This year marks The Arts Center at Duck Creek’s fifth official season as steward of Historic Duck Creek Farm in East Hampton. Duck Creek’s community outreach initiative is now supported by a two year grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The Arts Center at Duck Creek is also celebrating its recent acceptance as one of six new affiliate members of the state’s prestigious Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program.
Here’s what’s coming up. Art exhibitions in the John Little Barn and the John Little Gallery are open Thursday to Sunday, 2 to 6 p.m., while outdoor sculpture exhibitions on the Duck Creek Farm grounds are open daily from dawn to dusk. The Arts Center at Duck Creek is at 127 Squaw Road in East Hampton. Visit duckcreekarts.org for more information.
Don Christensen (April 29 to June 4) reflects on the barn’s history and renovation with an installation of paintings on locally found wood and furniture. A veteran East End artist and musician, Christensen works primarily in the language of geometric abstraction, employing a keen understanding of color relationships to create playful and spatially complex compositions.
Misla (June 10 to July 9) is a native New Yorker and mixed media artist focusing on the Nuyorican experience. Misla takes a personalized and collective account of the Latinx home and New York City apartments. Her paintings layer collage and found materials to explore the culturally dualistic environments in which she was raised.
Tara Geer (July 22 to August 20), a lifelong dedicatee of drawing and its methodologies, will present a series of charcoal, pencil, pastel and chalk on paper drawings, including four new large-scale “flower portrait” collages, created specifically for the barn. At once gestural, energetic, and refined, the works are a continuation of Geer’s pursuit of an expanded form of seeing through drawing.
Sue McNally (August 26 to October 8) will offer an exhibition of vibrant, nonspecific landscape paintings. McNally, who once spent 12 years painting in plein air in all 50 states, has more recently shifted to creating fragments or amalgams of place, informed by memory, but at times verging on total abstraction.
Brianna L. Hernández (April 29 to June 4) will build on her work expressing the complex layers of the dying process, grief and mourning rituals. The exhibition aims to offer visitors a space to reflect on the universal experiences of loss and memorialization and to increase awareness of the role of death doulas in end-of-life planning.
Sara Mejia Kriendler (June 10 to July 9) takes inspiration from pre-Colombian art and mythologies, as well as the local landscape. Kriendler engages with various themes encountered in her research — including earthly and otherworldly, temporary and eternal. The resulting sculptural installation considers the sacred properties of gold alongside natural materials from the East End.
William Eric Brown’s Atka Series (July 22 to August 20) is based on 35mm slides that Brown’s father shot in Antarctica during the 1960s while aboard a U.S. Navy icebreaker. Brown stitches together and reconstitutes these images with spray paint and diagrammatic marks, creating a new narrative that emphasizes the landscape’s isolation and remoteness, and its relevance to the current climate crisis.
Ted Tyler (August 26 to October 8) works in a self-built ceramic studio complete with a large-scale outdoor kiln. Tyler creates richly textured and whimsical forms from wood and gas firing techniques, in combination with various ash, slip and glaze applications. This exhibition will include an array of mixed media sculptures and vessels, as well as a large-scale outdoor installation.
Louis Brawley (July 9 to October 9) shows rough-hewn timber sculptures that are informed by the wood itself as well as the artist’s decades-long interest in Indian philosophies and teachings. His carved figures and totems suggest a spiritual link between the natural material and the meditative goal of relinquishing rationality.
Staff Writer on Apr 18, 2023