Parrish Art Museum

The Parrish Art Museum congratulates Tomashi Jackson (@tomashi_ashi), who was recently announced as a 2020 recipient of the Joan Mitchel Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. I make work that places formal and material investigations in dialogue with historic narratives of governance and policy, which I view as areas of public space and shared implication. Using properties of color perception as an aesthetic strategy, I investigate historic events that illustrate the select...ive valuation of human life based on how color is seen and interpreted. As the 202021 Parrish Platform artist, Jackson is creating a new body of work titled The Land Claim, which addresses the historic and contemporary lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families on the East End of Long Island, and how issues of housing, transportation, livelihood, migration, and agriculture link these communities. Learn more at the link in our bio. Image: Tomashi Jackson at Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA. Photograph by Joshi Radin Flore See more

Elaine de Kooning is an artist with long ties to the East End. Though a vocal defender of Abstract Expressionism in her work as an art critic, after a brief moment with non-representation, she became best known for her large-scale portraits, particularly of men, yet with a volatile brushwork and energy not often seen in figurative painting. A visit in 1983 to the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain was a revelation and she began a series of paintings ...titled Cave Walls. In this seminal mark-making, de Kooning found the roots of Abstract Expressionism, recognizing the same improvisational processes and spontaneous technique in much of 20th-century art. In 1985 de Kooning made a further expedition to the caves at Niaux in the Spanish Pyrenees and became even more aware of the contours and textures of the cave walls. Inspired by her discoveries at Niaux, she began a series of sumi-e ink paintings that evoke the spirit of those prehistoric drawings, including this untitled work from 1985 currently on view for the first time at the Parrish. Elaine de Kooning (American, 19181989), Untitled, 1985. Sumi-e ink on paper. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y., Gift of Arlene Bujese, 2019.21.1 See more

The Parrish Art Museum congratulates Simone Leigh, recently chosen to represent the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, and the first Black woman to secure the commission. Leigh’s mixed-media sculpture, Sentinel, 2019 (on long-term loan from the FLAG Art Foundation, N.Y.) is now on view in the Museum’s exhibition Material Witness. In the work, a corrugated Quonset hut for the body and tropical raffia palm for the skirt underscore both the resilience and femininity of the imposing female figure that is elevated on a pedestal and celebratedsomething the artist points to as a rarity today. Simone Leigh (American, born 1967), Sentinel, 2019. Bronze and raffia, 95 1/2 x 80 x 50 inches. Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, Courtesy of the FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Rise is fine art photographer Jeremy Dennis’s most recent series that reflects on what he perceives as a subtle suspicion of Native people held by descendants of colonists living on stolen land. Rise appropriates the aesthetic and concept of the zombie apocalypse; images of indigenous men emerging from underwater to tip a summer camper out of his canoe, or from beneath the pristine Southampton sand to abduct a bikini-clad beachgoer reflect an interpretation of... an imagined future uprising based on the aftermath of colonization, steeped in both the popular imagination of non-indigenous people and the repressed desires of Native communities to one day retake their territory, Dennis explains. When we think of Native American history, he continues, we often think indigenous people either disappeared or peacefully moved on. This work challenges both popular notions by depicting indigenous people as a somewhat inconvenient (to the descendants of colonists) yet resilient people. In the end, my personal belief is that Americans and Native Americans will never have another Great War, but the fear nonetheless exists, and this project confronts it. #IndigenousPeoplesDay See more

This Friday, October 9 at 5 PM, Spanish artist Jaume Plensa will discuss his four bronze portraitsmaking their international debut in Field of Dreams at the Parrish Art Museumwith Chief Curator Alicia Longwell. Standing over nine feet tall, the four totemic portraits capture a moment of quiet reflection, evoking silence and stillness in a bustling world. The works are the first in a new series of portraits carved directly into tree trunks, with the trunks remaining part ...of the sculpture in the subsequent casting in bronze. The innate connection between humanity and nature resonates deeply in this body of work: the wood acts as both the medium and the subject of the sculpture itself while the irregular surfaces, scattered splinters, and cracks in the wood are captured in bronze. This is a virtual event. Please visit our website to register. Jaume Plensa (Spanish, born 1955), Carlota (oak), Laura Asia (oak), Wilsis (oak), Julia (oak), 2019. Bronze, various sizes.Installation view, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY. Courtesy of Gray, Chicago/New York and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. Photo: Josue Cruz See more

Artists have long used materials in myriad ways and in many works of art, the substance itself can be imbued with the meaning of the work. In the mid-1980s the artist Ross Bleckner responded to the AIDS crisis, painting canvases he viewed as memorials, often depicting candelabras, urns, and chandeliers. Architecture of the Sky (1990) is commemorative of lives lossed, depicting a dome comprised by a pattern of dots in a built-up surface that suggests the lesions produced by ...AIDS-related sarcomas. Bleckner exploits this floating imagery to make the material surface of the work both beautiful and terrifying. Architecture of the Sky is currently on view in Material Witness at the Parrish Art Museum. Ross Bleckner (American, born 1949), Architecture of the Sky, 1990. Oil on canvas, 106 x 92 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Parrish Art Museum Collector’s Circle, 2010.9 See more

There’s still time to register for this evening’s talk with artist Lucien Smith (@feareatsthesoil) and Chief Curator Alicia Longwell. The museum shop will be open & restocked, so get your merch while it lasts!

Join us this Friday, October 2 at 5 PM for a conversation with Chief Curator Alicia Longwell and contemporary artist Lucien Smith, whose 10 large-scale paintings from his 2013Southampton Suiteare currently on view. Seating at the museum is limited and socially distant; the talk will also be live-streamed. Purchase tickets for both the in-person and online event at the link in our bio. Lucien Smith (b.1989) is best known for his process-based works that employ bo...th accidental and improvisational marks to create loose, all-over compositions. Southampton Suitebrings the artist’sRain Paintingsseries to conclusion with the 10 large-scale paintings created en plein air in Southampton. The exhibition at the Parrish marks the first time the ten works have ever been shown together. Lucien Smith at his Montauk home and studio, April 2020. Photos by Kyle Reyes for Hypebeast See more

For generations the East End has been a place where artists have gathered, drawn by the light, the connections among many creative friends and neighbors, and the effortless intersection of art and nature, the outdoors and interior spaces. The area has also offered artists the ability to design living and studio spaces in close proximity; for some, the distance between domestic and creative spheres is fluid and permeable. For the artist Robert Dash (19342013), the house and s...tudio were at the heart of his life and practicegathering places for friends and family and ample artistic inspiration. For nearly fifty years Dash painted, gardened, and wrote at Madoo (an old Scots word for my dove), a cluster of gray-shingled eighteenth-century buildings near the ocean in Sagaponack. He moved easily among the various barns and outbuildings to create winter and summer studios with adjacent living quarters. In Dash’s painting John Ashbery (1975), the poet sits at the dining table in Dash’s winter studio, attentively reading. He had a very strict regimen, recalls Robert Storr, a friend of Dash’s since the early 1980s and the former dean of Yale University’s School of Art. He did most of his painting during the winter. The summer was for gardening and socializing. John Ashbery (1975) is currently on view in Housebound: Fairfield Porter and his Circle of Poets and Painters at the Parrish art Museum. Robert Dash (American, 19342013), John Ashbery, 1975. Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y., Gift of the Madoo Conservancy, 2014.25.2 See more

Thank you to our Parrish Contemporaries Circle Chair Christine Berry for these great photos of yesterday’s Contemporaries tour of Field of Dreams.