4 Photos
[caption id="attachment_74238" align="alignnone" width="5184"] The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. Photo by Hufton + Crow, 2013.[/caption]
By Michelle Trauring
Terrie Sultan has pulled open the blackened cedar-wood door thousands of times. She could walk between the eight galleries with her eyes closed, weaving in and out along the spine — or hallway — bisecting them.
Behind walls of glass, she has watched the seasons pass and the meadow grow in. She has helped an art collection grow and new relationships form, an already loyal patronage holding steady.
And yet, it is still a wonder to her, every day, when she opens that door — the freshness and the newness of the building, the brightness she feels around her.
In that sense, time has stood still. But here she — and the Parrish Art Museum — both stand, five years later.
“It’s the fastest five years I think I’ve ever experienced in my life,” the museum director said. “I look around and I look up and I can see the evidence that things have changed — but how could it be five years?”
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The upcoming exhibition, “Five and Forward,” helps explain and celebrate the milestone anniversary in the Herzog & de Meuron-designed building by culling a trio of both solo and group shows from the museum’s permanent collection, which now includes more than 3,000 works.
“For the first time, we have all of our William Merritt Chase works back — paintings, drawings, archival material that other institutions kept borrowing for special exhibitions — so we will have a new, fresh installation dedicated to him in one of our galleries,” Sultan said.
“Another room will be dedicated to the wonderful artist Alan Shields, and a lot of his work is both an acceptance of and a pushing against the prevailing understanding of abstract expressionism, which is where the third gallery comes in: James Brooks,” she continued. “We will be launching a little peek at some of the great master works that have come to us through an incredible gift. So that will be a big surprise to people. It’s a gem of an installation.”
The three major galleries leap from one to the next, Sultan explained, creating a “beautiful walk through an intellectual and visual garden,” one that was never truly possible at the museum’s former space on Jobs Lane in Southampton Village.
That was the main inspiration behind strikingly horizontal, 615-foot-long building, which nearly tripled the museum’s real estate while aligning its core values with its façade. The limited palette of basic materials — glass, metal, wood and concrete — nods to both the indigenous agricultural architecture of the East End, as well as the environment where many of the artists created their paintings.
“The relationship between art and nature, the inside and the outside, was also very important to us. Starting with William Merritt Chase, many of the paintings in our collection were painted outside, so we thought that our galleries should at least have some of the flavor of being able to see those works in the atmosphere in which they were created,” Sultan said. “And so, in fact, with the exception of the restroom facilities and the art storage facility, every single room in this building has either a window or a skylight so that, when you’re in this building, you still have a sense of what’s going on around you in the world.”
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Guest curator Rashid Johnson.[/caption]
Without a window, artist Rashid Johnson often found himself losing sense of time in the art storage facility, surrounded by and sifting through the Parrish’s permanent collection this past summer. It was the architecture and landscaping that initially drew in the Bridgehampton resident, who would often visit the museum with his family for an art fix, he said.
Digging through the racks, with complete free reign to curate his own gallery for “Five and Forward,” was a whole other level, he said.
“I, quite literally, pulled out every picture at some point that they own,” said Johnson, who first received critical attention at age 24 at the “Freestyle” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. “I’ve been lucky because I do have relationships with other institutions — I’m on the board of the Guggenheim — so it’s not an entirely unfamiliar experience for me. But at an institution like the Parrish, which has a real dependence on gift, they are subject to what people want to give them. Sometimes people give very substantial gifts and very serious and prominent artwork, and sometimes they give things that people are less familiar with, and the Parrish has been a great home to those objects, as well.”
The artist came at the collection completely open — without an agenda or platform or idea, he said. He didn’t have a thesis he wanted to prove.
He simply wanted to see what he could find.
“In hip hop history, there’s a lot of talk about ‘digging in the crates,’ finding little gems, finding cracks and then remixing them, re-contextualizing them,” he said. “As I started digging through the crates, I started thinking about context and the life these objects could potentially have amongst one another, and that led me to the exhibition I put together.”
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Hans Hoffman's "Image in Green," 1950, oil on canvas.[/caption]
He said is letting his selection of some 20 works — from the circa-1950 “Image in Green” oil painting by Hans Hofmann to “Berber Grayling,” Michelle Stuart’s 2005 beeswax, ink and watercolor on paper — speak for itself, and makes new discoveries within it every time he visits.
“I think they all have a sense of autonomy and they start to create an interesting narrative,” he said. “They give you an opportunity to produce a story, you know, based on their individual characteristics. The bigger questions become, why are they together and how do they function together? I’m interested in those kinds of whys, as you explore what my interest could have been in that object, or in that artist, or in that artist’s relationship to the artist you find next to them. It’s kind of poetic that way, I hope.”
Johnson is the first of what Sultan hopes are many artist guest curators, she said, fueling her vision for the 34,400-squre-foot museum as “the real locus and a center for cultural and community engagement for the entire East End of Long Island.”
“We joked about this a little bit when we were building the building because, of course, we had Swiss architects, but from my point of view, Water Mill and our location right here on this road puts us kind of in the Switzerland of the Hamptons,” she said. “We’re not super identified with the Village of Southampton. We’re not super identified with the Village of East Hampton. We are really in the middle, with no borders and no political associations. So, we’re for everybody.
“We’re neutral territory where everyone can come,” she continued. “We have our own parking, which means that you don’t have to struggle. We’re open until eight o’clock every night, so that when it’s pitch black at three o’clock on a winter Friday afternoon, you know that if you come to the Parrish, the lights are gonna be on, the café is gonna be open, and there’s gonna be something going on.”
Up until this point, the Parrish Art Museum had formal one-, three-and five-year plans. Having reached the end of their line, Sultan has flexibility at the helm of a “nimble and responsive” institution, she said, a skiff in a sea of freighters. The director has a framework, but she hasn’t colored in all the lines — and she prefers it that way.
“If anybody hasn’t been here yet, now is the time, and it is a very, very exciting time for us,” she said. “Come and join us on this great adventure, because it really has been and it will continue to be. We are still a start-up, five years in, and we have a great foundation for what we’re doing, but we have our eyes and ears open, and want to grow and change with this community, and be the place people think of as their own.”
The Parrish Art Museum will kick off its fifth anniversary weekend with the opening of “Five and Forward,” a new exhibition culled from the permanent collection, and a discussion with Director Terrie Sultan and Cathleen McGuigan, Architectural Record editor in chief, on Friday, November 10, at 6 p.m. at the museum, located at 279 Montauk Highway in Water Mill.
A members reception and artist gallery talks will be held on Saturday, November 11, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., followed by a fifth anniversary cocktail party from 5 to 8 p.m. A free community day will be held on Sunday, November 12, from 12 to 4 p.m., which includes museum admission, art-making activities, haiku writing, single-gallery docent discussions, a scavenger hunt, book signings and live music.
For ticket information and a full schedule, visit parrishart.org/fifthanniversaryweekend.
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Aerial view of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. Photo by Russell Munson, 2016.[/caption]
gavinmenu on Nov 1, 2017