall, yet to be hung. “This one here was from the Clothesline Arts Show at Guild Hall and at the same time, Thornton Wilder’s play ‘Our Town’ was going on there, so we call this show ‘Our Town’ because that’s what it is.”

He smiled, glancing around the gallery’s framed photographs. “That’s what it is.”

Four exhibitions will open on Saturday, October 27, at Guild Hall in East Hampton. “Our Town,” featuring photographs of the village by former East Hampton Police Chief Fritz Leddy, will kick off with a gallery talk with guest curator Doug Kuntz at 4:30 p.m. Opening receptions for all four exhibits will follow from 5 to 7 p.m. Admission to the receptions is free. All exhibits will run through January 6. Museum hours are Friday and Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Suggested admission during regular museum hours is $7. For more information, call 324-0806 or visit guildhall.org.