The Bridgehampton Museum will open two exhibitions during the coming week, starting Saturday with “What We Carry: Memory and Migration,” which will open at the Nathaniel Rogers House with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m., and “Uncharted Waters,” paintings by Mark Seidenfeld, set to open next Thursday with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. at the museum’s newly renovated Corwith Homestead Tractor Barn.
Co-curated by Jeremy Dennis, Mark Wilson, and Darius Yektai, “What We Carry” looks at migration not only as a physical act but also an emotional and cultural experience involving memory, displacement, and belonging. The show addresses its theme through artworks, photographs, and personal objects.
Wilson, an Australian now living in the U.S., is organizing his space with some Americana-themed works and other pieces related to migration. In addition to his own work, he has also selected pieces by Nick Weber, JJ Veronis, Lucy Cookson, Steve Cookson, Christa Maiwald, Michael Cardacino, Paton Miller, Steve Miller, Veronica Mezzina, Jasmine Chamberlain, Louise Reiner, Eva Faye, and Rosalind Brenner.
Yektai’s room will tell the story of how his father, the artist Manoucher Yektai, migrated from Iran to this country in the 1940s and fell in love with the East End, where his children, Darius and Nico, and granddaughter, Lilah, now live.
Dennis will illuminate the Native American perspective on immigration and migration with an installation of some of his own artwork as well as a selection of works in his collection by Native artists.
In addition, Connor Flanagan, the museum’s executive director, has been working with a local Chinese family to share its story in the exhibition.
In conjunction with the show, Leonard Ackerman, an East Hampton attorney and author, will be at the museum on June 20 at 5 p.m. to talk about his book “Leibisch’s Journey,” a chronicle of his father’s emigration from Ukraine at the age of 12. And Tara Rider, a history professor at Stony Brook University, will present “Journey of Hope: The Irish in New York” on June 26 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition will run through July 4.
“Uncharted Waters” takes its title from a statement by Seidenfeld about his approach to painting: “I set my sails for the deep and uncharted waters. . . . Each painting is a journey into experimentation.”
A Bridgehampton resident, Seidenfeld was trained as a lawyer and represented galleries around the world until 1992 when Elisa Breton, the widow of André Breton, encouraged him to begin to make his own work.
His paintings have evolved from representational work with elements of fantasy and surrealism to fully realized abstraction, characterized by the museum as “dreamscapes shaped through layering, interruption, and revision.” The compositions are dense with layers of color that almost seem to oscillate.
Seidenfeld, also a photographer, won the Best Photograph award at Guild Hall’s 2007 Members Exhibition, He is working on a book of photographs titled “Spirits, Saints, Madmen, and Magic.”
The exhibition will continue through June 21.
