Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman longtime chief curators at Parrish Artwork MuseumAlicia G. Longwell, Ph.D, has introduced she might be retiring after 38 years with the Hamptons’ beloved arts establishment, together with her time in Southampton Village and shifting to her present state-of-the-art facility designed by Herzog & de Meuron in Watermill.
Longwell has been an integral and influential drive within the East Finish artwork scene, championing native, nationwide and worldwide artists and curating critically acclaimed exhibitions for many years. These initiatives, based mostly on intensive analysis and artistic ideas, have drawn consideration to the museum.
“We rejoice Alicia Longwell’s dedication and her great contributions to the Parrish Artwork Museum and to the artwork subject by her experience on East Finish artists,” mentioned the museum’s new chief govt. Monica Ramirez-Montagut mentioned within the announcement despatched Monday. “Alicia has been instrumental in establishing path for the Parrish Assortment and legacy of scholarship and excellence for 38 years,” continued Ramirez-Montagut, including, “She embodies the fervour and information of these few extraordinary curators who so skillfully mix the historic and the modern in exhibitions that generously invite viewers to see artwork in solely new contexts.Your complete Parrish household is grateful and honored for his or her unwavering steering.
“As my final day at Parrish Quick approaches, I can look again on a profession immeasurably enriched by studying, learning and, above all, artwork,” Longwell mentioned. “It was my nice success to have this ardour rewarded every day throughout my years of working on the museum alongside devoted colleagues, a devoted physique of guides and a supportive board. Being in an artist’s studio taking a look at artwork is after all the best privilege and the most effective a part of the job. Transmitting that very same pleasure to guests to our galleries, bringing artwork and other people collectively, is what I’ve all the time hoped to attain.
Alicia Longwell inaugurated the museum in its new constructing at Water Mill, planning the inaugural installations of the Parrish Assortment for the 2012 opening which featured the exhibition Malcolm Morley: portray, paper, course of (2012). She has organized quite a few investigative exhibitions together with Dorothea Rockburne: In My Thoughts (2011) and North Fork/South Fork: East Finish Artwork Now (2004), in addition to solo exhibitions of the work of artists Barbara Bloom, Marsden Hartley, Frederick Kiesler, Alan Shields, Esteban Vicente and Jack Youngermanamongst many others.
As well as, Longwell has tapped into the Parrish Artwork Museum’s assortment of three,500 works to curate over 100 thought-provoking thematic exhibitions, usually supplemented by key loans.
Amongst his most notable conservation achievements are Sand: reminiscence, that means and metaphor (2008), John Graham: Nonconformist Modernist (2017), and Affinities for Abstraction: Ladies Artists of East Lengthy Island, 1950-2020 (2021).
The Graham Exhibition, that includes 65 work and a number of necessary works on paper, spanned his four-decade profession and was the primary complete retrospective in 30 years of the influential artist’s work. It garnered optimistic critiques from nationwide media, together with artwork discussion board, Artnet Information and Hyperallergic.
Robert Ayers wrote in ART information, “This wonderful exhibition, which has been conceived, researched and curated over the previous 10 years by Alicia G. Longwell of the Parrish Artwork Museum…presents a cohesive account of Graham’s profession as early as 1923.” Lance Esplund within the the wall avenue journal known as it a “important…a splendid and refreshing retrospective”.
Commentary on the exhibition The sandKen Johnson of The New York Instances wrote, “Sand: reminiscence, that means and metaphor, a set of artworks manufactured from or on sand on the Parrish Artwork Museum…gives an opportunity to ponder the surprisingly many meanings of one of many world’s most cost-effective supplies and, when in the precise place, probably the most helpful.
Additionally in The New York InstancesAdvisable Ted Loos Affinities for abstraction amongst Museum displays with tales to inform; and each Gallery magazines and Conde Nast Traveler selected the exhibition in reviews on the Hamptons as a vacation spot.
Alicia Longwell obtained her doctorate from the Graduate Heart of the Metropolis College of New York, the place her thesis matter was John Graham. All through his tenure, Longwell performed a significant position in constructing the Parrish Artwork Museum’s assortment by figuring out and pursuing acquisitions, together with main works by Ross BlecknerMary Heilmann, Lonnie Holley, Elizabeth Peyton, David Salle, Alan Shields and Joe Zucker.
She has authored quite a few publications for the Parrish, together with Jane Freilicher and Jane Wilson: seen and invisible (2015); William Merritt Chase within the assortment of the Parrish Artwork Museum (2014); Angels, demons and savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet (2013), contribution essay for The Phillips Assortment catalog; American Landscapes: Treasures from the Parrish Artwork Museum (2010); and First Impressions: nineteenth Century American Prints (2010)—amongst others.
In a current interview with Dan Rattiner – the place she exhibited an encyclopedic information of the Parrish and its historical past (of which she lived a lot or made) – Longwell mentioned she moved from New York to the East Finish after working on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, and utilized for a job on the Parrish at a time when she remembered that native ads ” Assist Wished” have been on the lookout for a “brass belt buckle polisher” and goat herder.
Longwell’s retirement comes simply six months after the beloved husband of 46 years Dennis Longwell dies, with whom she was inseparable. Famend artwork historian, writer and instructor, Dennis Longwell repeatedly accompanied his spouse to occasions on the Parrish Artwork Museum.
“I by no means thought I’d have such entry to those sorts of wonderful artists, all of whom communicate so extremely of their work,” she advised Rattiner of her expertise on the Parrish, including some knowledge. that maybe the subsequent Chief Curator may think about: “As curators, all we now have to do is hear, I believe, and listen to artists discuss their work, which opens up extraordinary doorways to search out out what the portray is about.
Study extra concerning the Parrish Artwork Museum at parrishart.org.
