Summer hasn't quite faded yet but memories of the 2013 Hamptons Art Summer are already beginning to form. Following are a few visual highlights of an artful summer in the Hamptons. Expect to see scenes from art benefits, art fairs and exhibitions that made the summer of 2013 a special one.
Summer art benefits made the Hamptons a fun place to be.
Art parties benefiting area art organizations occupied most of July and August, giving partygoers a great way to assist organizations bringing art to the Hamptons and New York City. The line-up included celebrity-drenched parties to benefit The Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall, LongHouse Reserve, Watermill Center, Bay Street Theatre, Guild Hall's Young Contemporaries, East Hampton Library, The Retreat plus programs for Art in General and Rush Philanthropic Foundation.
LongHouse Reserve's "White Night" summer benefit
LongHouse Reserve's White Night Summer Benefit drew art and culture movers and shakers to an elegant living art where guests donned white and moved about sculpture installations and manicured grounds of LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, NY. Click here for more images.
Ai WeiWei Sculpture. Atmosphere by Owen Hoffman for PMc. Image courtesy LongHouse Reserve.
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The Watermill Center's “Devil’s Heaven” included no fewer than 20 avant-garde performances staged throughout the grounds, enticing guests to explore art and discover Watermill Center. Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovic were guests with the two collaborating later to raise funds for a kickstarter campaign for Abramovic's new performance art center in the Hudson Valley.
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Bob Wilson, Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovic. Photo by Tom Kochie.
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"Objectified" by Trina Merry.
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Experiencing “Funerailles de miel” by Lisa Lozano. Photo by Tom Kochie.
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For more images of "Devil's Heaven," click here. For a review of the performance art and the exhibition opening with "Devil's Heaven", click here.
The Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall's summer benefits were equally well-attended and filled with art. For scenes from the Parrish Summer Benefit, click here. For Guild Hall's Chuck Close preview, click here.
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Parrish Art Museum's Midsummer Benefit
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A trio of art fairs brought VIP openings and presented art from the Hamptons, New York City and beyond.
All three fairs reported attendance-breaking records with a grand total of nearly 40,000 visiting Art Hamptons, artMRKT Hamptons and Art Southampton collectively in July. (If you're curious, Art Southampton reported attendance of 16,300; Art Hamptons 14,000 and artMRKT Hamptons 9,500).
Art sales were brisk with price tags reaching a top-reported sale of around $118,000. To see some of the works that grabbed top dollars at Art Southampton, click here. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the art fairs in casual conversations. By all accounts, the art fairs were acknowledged as an integral part of the Hamptons art summer experience.
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Inside Art Southampton
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Mark Borghi Fine Art at Art Hamptons Photo: Tom Kochie.
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artMRKT neon entry with Live Footage band.
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A flurry of art exhibitions launched Memorial Day weekend and continued all summer long, bringing with it a range of contemporary and historic art shows.
Guild Hall launched with a light-hearted look at the Artists vs Writers Celebrity Softball Game plus solo shows by John Alexander and Joel Perlman. Guild Hall's summer blockbuster exhibition--a solo show of recent works by Chuck Close--is currently on view through Oct. 14.
The Parrish unveiled a strong first season in their new building with a series of blockbusters. The first was solo show of works by Alice Aycock with a counterpart exhibition presented at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Following the July close of “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories are Worth Repeating”, the museum is presenting two new temporary exhibitions that run through Oct. 14: "Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio and Dubuffett" and "Michelle Stuart – Drawn By Nature”.
In July, the Parrish unveiled its second Parrish Platform with museum-wide installations by Josephine Meckseper. The works react and reinterpret art in the museum's permanent collection and the museum's architecture and grounds. Meckseper's Parrish Platform remains on view through Oct. 14. The Parrish also presented its second off-site installation project, The Parrish Road Show with works by Sydney Albertini and Almond Zigmund.
The summer also brought some sleepers.
