Parrish’s Christmas in January
The new year has brought new gifts to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, with both significant contributions to its capital campaign and boosts to its permanent collection.
At the end of January, the museum announced that it had received significant gifts from Dorothy Lichtenstein, the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, and the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation for the financing of its new building in Water Mill, scheduled to open in the fall. The museum has raised some 85 percent of the $26.2 million budgeted for the project. The contractors are continuing both interior and exterior construction through the winter.
Key to the new building’s significance will be the dedication of galleries to a permanent installation of selected works from the Parrish’s 2,600-piece collection, which spans more than a century of art production in the region. The museum has received grants for the installation of works by artists such as William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, and Esteban Vicente from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation.
In 2011, the museum’s Campaign for Art received more than 30 works, most of them by East End artists. Those gifts included Louise Nevelson’s “Untitled” from the late 1970s, donated by Arne and Milly Glimcher, and Michelle Stuart’s “Islas Encantadas Series: Materia Prima II” from 1981, a gift of Jacqueline Brody. The museum also received gifts of work by Keith Sonnier, Gertrude Greene, Paul Jenkins, Frederick Kiesler, Philip Pavia, Gary Falk, Lucio Pozzi, Robert Ryman, Leon Polk Smith, Porter, and Vicente.
In addition, the museum has acquired work by Michael Combs and Eric Freeman through a number of financial gifts. Artists who donated their own work in 2011 include Linda K. Alpern, Connie Fox, Sheila Isham, Bill King, Roy Nicholson, and Lucy Winton.