Nina Yankowitz: Six Decades of Art Without Borders at the Parrish Art Museum

Spanning six decades of work, Nina Yankowitz opened “In the Out/Out the In,” her first retrospective, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on October 11. The artist, who continues to push the boundaries between painting, sculpture, video, installation and new media, is known for her interdisciplinary practice approach to creating work.

While studying at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in the late 1960s, Yankowitz recalled that there were classes offered in many mediums.

“I wanted a studio in the basement; they gave one to Joseph Kosuth,” Yankowitz said in a recent interview at her Sag Harbor studio. “I told them I want to take design, I want to take classes in everything, and they let me do it.”

Yankowitz was invited to participate in the Parrish’s “Artists Choose Parrish” exhibition in 2023, where renowned artists with local roots are invited to explore the museum’s archives and holdings, pairing their work with artists who have legacies on the East End. Also participating in the exhibition were Cindy Sherman, Alix Pearlstein, Nanette Carter and Amy Sillman, to name a few.

“I am very excited to be working with Nina again, this time for her comprehensive retrospective, which is long overdue,” said Corrine Erni, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman chief curator of art and education, deputy directory of curatorial affairs at the museum.

Upon entering the first gallery of Yankowitz’s current show at the Parrish, canvases are draped on the walls. One is a comically abstracted wall-sized sculpture portrait of Spiro Agnew, who served as Richard Nixon’s vice president from 1969 until Nixon’s resignation in 1973. Titled “Sagging Spiro,” the eyes are noted as a blue horizontal line and a nose is made of multiple folds of draped canvas. Another piece, “Oh Say Can You See: A Draped Sound Painting,” depicts the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The pleated fabric piece was born of a collaboration with musician Ken Warner and his synthesizer one summer in Woodstock, New York, though her pleated fabric pieces on the surrounding gallery walls came a few years later.

After word traveled by word of mouth in her junior year of college, Yankowitz ditched the downtown heat and headed upstate to join the artist collective “Group 212” in Woodstock in summer 1968. The location was off Route 212, between Saugerties and Woodstock, where she joined experimental musicians and performance artists and those like her who were experimenting across mediums. It was there that she scratched an itch for investigating performance and new media.

During this experimental summer, Yankowitz met Ken Warner, also known as Phil Harmonic, a jazz musician and composer also navigating the experiments of that moment. She collaborated with other artists whose work embraced and borrowed from different mediums; stretched herself in new ways, though not at all on the canvas. Having escaped the summer city heat to find an expanded way of working, Yankowitz created her drape painting, “Oh Say Can You See.” The piece is one of the first encountered in her show at the Parrish. Yankowitz visually disrupts the opening notes of the “Star Spangled Banner” and in collaboration with Phil Harmonic, who used an early Moog synthesizer, manipulated the melody and opening notes of the nation’s anthem.

While sitting in her studio, Yankowitz recalls her time in Woodstock in 1968, and with a dimpled smile, she shared her memories. “It gave me a collaborative edge to work with Phil Harmonic and a lot of musicians in that house, and that was exciting. I didn’t need approval. I would think, ‘I’m going to explore what I explore,’ and I would unleash myself to the world.’ I would appreciate feedback, but I didn’t need it.”

Yankowitz’s work at the time was an immediate reflection of the turbulence of the late 1960s. In the weeks leading up to making this series of work, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; on May 27, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 that burning a draft card was not an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment; on June 4, Robert F. Kennedy, who was attracting voters’ attention and had won the Democratic primary in California, was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. For Yankowitz, the material she was interested in was right in front of her — “I look back after I make, but other artists ask themselves while they’re in the process. I feel more freedom in my own trajectory,” the artist said on her process changing from the 1960s to now.

Yankowitz’s career launched soon after she graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. At the tender age of 23, the young artist had her first solo show at Manhattan’s Kornblee Gallery, a woman-owned gallery known for handling respected, well-known artists early in their career. Four years later, Yankowitz would be invited to participate in the very first Whitney Biennial in 1973. The artists who showed alongside Yankowitz in that exhibition were those who framed the curriculum at SVA, including Lynda Beglis, Louise Fishman, Louise Bourgouis, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Jonas, Barbara Kruger, Louise Nevelson and, namely, Robert Smithson, who helped look out for her early in her career.

“I had moments where I…,” Yankowitz paused for a moment, before starting again with a smile. “I started really young. I thought that was the art world. I didn’t know. I just forged ahead. There were so many interesting things going on, and so many artists who were well-known and were so supportive and generous. Robert Smithson — he knocked on my door and brought over The Sunday Times with a review of my show. He was just so generous and supportive, especially as a young person.”

Moving into the adjacent gallery at the Parrish, visitors encounter an audio piece. “Lips Knees Neck Elbows Chest Rear” is accompanied by Yankowitz’s abstract paintings of the body parts. She leaves up to viewers to interpret which is what.

“I’m trying to break down the boundaries of painting, abstract forms, obliterating them and blowing them apart by draping them and often, but not always, infusing them with sound,” she said. “I don’t really see much difference between painting with space and installation because I see them as biometric and disrupting them as three dimensional planes. They’re all related.”

At the Parrish, three works in particular— a trio of synesthetic abstract paintings —stand out amidst a global outcry for peace. When asked if the colors in the works have meaning in relation to one another and if the objects were placed to be in dialogue, Yankowitz responded, “We are the world, we are the people.”

