Imposing sculptures by Sean Scully and Renée Cox are only two of the new artworks that will welcome visitors to East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve on April 18, the venue’s “spring awakening” day when admission will be free for everyone. “It’s a wonderful way to get a taste of what’s to come this summer,” said Lara Sweeney, who assumed the role of executive director yesterday. “It’s special to be able to open the grounds to everybody.”
In addition to the new artworks on loan, including two bronze sculptures by William Kentridge and the works by Mr. Scully and Ms. Cox, pieces from the permanent collection and long-term loans of works by Willem de Kooning, Maren Hassinger, Fitzhugh Karol, Grace Knowlton, Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, Barbara Shawcroft, and Toshiko Takaezu, among others, will be on view.
“Things That Look Like Magic: Cheryl R. Riley and Wharton Esherick,” an exhibition organized by Glenn Adamson, curator at large, and Carrie Rebora Barratt, LongHouse’s former director, will open on May 2.
Jack Lenor Larsen (1927-2020), LongHouse’s founder, knew both artists and actively and intentionally gathered artworks and artifacts from both, curating his spaces again and again. He wanted this practice of place-shifting to continue, thus inspiring an annual exhibition of rearrangements and reinvestigations — an act of relevance, not reverence, according to a release.
Esherick (1887-1970) worked in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. He is best known for his wood furniture, which combines modernist sculptural form with functional craft.
Larsen, who met and became friendly with Esherick in 1952, began collecting his work, leading to acquisitions of such substance and depth that LongHouse’s collection of Esherick’s furniture is considered the most important in the nation after the holdings at the Esherick Museum in Malvern, Pa. It includes both World’s Fair tables, a monumental archway from the Curtis Bok house, and a rare bench of painted softwood, as well as tables, a music stand, library ladder, and cubist mirror. Pieces from the collection will be featured in “Things That Look Like Magic.”
Ms. Riley is a multimedia artist, furniture designer, and art adviser. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana.
The LongHouse exhibition will create a cross-generational conversation that offers a new look at its permanent collection while also creating a platform for Ms. Riley, “a vital and proficient maker with provocative connections to the counterpart of Esherick,” says the museum.
Mr. Scully is represented by “48,” a 20-foot-tall stack of six-foot-square aluminum plates painted in different colors of automotive paint. The work epitomizes his deliberate use of stripes and colors and transforms the rigid geometry of the stripe and the grid into “a profound language of emotion, history, and light,” according to LongHouse.
Previously shown only in New York City across from Lincoln Center, the piece is on loan and will be installed next to the pond at LongHouse. Mr. Scully had a residency at the Edward Albee Foundation’s barn in Montauk during the summer of 1982 that had an impact on his future work. Mary Gail Doerhoefer, LongHouse’s head of collections and exhibitions, had worked with Mr. Scully recently and wanted to showcase one of his pieces.
“I think it’s such a dramatic use of color and scale, and where it’s placed, right next to the pond, I see it becoming a kind of anchor for a community gathering space,” said Ms. Sweeney. “48” will be in conversation with Oscar Molina’s sculptural installation “Children of the World,” which the artist moved there.
Ms. Cox’s “Soul Culture Statue” (2025), which was commissioned by KODA, a nonprofit arts organization in the city, is the artist’s first outdoor work. Also on loan, it premiered last year on Governors Island. The seven-foot-tall mixed-media work continues the artist’s participation in the philosophies of Afrofuturism, using pan-African and Indigenous imagery that accommodates an idealized and expansive future, according to KODA, which says on its website, “She decided it was time for her to create her own world. Where color and gender did not matter.”
“The piece is so majestic and such a wonderful way to start your tour of LongHouse,” said Ms. Sweeney, adding that it will be installed near Buckminster Fuller’s “Fly’s Eye Dome,” which recently collapsed under the weight of February’s blizzard.
Speaking of the dome, “The board and staff are working diligently with the insurance company to work through all the options,” Ms. Sweeney said. “Of course the vision is to rebuild and fortify it, but we’re still waiting to get through all the bureaucracy to see what’s possible, and then start our fundraising, of course.”
In addition to the art, which also includes returning loans of work by Mark Mennin, Jill Platner, Kenny Scharf, and Vadis Turner, artist and author talks will take place throughout the season. Mr. Mennin will talk about his new book, “Observance,” and Jill Moser will launch her recently published “Talking Pictures: Collaborations.” James Salomon will hold forth on “DayDream,” an exhibition he organized last summer at the Berkshire Botanical Garden.
Alastair Gordon, a critic, curator, cultural historian, filmmaker, and writer, will return to host Long Island Modern, his series of architecture talks, which this year will highlight the 25h anniversary of his influential book “Weekend Utopia.” The landscape designers Julia Watson and Margie Ruddick will discuss garden design and the landscape, and Edwina von Gal of the Perfect Earth Project will return with Grounded Conversations.
As for the performing arts, the Neo-Political Cowgirls will bring Shakespeare to LongHouse, and Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner will return for his annual outdoor piano recital, which this year will celebrate Jack Lenor Larsen’s birthday.
Also back are Friday evening painting classes with Barbara Thomas and the Insider/Outsider talk series, presented in collaboration with Jeremy Dennis of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio.
The LongHouse website is the best way to keep abreast of its diverse and venturesome programming.
