Fall Opening for Parrish
The new home of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will open its doors for the first time on Saturday, Nov. 10, the museum announced this week.
Roughly 12,000 square feet of the building, still under construction on the 14-acre site off Montauk Highway, will be used for exhibitions. In all, the long, low structure, with about 34,400 square feet under twin rooflines, has three times the space to show art than the Parrish’s current home in Southampton Village. The new building was designed by Herzog and de Meuron, a Swiss architectural firm, and had a construction budget of $26.2 million. Ben Krupinski Builders of East Hampton is the general contractor.
About two-thirds of the new museum’s gallery space will be dedicated to the Parrish’s 2,600-piece permanent collection, which includes work by William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Fairfield Porter, Jackson Pollock, and dozens more. The building’s placement on the site, at a diagonal to Montauk Highway, was intentional, designed to provide ideal illumination for the art on display.
“The idea is to give the works the same kind of light for viewers that the artists were experiencing when they were making them,” Terrie Sultan, the Parrish’s executive director, said in an interview last year.
The remaining third of the gallery space will be used for revolving shows.
A performance space in the new building is intended to make the Parrish a leading cultural center for the region. In addition to storage rooms and administrative offices, the building will also have a store, a cafe, and a space for general use.
The Nov. 10 opening will be preceded by a series of invitation-only visits by Parrish donors and public officials, and school trips by students in the Southampton and Tuckahoe School Districts.
A show of Malcolm Morley’s works on paper will be the inaugural exhibition, on view through Jan. 13, 2013.