On August 20, 2020, the Parrish opened Field of Dreams, our inaugural sculpture exhibition created to extend the galleries outdoors and activate the Museum’s meadows with work that engages and responds to the Parrish’s architecture and landscape. The exhibition series is part of the Museum’s new Art in the Meadow initiative that enlivens the grounds with performances, projections, and works of art.

Abstract painter Lucien Smith is best known for his process-based works that employ both accidental and improvisational marks to create loose, all-over compositions. Organized by Alicia Longwell, Lucien Smith: Southampton Suite brings the artist’s Rain Paintings series to conclusion with 10 large-scale paintings created in a plein air studio that he constructed on the East End during the summer of 2013. With the 9 x 7 ft acrylic on unprimed canvas Southampton Suite paintings, the artist created an immersive environment that continues his quest to “. . .replicate a natural process with manmade tools.”

Jackie Black’s photographs examine the ambiguity of American culture surrounding mortality. Organized by Curatorial Assistant and Parrish Publications Coordinator, Savannah Petrick, Last Meal is the artist’s commentary on capital punishment. To produce the 12 x 12 images, Black researched, recreated, and photographed the last meals and statements of 23 individuals who were tried, convicted, and executed in Texas under capital murder between 1984 and 2001. At first glance, they read as staged food photos on a glossy diner menu. But suspended against stark black background with no suggestion of social nor human aspects of mealtime, each becomes a macabre still life.

In 1949, Fairfield Porter and his wife, poet Anne Channing Porter, moved from New York City to a 19^th-c. sea captain’s house in the village of Southampton, NY. For the next three decades the couple’s friends gravitated there for a weekend or an extended stay, chronicling their social mores and shared sensibilities in words and paint. Housebound presents paintings and poems from this era side by side, bringing in sharp focus the many connections between the works and the artists who created them. Nearly 40 paintings by Porter, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers will be on view. Poems by Anne Porter and New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler will be accessible from SQR codes on the labels of specific works. The project grew out of a series of online live-stream talks by exhibition organizer Alicia Longwell, that were presented by the Museum during its temporary closure due to COVID when nation became housebound.

Each year, the Museum creates a new exhibition that contextualizes works and amplifies themes by important artists drawn from the Parrish’s permanent collection of more than 3,000 works. This year’s seven-gallery installation, What We See, How We See, features paintings and works on paper by a wide range of artists, including a major gift from the Saul Steinberg Foundation that encompasses the varied projects, such as wallpaper and fabric, by this prolific artist who lived and worked in Springs for some 50 years; boldly colored paintings and prints by Tom Slaughter (1955–2014); American Landscapes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, highlights from the Parrish’s renowned holdings; and Circles, Squares, and Squiggles, works that encourage viewers to take a closer look by artist Josef Albers, Dan Christensen, and Jack Youngerman, among many others.