Guild Hall Lands A Curator

After a 12-month nationwide search that resulted in over a hundred applications, Guild Hall has found a new curator.

Lisa Panzera, who most recently has been curator of the Levy Gallery at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, is already at work at Guild Hall and making plans for the coming season.

"The first thing I have to do is get to know the community," said Ms. Panzera. "I want to make a lot of studio visits so that I can spend time looking at artists' work and get to know what is here."

Silence In East Hampton

She spent her teenage summers in Nantucket with her family and was immediately struck by its similarity to the East End. But after living in New York City, where she was on the staff of the Guggenheim Museum, and then in Philadelphia, the East End is a big change.

Her husband, Antonio, a scholar of Italian literature, is still teaching in Philadelphia, and Ms. Panzera and her dog are finding the silence of East Hampton's woods very different from the constant noise of city life.

"The first night, the silence was so profound that neither of us slept," she said.

Expanding Taste

Ms. Panzera's own specialty, and the focus of her doctoral dissertation for the City University of New York, is Italian Futurism. She's interested in Italian contemporary art in general (the major show she worked on at the Guggenheim was on Italian art from 1943 to 1968), but, as she points out, this is harder to keep on top of as she is here and it is there.

"I guess my tastes have gradually moved forward in time," she said, explaining that she first studied the Italian Renaissance and then, for her graduate studies, 19th-century European painting.

Ms. Panzera has lectured extensively at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum on contemporary art and has also taught classes and written for art journals, mainly on 20th-century art.

Regional Artists

She will be inheriting a number of shows already planned by the museum's interim curator, Donna Stein, and is reluctant to commit herself to any concrete future plans until she has come to know the territory.

But one similarity she noted with her curatorship at the Levy Gallery is that both it and Guild Hall deal with regional artists, those from the Philadelphia area at the Levy and those from the East End at Guild Hall.

She is fascinated, she said, by the artistic history of the South Fork and its continuing attraction for artists, both those who have been doggedly working away through the decades in relative obscurity and the big New York City names for whom a studio in the Hamptons is just part of the trappings of success.

She did say that she hoped to organize more thematic shows, which would present an opportunity to bring in artists with a variety of styles, those who are established and those who are just emerging, and historic and contemporary work.

"It's a nice way of mixing things up, lending perspective to the work, and opening things up a bit," she said.

She also noted that accessibility in its broadest sense is vital to sustaining a museum program and captivating audiences.

"Presenting a broad range of exhibitions and events is essential to remaining vital."