The South Fork Natural History Museum (SoFo) entered into the art world with a contemporary art installation and participatory project by video artist Christine Sciulli. "The Expansive Field: Environmental Art by Christine Sciulli" presented a site-specific multi-media work that included video, natural materials and sound strategically installed on the grounds of the Bridgehampton-based museum. Sciulli was the museum's first artist-in-residency. Her residency also included artist presentations and a participatory art performance that wove original soundscape composition, projected light, dance and video for a one-night-only experience.
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Artist Christine Sciulli besides a part of her "Expansive Field" installation project at the South Fork Natural History Museum. Photo by Sunny Khalsa.
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The Sag Harbor Whaling Museum rolled out a strong exhibition schedule that lasted all summer. Each show had some art star power that included Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Donald Sultan, John Torreano, Alfonso Ossorio, Dan Rizzie or others). The first two shows were curated by Peter Marcelle of the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton. Exhibitions included a group show tightly focused on the whale ("A Whale of a Show") and an exhibition featuring Sag Harbor-based artists.
The museum's art season wrapped up by featuring documentarian D.A. Pennebaker's work in the exhibition Life As It Is – Unscripted”. The exhibition featured films, movie posters and objects by Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. It was held concurrently with "Almost Beachfront," a solo show that featured prints by Scott Sandell.
The reason for the strong season may be new museum manager Greg Therriault, who helped ferry a capital campaign that aims to raise $180,0000 to restore (and save) the historic house the museum calls home. Proceeds from art sales was one way the museum raised funds.
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Art Opening at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum
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Southampton Center was the surprise of the season.
Even before the Parrish Art Museum vacated their Jobs Lane address, Southampton Village officials were making plans to offer art and culture in the wake of the museum's departure. The Southampton Center quietly entered the Hamptons art scene on July 12 with strong summerlong programs that included two contemporary art exhibitions by mid-career artists selected by a Brooklyn-based curator.
The highlight of the first exhibition was an excerpt of David Michaelek's video piece Slow Dancing. Three oversize screens--reaching nearly floor to ceiling--featured video portraits of 43 professional dancers or choreographers, each dancing in hyperslow motion. The work was installed previously at Lincoln Center and in Trafalgar Square in London. The Southampton Center's inaugural exhibition also included a solo show of photographs from the Arctic by Diane Tuft and a mixed media lighting installation by Bentley Meeker.
The second group show was held from Aug 10 to 25 and present four installations. A site-specific sound installation by Krista Dragomer tied bird twitters to cell phone songs to conjure the crossover between the natural and the human-made world while posing the question of possible impact on the feathered population.
Eric Corriel presented a site-specific video and sound installation in the performance hall at the Southampton Center. Two opposite walls were covered with a series of screens containing projections of the chopping surface of water. The continued rise and fall of waves that were positioned above visitor's heads created an immersive sensation. "Water Will Be Here" seeks to conjure what it would be like if sea levels rose until cities found themselves underwater.
"Water Will Be Here" has been presented in Brooklyn (2010), Atlanta (2011), and Toronto (2012). Made pre-Superstorm Sandy, the site of the Brooklyn installation did find itself underwater, said Corriel.
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"Water Will Be Here" by Eric Corriel. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyne created the site-specific installation "Tempest" for the Southampton Center. The pair typically creates enormous installations but pared down to accommodate the middle gallery. Kavanaugh explained that when they considered the natural world of Southampton, the ocean was the obvious place to seek inspiration.
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"Tempest" by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen. Photo by Pat Rogers.
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The show was rounded out by two galleries of mixed media artworks by Aurora Robson. One room featured the suspended installation Circumdare. An adjacent gallery presented mixed media flat works and sculpture. Robson's work makes use of discarded plastic whose form is nearly unrecognizable and forged with the whimsy of dreams (good and bad). Her work is a way of subtly point out human-created pollution exasperated by product packaging disposal and consumption debris and their ill effects on water.
Circumdare had been previously installed at the Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton and was also presented as part of a summer fundraiser for The Nature Conservancy.
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"Circumdare" by Aurora Roberson
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The Southampton Center is located in the former Parrish Art Museum location at 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, NY 11968. The next exhibition is "Chas Addams: Family and Friends." It will be on view from Sept. 28 to Nov. 3, 2013.
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