GUILD HALL: Album Covers, Historic Photos
The museum at Guild Hall is offering a bit of something for everyone this season with the opening of four shows in its various galleries.
In the Moran Gallery will be “Fritz Leddy, Part 2,” a collection of photographic images by a former chief of the East Hampton Village Police Department taken from 1937 to 1968 (a related article appears in Section A). In the Spiga Gallery, Frank Wimberley, who won best in show at the 2010 Artist Members Exhibition, will show his abstract paintings. The Wasserstein Gallery will show John Berg’s Grammy Award-winning album cover designs from his career with Columbia Records. And in the Woodhouse Gallery, abstract work from the permanent collection will be on view.
Mr. Leddy’s negatives were found in the basement of the Police Department in 1999. According to the museum, he was a serious hobbyist who used a large-format camera to take more than 2,000 images of the people and places around East Hampton Village. Part one was shown in 2006. Doug Kuntz, a former photo editor for The Star, is the guest curator and will lead a gallery talk on Saturday at 4:30 p.m.
Mr. Wimberley was selected by Ben Genocchio, a former art critic for The New York Times and current editor in chief of Art and Auction magazine. In an essay for the show, Eric Ernst said his paintings evoke both John Coltrane’s “surging sheets of music and Miles Davis’s delicately woven tapestries of sound” and “create labyrinths of melodies that effortlessly float to the surface and then are submerged in planes of movement, texture, and color.” Mr. Wimberley works in Sag Harbor and New York City.
Mr. Berg, who was an art director and vice president for Columbia Records for 25 years, won 4 of the 29 Grammys he was nominated for. In all, he designed more than 5,000 record covers, many of which won multiple awards. Original covers and three of the Grammy Awards will be displayed. Among his designs were Bruce Springsteen’s iconic “Born to Run” album, Bob Dylan’s first album, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and all of the albums by the band Chicago. He also designed record covers for Thelonious Monk, Barbra Streisand, and Bessie Smith.
Mr. Berg described his job as similar to that of a film director. “Hear the music (which would be akin to reading the movie script), pick the talent (the illustrators and/or photographers, models, locations), choose the best take, the best type, and make something nobody has ever seen before but something they really want.” Mr. Berg is married to Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer at The Star.
The permanent collection show will include many Abstract Expressionist artists from the first generation with studios in East Hampton Town, such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Ibram Lassaw.
The museum will hold a public reception for all four shows on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. They will remain on view through Jan. 13.