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PARRISH ART MUSEUM OPENS PART II OF THE LANDMARK EXHIBITION
“ARTISTS CHOOSE PARRISH” FEATURING 12 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS WITH TIES TO THE EAST END

This second installment of the year-long, three-part series is on view
August 20, 2023 – February 4, 2024

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Marina Adams, Brown in Red between Yellow and Blue, 2022
Acrylic on linen; 88 x 78 in. Courtesy the Artist

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WATER MILL, NY 8/7/2023—On Sunday August 20, the Parrish Art Museum opens Artists Choose Parrish, Part II: the second installment of a landmark exhibition series featuring internationally renowned contemporary artists with deep roots on the East End of Long Island, presenting their work alongside their selections from the permanent collection. Artists Choose Parrish Part II highlights 12 artists—Marina Adams, Alice Aycock, Vija Celmins, Rachel Feinstein, Ralph Gibson, Sheree Hovsepian, Suzanne McClelland, Alix Pearlstein, Ned Smyth, Donald Sultan, John Torreano, Stanley Whitney—and is on view through February 4, 2024.
 
The artists were invited to delve into the Museum’s 3,600-volume holdings online and at the Parrish to select works. As in Part I, the artists reminisce on the relevance of the East End in their lives and approach to art. The exhibition series continues and deepens the multilayered anthology of visual dialogues from unique perspectives, revealing a shared sense of community on the East End and continuing the artistic legacy of the region that radiates in the global art world. By pairing their work in unexpected and creative manners with work by Museum collection artists from the past and present, the participants crafted new narratives that explore perception and perspective, place and identity, formal connections, or personal and professional relationships.

Many of the artists in this iteration were looking for connections in process and material, focusing on the physical manifestation and experiences of the works. They chose works where they detected opposites but also similarities to their own works. Several explored art historical references, cultural symbolism, power dynamics, and social constructs.
 
Marina Adams chose Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XXXVIII, 1983, because it was a later painting by the artist like the ones she had seen at Xavier Fourcades gallery in the ‘80s when she first arrived in New York. “They opened up a world to me,” she says. Adams pairs the collection work with her abstract painting, Brown in Red between Yellow and Blue, 2022.
 
Alice Aycock chose a work by Dennis Oppenheim, to whom she was married in the 1980s. Both artists’ lives and work were influenced by their experience living on the East End, and both made work that emerged during the conceptual earthwork period of the late 1960s and 1970s. Aycock’s fourteen-part drawing Dance Me to the End of Love (Leonard Cohen) (2022), a virtual earthwork based on contra dance diagrams, dialogues with Oppenheim’s photo documentation of his executed earthwork Polarities (1972), based on his daughter’s first drawing and the dying gesture of his father.
Oppenheim’s earthwork, 500 feet long, was enlarged, plotted with red magnesium flares and executed in 1969 in Bridgehampton.
 
Vija Celmins chose Montauk, L.I., 1981, by Ellen Phelan because she liked the way the brush and paper interact to make the subtle indication of a light-filled landscape. “The paint is gesture and image, being both abstract and representational,” she says. Celmins’s own work, Untitled (Ocean Mezzotint), 2016, was built in a slow process by scraping out the image on a rough surface of copper. She worked on it most of 2016, and ended up with a dense, night like image of a complicated stretch of water. Celmins notes that as opposed to Phelan’s work, hers is not made spontaneously, but sees a connection in that both works are mystical and strong.
 
Born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, Rachel Feinstein has been interested in universal symbols since studying religion and philosophy in college alongside art. She chose Audrey Flack’s Lady Madonna, ca. 1972, because she sees Flack as a contemporary artist who uses female imagery to make the connection between her life and art to those who lived and worked before her. Feinstein’s sculpture See You Soon, 2001, also in the Parrish collection, is based on a statue from a German porcelain factory in the 18th century of Jesus and the baby angels amongst frothy clouds in heaven. The images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the other saints appear to her as universal images joining cultures together through symbols.
 
Photographer Ralph Gibson, who chose Philip Guston’s Visitors, 1975, has always been inspired by Guston’s abstract work but also his courage to change. When Gibson saw an image on Prince Street that reminded him of Guston’s work, he immediately knew the photo he’d be taking was an homage to the great artist. 

Sheree Hovsepian, Acolyte, 2023
Silver gelatin prints, ceramic, string, nails, and walnut artist frame; 41 1/5 x 31 ½ x 3 ¾ in. Courtesy the Artist

Sheree Hovsepian chose the artist Gertrude Greene because they both engage in collage and assemblage work. Hovsepian’s practice investigates the ways that photographic imagery gains material, formal, and sculptural relevance. In frames made in the studio, she constructs multimedia assemblages with silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, string, and other ephemera found in her home. She sees a similarity in how Greene’s compositions are delicately balanced, and relates to the precision and restraint with which Greene constructs her collages, and the quiet beauty of her abstractions.

Suzanne McClelland searched for works on paper that allowed for surprising affinities to form between unfamiliar and familiar artists. Focusing on lines, tangle, and language, she was looking for orientation and organization of space. Many of the drawings she chose—works by Jennifer Bartlett, Mary Bauermeister, Mel Bochner, Arshile Gorky, Cleonike Theodora Damianakes Wilkins, and Saul Steinberg—suggest an aperture, hole, or pathway “between here and there.” Her own four works, all made in 2023, are a reflection of her love for painting as drawing as writing and various methods and effects of erasure and blur.

Alix Pearlstein, who works in video, performance, installation, sculpture and collage, stages interactions between people or things, exploring relationships, behavior, character, power dynamics and social constructs. She is showing works replete with ties to the history of artists on the East End from her Archive Collage series, which she created by cutting out and collecting figures and objects from magazine reproductions of artworks. Fred. W. McDarrah’s photograph, Carolee Schneemann in a Private Performance at Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, 1975, documents Schneemann’s first performance of Interior Scroll on the East End. Though not related but through the coincidence of their shared last name, Alix formed a strange, life-long relationship with Philip Pearlstein’s work of rough-hewn bodies, foreshortened and cropped by the frame. She sees a similar aggression present in Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Chuck Close and his Big Self-Portrait, 1967–68, which she used in one of her works, festooned with young women’s bodies, one of which represents a friend of hers.

 

Ned Smyth, Renaissance Plan, 1973
Cast concrete; 72 x 72 x 144in. Courtesy the Artist

Ned Smyth will show two of his minimalist installations from 1973 that are assembled with two-by-four, cast concrete architectural pieces that range in length from one foot, four feet, and eight feet and lean against the wall or are stacked on the floor. He chose Untitled, ca. late 1970s, by Louise Nevelson because it is the same height as one of his pieces and monochromatic like his cement work, and both their large-scale sculptures are shown up against the wall.
 
Looking for abstract works with specific messages or ideological statements, Donald Sultan chose artists who emphasize material and iconic images with visual and actual weight. They include Charles Burchfield, R.M Fischer, Valerie Jaudon, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Lipski, Dan Rizzie, and Keith Sonnier. “They are all very different in their points of view yet speak clearly to their historical prerogative,” he says. “I have known these artists’ works for many years. I was thrilled to be able to have their voices heard again.” Of his own work, Sultan is showing small sculptures such as Lead Lemon March 25 1985, 1985, Lead Teacup with Tar February 10 1989, 1989, as well as large-scale works such as Lemons July 15 1987, 1987 and Oranges in a Pot April 5 1993, 1993.

Splash Building (2009) by Dennis Oppenheim was one of the first works John Torreano thought of when asked to choose from the Parrish’s collection. He was attracted to the scale of the Oppenheim work, the combination of materials and mix of colors and light but, most importantly, its potential multiple interpretations: a building or a splash building, a pop artwork, a three-dimensional drawing. Seeing it is always a surprise, according to Torreano. A simultaneously contradictory experience is something Torreano looks for in art, and refers to it as contradistinction. The choice of his painting 4 x 4 (1990) is an effort to cause a dynamic closure with Dennis’s Splash Building. They are extremely different, but with enough similarities in material and content to make that happen.
 
Stanley Whitney will show his largescale oil on linen work Where Love Can Stay, 2023 alongside Philip Guston’s, The Street, 1970, and Romare Bearden’s, Before the First Whistle, ca. 1974. The artist met Guston in 1968, when he was a student at the Skidmore College Studio Art Program. Whitney was moving towards abstraction, and Guston was moving towards figuration; and Guston had a big impact on the younger artist, pushing him to move to New York. Whitney was moved by the color and beauty of Bearden’s work, saying: “I kept thinking about this Romare Bearden piece after I first saw it. It’s one of the best Bearden’s I’ve seen in a long time. I was struck by the color. It’s a beautiful, powerful piece.”

RELATED PROGRAMS
 
Saturday, August 19, 5-7:30pm
Members Opening Reception
6pm Artist Talk with Marina Adams, Suzanne McClelland, and Ralph Gibson
 
Sunday, September 3, 3pm
Artist Talk
 
Upcoming Installation of Artists Choose Parrish
 
PART III On View: October 29, 2023–February 18, 2024
Participating Artists:  Richard Aldrich, Joanne Greenbaum, Virginia Jaramillo, Rashid Johnson, KAWS, Mel Kendrick, David Salle, Sean Scully, Amy Sillman 

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Artists Choose Parrish is organized by Corinne Erni, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator of Art and Education, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, with support from Assistant Curator and Publications Coordinator Kaitlin Halloran, and Assistant Curator Brianna L. Hernández
 
The Artists Choose Parrish exhibition is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of the Estate of Mildred C. Brinn; Bank of America; Stephen Meringoff in honor of Robin and Fred Seegal; Robert Lehman Foundation; Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder; Agnes Gund in honor of Dorothy Lichtenstein; Goldman Sonnenfeldt Foundation; Jennifer and Sean Cohan; Susan and Timothy Davis; Alexandra Stanton and Sam Natapoff; Fern and Lenard Tessler; Jacqueline Brody; The Evelyn Toll Family Foundation; Martha McLanahan; Herman Goldman Foundation; Carole Server and Oliver Frankel; Fred Schmeltzer; and Scott and Margot Ziegler. 


 
The Parrish Art Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District. Public Funding provided by Suffolk County. 

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Mission Statement
The Parrish Art Museum strives to illuminate the creative process, casting light on how art transforms our experience and understanding of the world in which we live. The Museum fosters connections between individuals, art, and artists through the care and interpretation of the collection, as well as the presentation of exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, and programs. A center for cultural engagement with a focus on the East End of Long Island, the Parrish is a source of inspiration and a destination for the region, the nation, and the world. 

www.parrishart.org

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AAQ / Resource: Ben Krupinski Builder

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