The Parrish Art Museum presents Connections and Context—the third annual installation of the permanent collection at the Museum, on view through November 2016. Connections and Context features significant recent acquisitions, some of which mark the introduction of artists new to the Museum’s collection, as well as works that have not been shown in the Museum’s current building in Water Mill (opened November 2012). Some 70 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are presented in nine thematic, mini-narratives that explore the concept of dialogue—how artworks interact with one another while claiming individual visual territory.

The thematic exhibitions in Connections and Context provide insight into relationships among works of art and artists. Home Sweet Home explores every notion of home—from serenity, to instability, to a whimsical take on domesticity. In Collective Conversation, four works spanning 50 years explore architecture, geometry, solid form, and fleeting gesture. Inscape—the Inner Nature of Things contrasts twelve artists’ diverse approaches to expressing emotion through abstraction, ranging from basic forms combined with loose, expressive lines to pure abstract gesture. American Views provides a fresh look at landscape, both real and imagined, though late 19th and early 20th century paintings. Three groupings of photographs installed in the spine gallery provide contrast and context, from the philosophical investigation of nature and perception in five large-scale photographs by Jean-Luc Mylayne, to the opportunity to reconsider everyday surroundings in Close to Home, to the intimate collaboration between subject and photographer in Picturing Artists.

A special presentation on view within Connections and Context is James Brooks: Process of Discovery. A major painting in the Parrish collection by the 1950s New York School artist is augmented by a series of works on paper on long term loan from the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation that reveal Brooks’s process of discovery.