Installation view of "Earth, Wind, and Fire" at Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY.
Every summer, New York's wealthiest residents migrate east to Long Island to spend the season in the Hamptons. Yet the area's artistic history long predates its current identity as a luxury enclave. Beginning in the late 19th century, Hudson River School painters helped establish the East End as a seasonal artists' colony, drawn by its pastoral landscape, coastal scenery and distinctive light. By the early 20th Century, the South Fork had become an established summer retreat for artists, writers and affluent New Yorkers.
The region became even more central to American art after World War II, when artists moved east in search of cheaper housing, larger studios and distance from the city. In 1945, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner settled in a modest farmhouse in Springs, then a rural hamlet north of East Hampton, purchased with financial assistance from Peggy Guggenheim. They were followed by other Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Elaine De Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler and Adolph Gottlieb.
Today, the Hamptons are far more closely associated with wealth and luxury, and few artists can still afford to live there. The area has shifted from an affordable artists' colony into a seasonal marketplace and concentrated extension of the New York art world. That transformation accelerated during the pandemic, when many galleries and all three major auction houses opened East End outposts to serve the collectors who had relocated there. Although several of those spaces have since closed, the Hamptons still offers plenty of exhibitions worth seeing each summer. Here are this season's must-see shows.
"Earth, Wind, and Fire"
Eric Firestone, East Hampton, through August 9, 2026
Eric Firestone has been one of the more enduring commercial presences in East Hampton, where it operates spaces on Newtown Lane. Its latest exhibition at the East End location centers on nature, bringing together 23 artists from different generations whose work addresses the land, rewilding, traces of the natural world and its intersections with the body, consumerism and the urban environment. Many of the artists incorporate found or organic materials into their work, treating the creative process as a form of collaboration with nature rather than an act of imposition. Their practices often place human intervention within existing natural structures and cycles, exploring how the anthropic and the organic can coexist. That tension between city life and the natural landscape is one of the exhibition's central concerns. It reflects a broader condition of contemporary life, in which the growing distance between people and their surroundings has produced an increasingly unsustainable relationship. By bringing these forces into dialogue, the exhibition encourages viewers to reconsider how they inhabit, use and alter the environments around them.