News

What made Mike Solomon’s talk about Alfonso Ossorio and the Creeks so captivating was that, as he put it, “It is a personal as well as a cultural history.” An overflow audience packed the Baldwin Family Lecture Room at the East Hampton Library to hear Mr. Solomon, an artist and founding director of the Ossorio Foundation, discuss Ossorio’s art, his generosity, and his influence in the art world of the 1950s and beyond.

The Solomon family — Syd, an important abstract painter, his wife, Annie, and their two children, Mike and Michele — lived at the Creeks, Ossorio’s 57-acre estate on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, for three months in 1959. Thirty years later, Mike returned to East Hampton with his wife and 2-year-old son to work as Ossorio’s studio assistant. After the artist’s death a year later, he became the director of the foundation established by Ted Dragon, Ossorio’s life partner and heir.

September 29, 2018 - January 20, 2019
Museum of Fine Arts
St. Petersburg, Florida

Syd Solomon’s (American, 1917–2004) gestural canvases are exemplary of the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, as seen in the large-scale painting Westcoastalscape (1968) currently on view in the Acheson Gallery.  He has stated, “I am interested in the immediate, the chance and the transitory aspects […] in my work.  The truth of the moment, I believe may frequently be the artist’s opening to permanent quality.”  His multilayered paintings, characterized by stunning sweeps of color contrasts, are inspired by nature, and specifically the Florida landscape.  This Spotlight exhibition brings together works ranging from 1945 through the 1980s, drawn from the Museum collection as well as the Estate of Syd Solomon, which has also loaned archival images and publications.

After serving in WWII, Solomon divided his time between Sarasota, where he established the Institute of Fine Art at New College, and East Hampton, New York. At his invitation, a distinguished group of artists taught at New College in the 1960s including Conrad Marca-Relli, Larry Rivers, and Philip Guston.

More than ever, female artists are breaking sales records and being recognized for their role in important art movements.

Once, when asked about discrimination against female artists, the Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner said the bias was as old as Judeo-Christian history. Brushing aside the weight of that realization, she added, “There’s nothing I can do about those 5,000 years.” She painted anyway, as have women throughout the ages who have continued to create despite official disdain.

Centuries and decades later, it seems their persistence may be finally paying off. Galleries are adding more women to their rosters, museums like the Uffizi in Florence are combing their storage facilities in search of treasures that deserve airing, and numerous institutions have been mounting exhibitions of art by women. On the eve of this fall’s auction season, the art market appears to be experiencing a long overdue correction.

The works of female painters were consistently undervalued by auction houses – but that’s all changing.

It has been several decades since the art world – that swirling miasma of idealism, virtuosity, pretense and money – has recognised the men of the New York School, also known as the Abstract Expressionists, as truly great artists. Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning have long been in high demand, now more than ever; their canvases regularly fetch hilarious sums, well into the eight and nine figures. 

Mike Solomon at East Hampton Library
East Hampton Public Library
September 15 - October 10, 2018

Opening Reception
September 15, 2018
7 PM

The Creeks: Epicenter of the 1950s Hamptons Art Community
East Hampton Library | Baldwin Family Lecture Room
Saturday, September 15, 2018 
6 - 7 pm

RSVP

We are preparing for our John Goodyear exhibition, Distillation and Wit, opening on September 6, 2018. Please read our online catalogue to learn more about the artist and his career.

John Goodyear
Distillation and Wit
September 6 - October 6, 2018

Opening Reception 
Thursday, September 6, 2018
6 - 8 pm

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, is hosting ”Walter Darby Bannard: 1959-1962,” a focused show exhibiting the breakthrough works of the American abstract painter. On view through January 6, 2019, the exhibition showcases some of the early and rarely seen works of the artist.

“Walter Darby Bannard: 1959-1962” focuses on a significant period of the artist career — a time when he abandoned gestural brushwork and developed a pared-down geometric vocabulary. The period on focus represented for Bannard a moment of reckoning with the lessons and legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Bannard who lived in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, had the desire to usher in a new era in American painting.

Acts of Art + Rebuttal in 1971
Leubsdorf Gallery
October 5, 2018–November 25, 2018

Acts of Art and Rebuttal revisits the 1971 exhibition Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal, which was organized by members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition at Acts of Art, a small, artist-run gallery in Greenwich Village. The original exhibition was mounted in response to the Whitney Museum’s refusal to appoint a Black curator for their survey Contemporary Black Artists in America.

Art Break: Museums of Long Island Are Steeped in History While Capitalizing on Their Picturesque Settings

When people think of Long Island, they tend to think about the outdoors: the beaches, ocean, parks, wineries – even the best mall on the Island is an outdoor one. Not Art Break! When we think of Long Island what springs to mind are the artists’ colonies of the East End and North Fork, the sculpture gardens of Nassau and Suffolk counties, and the community involvement of so many museums.

Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, located on the old Frick estate, is known for specializing in 19th and 20th century American and European art as well as having a beautiful garden, well-marked nature trails, and an excellent sampling of modern sculpture on display. There are two special exhibitions currently on view: True Colors and A Mirror to Nature: Sculpture by Marko Remec (both ongoing).