In the darkened media room, the museum is showing three of Yankowitz’s most recent new media works including “Closing Bell,” an installation of a rowboat crashing out of the wall with spotlights and sand on the floor, which was a collaboration between 30 artists. To the right of the boat, there are two digital monitors, portrayed as portals to the past, titled “Unsung (S)hero: Emmy Noether Tempts Fate From Then to Now” which tell the stories of the many women who were left out of history.

During a private tour, Erni explained, “[Mathematician Emmy] Noether was the first to prove Einstein’s theories and was never recognized for it. So [Yankowitz] is giving her recognition through her video. But of course, it’s always Nina — it’s always playful at the same time and with her own imagination of how she wants that to be seen.”

On the gallery’s south wall is Yankowitz’s work titled “Criss Crossing the Divine/Spiral Vortex Paint Game,” which, according to the artist’s website, is “an interactive installation conceived to address the ever-expanding religious intolerance fueling global wars.”

“I was never into religion,” Yankowitz said. “This work was not about religion. It’s about how religion was used to divide religion. When I would say things like that, and when they are far apart, I couldn’t believe how they are all the same. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference.”

Museum visitors are invited to use the interactive wand provided with the piece to assign religious topics to the interactive engine. They are given religious texts which are color coded — the artist explained that no two results from the interactive artwork have been the same.

“People in Europe would accept showing this work, but not in America,” Yankowitz noted. “Down at the Tribeca Film Festival they don’t accept work about religion, I don’t know if it’s still true.”

Erni shared similar thoughts about the work being viewed in the U.S. While this interactive piece debuted in a solo show by Yankowitz at Guild Hall in 2014, which was curated by Christina Moissades Strassfield, now the executive director of the Southampton Arts Center, it was funded by a grant from European Mobile Lab Mobile Artists (e-MobiLArt).

Yankowitz added, “When we first showed this at the Biennial in Greece, and with media scientists, I thought, ‘This is Greece, it’s Catholic, it’s Right…’, but they were lined up around the block. There were nuns, and they were surprised. It was remarkable. It’s important to share with other people to know that they’re not so different than their own. There’s a real constancy about relative perspectives.”

Though Yankowitz is addressing global issues through curatorial choices and in her new media works, she has also done so directly. Yankowitz, alongside Lynda Beglis, Nancy Graves, Mary Miss, Louise Nevelson, Howardena Pindell, Joan Snyder, Nancy Spero and more than a dozen other female artists, signed a letter stating they were “outraged” by the war in Vietnam, and that they would only exhibit their art if their letter was exhibited alongside the work. The letter was shown alongside the work when Yankowitz went to Germany, and this ephemera is also on view at the Parrish.

“I stayed with [artist] Mary Baumeister and [composer] Karlheinz Stockhausen, her husband,” she said. “It was my first time really showing in Europe. I really loved it, and there were many artists in this show that I respected, and women who cared about women.”

When asked about her practice and the way in which the East End has affected it, Yankowitz looked around her studio and said, “Very early on, I used to rent houses with friends, and one thing that was so unusual was I used to hear sounds — sounds of birds — and it was music. In the city, it was different, it was a beat. It was a different kind of symphony.

“There were artists in different age groups that had homes and lived out here, and could really just work,” Yankowitz added. “Their workflow was much easier for them. I began to understand that out here. I have my studio here — much smaller than New York. I’m not needing to fabricate out here. A lot of the film and interactive work I started [making] out here. It’s a totally different kind of thinking and meditative internal approach. I would have never thought of myself in community with nature — when hearing the animals fighting. The animals are telling the story. This is what is telling my story and my work.”

Yankowitz indicated she will continue to discover and make work between Sag Harbor and New York.

“I’m on a journey,” she said. “It’s not that one thing you’re blown away by, you’re swept away into those worlds. For me the ‘justice for all’ theme is important to explore. Even in the early drape paintings, I wanted people to be participants in it, and change it, alter it. And over time, in 20 or 30 years, it will have a different relevance. The staff here has done a terrific job and Eric Firestone, too.”

The East Hampton and New York City- based gallerist Eric Firestone, who represents Yankowitz, has reinvigorated the careers of artists like Martha Edelheit and Paul Waters, which Yankowitz commended. She said that Firestone is not only known for investing in his artists and their work, but also truly making sure they feel seen and heard.

“It’s been great working with him,” she said. “He is passionate about what he does. He is interested in doing this for what he can, and he really helped launch Marty [Martha Edelheit] — it takes time to bring someone back. I love many of the artists’ work and he’s a good person. I like him a lot. His director, Jennifer Samet, is a fabulous person to work with. I found it special.

“I feel very privileged to be able to see all of my work in one space, and to be able to travel through it and see it,” Yankowitz said. “Corinne’s vision and curation, she’s incredible. I feel incredibly lucky. People have retrospectives long after they’re gone.”

And when asked for advice to share with next generation of artists, she said, “Don’t give up on yourself. Just go along. Keep doing what’s important.”

“Nina Yankowitz: In the Out/Out the In” is on view at the Parrish Art Museum through February 22, 2026. The Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway in Water Mill.

Frankie Kadir Bademci is an artist and writer living between Brooklyn and East Hampton and is completing his MA in Art History from the State University of New York, Purchase College.