Art on Wheels: Off-Island, East End Art Finds Larger Audience

The East End of Long Island has long inspired artists — the light and natural world an ideal muse, bringing creators of all walks to the East End, where many settled and called this place home.

Galleries and arts centers are abundant at the end of Long Island, as well as artist associations like the Southampton Artists Association, which will celebrate its 25th annual Art in the Park event, featuring photography, paintings, sculptures and mixed media, on July 19 and July 20 in Agawam Park.

Off-island, art created and curated here is finding a larger audience. In Tribeca, the Schoelkopf Gallery is showing “Mary Abbott: In the Hamptons,” the first important retrospective of Abbott’s work in New York, much of it inspired by her decades on the East End.

Sag Harbor’s The Church — founded by North Haven artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik — is also seeing exhibitions that opened in the Madison Street arts incubator find new life, and a new audience elsewhere.

Through August 24, the Cincinnati Art Museum will feature “Cycle Thru! The Art of the Bicycle,” which originated at The Church in an exhibition created in partnership with The Bicycle Museum of America in New Bremen, Ohio. Featuring over 20 bicycles, from 1860s to today, the exhibition illustrates functional and aesthetic design innovation, with bicycles paired with contemporary art by Jarbas Lopes, Bas Jan Ader and Bari Kumar, as well as selections from the collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum.