Summer in the Hamptons: an art lover’s essential guide

Amidst a dynamic summer program including shows on Carmen Herrera, JR and more, the Parrish recently launched Fresh Paint, a multi-platform series of single-work exhibitions, with the FLAG Art Foundation. The inaugural show features a 10-foot-tall mixed-media work by the Los Angeles–based artist and activist Lauren Halsey, who is also currently featured in Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale.

For her installation at the Parrish, pride n progress thang (2024), the artist combines photographs, ephemera, found objects and miniatures, using materials collected within her community to create a personalised view of South Central LA. While the area has a turbulent history, Halsey shines a light on the local places and people that are integral to daily life there, therefore, offering a more nuanced perspective of the neighbourhood she calls her own.

Sag Harbor’s The Church, an exhibition space and artist residency founded by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik in 2021, presents 40 female-identifying artists whose work flies in the face of antiquated stereotypes about women not being funny. From the satirical and surreal to self-deprecating and subversive, artists like Lisa Yuskavage, Nina Chanel Abney, Katherine Bernhardt, Cindy Sherman and more show us myriad ways to use humour in contemporary art.

There are works that tackle cultural stereotypes, such as Renee Cox’s 1998 Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and Denise ‘Weethahome’ Silva-Dennis’s 2021 Land Back Butter, Wee Tah Moe, and others that offer quirky, unexpected takes on the mundane, like Monica Banks’s 2018 Kaleidoscope, a porcelain pie sprinkled with human fingers, or Nina Katchadourian’s endlessly clever Lavatory Self-Portrait series, taken in airplane bathrooms.

In conjunction with the Noguchi Museum’s Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within retrospective, East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve is paying homage to the late Japanese-American ceramicist known for her large-scale vessels. The16-acre sculpture garden is displaying its full Takaezu holdings for the first time, alongside works by artists whose lives and art were shaped by her influence, including Isamu Noguchi, as well as Jack Lenor Larsen, the textile designer and author who founded LongHouse Reserve. In 1975 Larsen purchased the land where he envisioned bringing the Long Island community together through a bucolic garden and art programming.

The exhibition also includes the pioneering fibre and collage artist Lenore Tawney; Anna Kang Burgess, Takaezu’s close friend and fellow Cranbrook alumna; and two sculptors who apprenticed with Takaezu: Fitzhugh Karol and Martha Russo, who has a dedicated on-site exhibition entitled phase shift (wattling LHR).

While outdoor sculpture can be enjoyed at Southampton Arts Center throughout the season, the community organisation will soon open Couples Squared, dedicated to artists who are also partners. Spanning painting, sculpture and photography, the show encompasses historic couples, like the mid-century pioneers Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, as well as today’s creative duos, including landscape and figurative painters, Isca Greenfield-Sanders and Sebastian Blanck.

The art on display covers a variety of subjects and styles, such as portraiture and landscape, representation and abstraction. Also on view through 20 July is Beyond the Streets: Post Graffiti, which charts the evolution of graffiti from rebellious street art to a multidisciplinary cultural phenomenon.

Speaking of creative partnerships, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, collectively known as Les Lalanne, are arguably collectible design’s most iconic pairing — and the architect Peter Marino is undoubtedly amongst the duo’s greatest patrons. One of the world’s foremost collectors, Marino has amassed a treasure trove of paintings, sculpture, drawings, photography and ceramics dating from 3500 BC to the present. Since 2021 the public has been able to bask in his expansive holdings at the Peter Marino Art Foundation, housed in a restored 19th-century landmark building in Southampton.

While this summer visitors can also enjoy exhibitions dedicated to British sculptor Richard Deacon (through 13 July) and American artist McArthur Binion (20 July–28 September), Marino’s fantastical Lalanne works are not to be missed. More than 40 of the couple’s enchanting creations, including Claude’s Très Grand Choupatte (2007) and François-Xavier’s Les Trois Grands Moutons de Peter (2004) are on view.

Since his first New York solo show at Mary Boone Gallery in 1979, Julian Schnabel has remained a prominent fixture in the contemporary art world thanks to his endlessly experimental oeuvre, spanning painting, film, architecture and more. In later summer and fall, his revolutionary approach across media will be celebrated at East Hampton museum and performing arts centre, Guild Hall.

Julian Schnabel: Selected Works from Home presents a selection of the prolific artist’s paintings, drawings and sculptures that he chose to keep for his personal collection. These range from an early wax painting, Procession (for Jean Vigo) (1979), to his signature plate paintings, in which paint-covered shards of crockery form monumental compositions.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1941, Liliana Porter was an important figure in the early Conceptual and feminist art movements and remains active across photography, printmaking, painting, video and more. Designed by artist Dan Flavin to permanently house his fluorescent light installations alongside temporary exhibitions, Dia Bridgehampton covers Porter’s wide-ranging practice, from her found object installations of the 1990s to her recent films and plays.

A highlight of the show is a newly commissioned iteration of Porter’s Forced Labor series, in which she stages scenes with figurines engaging in absurd tasks — for example, a woman faced with sweeping a towering mound of dust. Whether addressing the political or the philosophical, Porter’s timeless sense of levity always comes through.