The Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum

200 Main Street, Sag Harbor, NY 11963

Now in its eighth year, the Parrish Road Show is the Museum’s annual creative off-site cultural engagement program. Every year, East End artists are invited to create new work for temporary projects and engage residents in their process. In an effort to deeply connect art and creativity to everyday life, the exhibitions take place at public sites across the region—cultural and historical organizations, public parks and highways, and community centers—and the artists offer public talks and artmaking workshops for children and adults.

For the 2019 Parrish Road Show, artist Candace Hill Montgomery will present Hills & Valleys, an exhibition of recent weavings that reflect the artists’ life experiences and concerns about the world we live in, at The Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum. The location has deep meaning for Hill-Montgomery, who grew up in Sag Harbor in summers from age 10 on.

Candace Hill Montgomery is a multi-media artist working in painting, collage, writing, sculptural textiles, and weaving. An ardent feminist and activist, Hill Montgomery’s work is informed by being a black female in a culture of racism and sexism while being balanced by a personal poetic lyricism. Upon moving to the East End full time in 2011, she focused on painting, and more recently, weaving. Weaving, she finds, allows her to get her message across directly to the viewer and break away from the constraints of structure and borders of traditional painting.

Today, she uses a wide variety of threads, beads and metals, and prefers handspun wool as it absorbs dye unevenly and produces interesting colorations, and organically dyed yarns. She uses handmade looms, their irregularity referencing the unevenness in artmaking. All these different materials offer both strength and softness for the differing “tragicomedy” narratives of today’s world that she’s concerned about, such as clean food and water, or homelessness.

Hill Montgomery’s work has been featured in exhibitions in major art institutions, including the Bronx Museum for the Arts, New Museum, Printed Matter, Artists Space, Franklin Furnace, Fashion Moda, and Creative Time, among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum Harlem (1979), and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1985) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1981). In 1985, Hill Montgomery curated a solo exhibition of Lorna Simpson’s work with Lucy R. Lippard titled Working Women/Working Artists/Working Together at Gallery 1199. Her work is in the Digital Archive of the New Museum. Her essays have been published in the Women’s Art Journal. She received a master’s degree in Art Education from Hunter College.

Parrish Road Show is organized by Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects

Parrish Road Show 2019 is made possible, in part, by the generous support of The Dorothy Lichtenstein ArtsReach Fund, established by Agnes Gund; Deborah Buck; Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder; Jane Wesman and Donald Savelson; Leslie Rose Close; and Joni Sternbach.