Parrish Art Museum
Artists Choose Parrish, Part I B | April 30–July 23, 2023
279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY 11976
Featuring works by Tony Bechara, Ross Bleckner, Jeremy Dennis, Eric Fischl, Claude Lawrence, Robert Longo, Eddie Martinez, Enoc Perez, Hank Willis Thomas, Nina Yankowitz, and Joe Zucker.
Celebrating the Museum’s 125th anniversary, this landmark exhibition honors the East End’s rich artistic legacy and brings greater attention to major artists practicing here today. Forty-one renowned artists with deep local roots are selecting works from the collection to be shown along with their own. The exhibition, organized in three installations, is driving a renewed dialogue between the Museum’s past and future and reveals new perspectives of its collection through the lens of a diverse roster of artists.
The artists were invited to delve into the Museum’s 3,600-volume holdings online and at the Parrish to select works. Many artists reminisce on the relevance of the East End in their lives and approach to art. The result is a 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.
Artists Choose Parrish is organized by Corinne Erni, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects, with additional support from Kaitlin Halloran, Assistant Curator and Publications Coordinator, and Brianna L. Hernández, Assistant Curator.
Nina Yankowitz takes over an entire gallery to literally offer alternate perspectives for experiencing art: Reclining lounge chairs invite viewers to look up at works by Tara Donovan, Rashid Johnson, Louisa Chase, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins; a 7-foot platform allows a view from above of a visual sound score woven into a rug. Seated in a heavy chair with tiles, viewers confront Chuck Close‘s self-portrait, while small works hang at tilted angles in the distance. Yankowitz chose works relevant to life in America today, including Jackie Black’s Last Meal (Series), 2001–2003, 24 photographs of meals requested by death-row inmates, paired with Yankowitz’ uncanny sculptural paintings of body parts protruding from the wall to imagine “what’s on the other side.”