James Salomon has organized dozens of art exhibitions at almost as many venues over the years, including his own Salomon Contemporary on Plank Road in East Hampton, but his most recent curatorial venture is a book, “DayDreams,” which features artwork and written contributions from 44 artists and others who have deep connections to East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve and its founder, Jack Lenor Larsen.
A launch party will be held at LongHouse next Thursday at 5 p.m.
The genesis of the new volume is another book, “DayDream,” which followed a 2025 exhibition of the same name at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, Mass. When he was contacting artists for that show, one began to tell Salomon a daydream story. “I asked if he could write that down for me,” Salomon said during a Zoom call from his home in Millerton, N.Y. The artist agreed, after which Salomon thought, “What if, instead of doing a conventional catalog, I have a catalog where I asked each artist to write down a daydream story.” That first book also paired artwork, in that case from the exhibition, with a written text.
For both books, “The mandate was, this is not an artist statement. It’s a memoir, it’s a once upon a time, what do you daydream about, what do you fantasize about. I tell people the more vulnerable you want to be, the more you want to tell, the better the story you’re going to give your reader.” The first book included 42 artists.
How, one might wonder, does one solicit personal material from over 80 artists over the course of two years and get it published? The answer — connections — begins in Paris in the summer of 1995.
Salomon had just graduated from Boston University with a degree in film. “I was walking around with my resumes in the Latin Quarter. I was looking to get a job in a bookshop, because I was reading a lot and I was bilingual.” However, he encountered the Galerie Maeght during his wanderings. Its roster of artists includes Bonnard, Matisse, Miro, and Braque, to name only a few.
“The director took a liking to me because I was young and bilingual and they had a lot of English-speaking clients and offered me an internship. Being an intern in an art gallery had never crossed my mind as something to do.” He worked there for five months before returning to his home in Westhampton Beach.
Several years later, his mother connected him with a family friend, an advertising executive who had once been the mayor of Westhampton Beach. “He explained to me that he didn’t know much about the art world, but I should be looking at three places, which he wrote on a cocktail napkin: Gagosian, Pace, and Mary Boone.”
While “couch surfing” in Manhattan, “I wanted the job at Mary Boone so badly I was banging down the door.” After six months, his persistence paid off. Working at the gallery from April 1999 to November 2009, he was involved in operations and sales.
For five of those years, he ran Salomon Contemporary in East Hampton. (Ross Bleckner and Eric Freeman, who showed with Boone, also had studios on Plank Road at that time.)
The first show there, in the summer of 2006, featured Ned Smyth, who lives on Shelter Island. “What really attracted me to Ned was that he worked with Gordon Matta-Clark and was part of this whole downtown scene I thought was fascinating.”
The following summer he showed work by Lawrence Weiner, an important conceptual artist he first met at a dinner party thrown by Boone. The show opened a few months before Weiner’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum and marked the beginning of a close friendship.
In 2008, the space was taken over by Alice Aycock’s installation “Sand/Fans,” a re-creation of a piece originally shown in 1971 at 112 Greene Street, an influential alternate space in SoHo. That show coincided with “Sand: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor,” which Alicia Longwell organized at the Parrish Art Museum. It was Longwell who connected Salomon with “Sand/Fans,” which required a more industrial space than the Parrish.
Speaking of 112 Greene Street, in January 2011, after Salomon had left Mary Boone and his space in East Hampton, he and Smyth organized “112 Greene Street: A Nexus of Ideas in the Early 70s” at Salomon Contemporary Project Room in Chelsea. “The whole 112 Greene Street downtown New York gritty ‘70s scene I thought was totally cool.” That exhibition included work by Aycock, Bill Beckley, Chris Burden, Mary Heilmann, Joan Jonas, Dickie Landry, Dennis Oppenheim, Susan Rothenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Smyth, George Trakas, and Jackie Winsor.
As for “DayDreams,” in his introduction to the book, Glenn Adamson, LongHouse’s curator at large, writes, “This makes the daydream the perfect subject for an art book, for it stands in relation to everyday life as art does to the rest of society. Alone among us, painters and poets are granted — they grant themselves — the right to explore their own awareness, with no predetermined end in mind.”
The artist-writers in the book are Ai Weiwei, Bjorn Amelan, Vija Celmins, Renee Cox, Maren Hassinger, Benjamin Keating, Jill Platner, Cheryl R. Riley, Laurie Anderson, Monica Banks, Scott Bluedorn, Quentin Curry, Jeremy Dennis, Eric Fischl, Alice Hope, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Fitzhugh Karol, Laurie Lambrecht, Joel Mesler, Steve Miller, Oscar Molina, Jill Moser, Ugo Rondinone, Toni Ross, Kiki Smith, Agathe Snow, Mark Wilson, Almond Zigmund, Noah Becker, Melinda Hackett, Michael Halsband, Lori Hawkins, Judith Hudson, Richard Landry, Jill Musnicki, and Dustin Yellin.
The book also includes reflections on Larsen by Dianne Benson, the chairwomen of LongHouse’s arts committee, an essay on Buckminster Fuller by Alastair Gordon, thoughts on Toshiko Takaezu by Carrie Rebora Barratt, an homage to Weiner by Salomon, a moving story by Andrea Grover, executive director of Guild Hall, and handwritten notes by Liz Collins, Philip Glass, Julian Schnabel, and Sean Scully.
“I asked Andrea for something in her own handwriting, and she agreed. I call Andrea the North Star of the East End art scene. She knows how to bring a community together.”
It was Barratt, LongHouse’s former executive director and now consulting curator for historic preservation, who kickstarted the second book. After Salomon gave her a copy of the first book last summer, “She said she wished LongHouse had one. I hadn’t given it much thought, but after a few weeks I went back to her and asked if she wanted me to pursue it. I gave her a proposal, and the rest is history.”
Salomon was happy to do the book without a show, “without having to deal with insurance, logistics, paperwork, cost, walls, real estate, all those things. This book is a curation, not a catalog. The artists send in images, they don’t have to send in the artwork. It’s beautiful.”
