The Art Scene: 03.22.12
New Amagansett Gallery
Sara de Luca and Don Christensen will open a new gallery just off Montauk Highway in Amagansett on Saturday, with a reception that evening from 5 to 7. This season Ille Arts will show mostly artists who have a South Fork connection, and the opening show, “Friends and Family,” will include work by Sydney Albertini, Vivien Bittencourt-Katz, Mary Boochever, Amanda Brown, Jack Ceglic, Dan Christensen, James Gilroy, Elaine Grove, John Haubrich, Pat Place, Kevin Teare, Tim Tibus, Stephen Westfall, and Mr. Christensen himself. It will be on view through the middle of May.
Future shows will include solo exhibitions of Sydney Albertini, Liz Markus, and Ms. Bittencourt-Katz. A group show at the end of the summer will consist of work by Mary Heilmann, Mr. Westfall, and Don Christensen. A reading series organized by Max Blagg is in the works.
The gallery space, envisioned as a gathering place, is on the site occupied by Wilsonville last summer. It has been cleared out, with bright, freshly painted white walls and floors, and there will be outdoor seating. The gallery’s Web site is illearts.com.
Guild Hall Wants Your Art
Guild Hall is accepting submissions for its 74th Artist Members Exhibition through April 22. The show will open on May 5 and continue through June 9. The guest juror is Lilly Wei, an independent curator, essayist, and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is also a contributing editor at ARTnews.
The exhibition is open to every artist member of Guild Hall. The top honor of distinction, awarded by the guest juror, is a solo show in Guild Hall’s Spiga Gallery. More than 350 artists typically participate.
Award categories include best representational painting, best abstract painting, best sculpture, best work on paper, best mixed media, best photograph, and numerous honorable mention citations, along with the $250 Catherine and Theo Hios landscape award and an award for best new member artist, presented to one artist who is new to the members exhibition or who has not entered in the past five years.
Entry requirements are available on the Guild Hall Web site. A tour of the show with the winners will take place on May 19.
East End Arts Winners
The East End Arts Council’s juried show “Music” will be on view through April 20 in Riverhead. The guest juror, Terrie Sultan, the director of the Parrish Art Museum, selected four winners from the entries on March 2. Best in show went to Christina Nalty for a sculpture. First and second prizes went to photographs by Stephen Bitel and Virginia Aschmoneit. Ruth Nasca of East Hampton won third prize for her movie poster painting “Impassioned Gospel Music.”
At Pritam & Eames
Pritam & Eames in East Hampton will show the work of three East End artists in “Art at Home,” which opens tomorrow. The gallery of American studio furniture is focusing on its walls this time, hanging the work of Linda Capello, Aubrey Grainger, and Karen Kluglein. Bebe Johnson, the owner and director of the gallery, said she was excited to introduce the work of artists “who are not afraid of beauty.”
Ms. Capello, who graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, is primarily concerned with the figure and the subtlety of line in her conté crayon drawings. A Sagaponack resident, Aubrey Grainger was influenced by the Hudson River School artists and the French and American Impressionists, and she also paints landscapes inspired by the East End. Ms. Kluglein’s life-size botanical watercolors on paper or vellum have won various awards, and she has shown her work nationally.
A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. The show will be on view through May 22.
Now, Hampton Hang
The Hampton Hang Gallery will open this weekend with a group show, “Mind & Matter,” at its space in Water Mill behind Suki Zuki. The proprietors, Ashley R. Dye and Eric Kulukundis, describe it as an open program art gallery specializing in the art of the Hamptons.
Mr. Kulukundis has long ties to the area and its art community and is a former gallery owner in Los Angeles. Ms. Dye has lived on the South Fork for more than a decade and has worked with artists in galleries and as an independent art dealer during that time.
“Mind & Matter” features paintings by Steve Miller, sculpture by Mike Chiarello, and a specimen mineral collection by Angela Firestone, who was formerly with the Cranbrook Science Museum. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m., and the show will remain on view through April 20.
Napoleon, the Poster
Paul Davis, a Sag Harbor artist, was commissioned to design a poster for “Napoleon,” a 1927 movie presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The festival, which starts on Saturday and runs through April 1, is showing the restored film with newly discovered footage for the first time in this country.
Mr. Davis worked from film stills for his portrait of Albert Dieudonné, the star of “Napoleon,” using the colors of the French flag. A copy of the poster is available on the festival’s Web site, silentfilm.org/napoleon-poster.php.
De Niro Sr. at DC Moore
Robert De Niro Sr., who visited East Hampton regularly in the 1950s, will have a show of his paintings and drawings at the DC Moore Gallery in New York City beginning today. The artist “blended abstraction and representation, bridging the gap between European modernism and Abstract Expressionism,” according to the gallery. The show will be on view through April 28.