It is rare to have an opportunity to think about an exhibition and its curatorial vision for almost a year while it is still open, but the Parrish Art Museum provided such a chance these past few months with its multipart "Artists Choose Parrish."
The show marked the museum's 125th anniversary and recognized the collection of fine art objects it had amassed in that time. Forty-one contemporary artists were invited to find works in the collection they admired or could relate to their practice. They were then asked to create or include pieces of their own in a dialogue with those selections, while thinking about how their experience on the East End shapes their art.
The museum was generous with its Water Mill space, allowing each pairing all it needed to make its point. Some artists required entire galleries or significant swathes of space; others took a more direct and minimal approach. Neither strategy felt incorrect. If in some cases viewers were left wanting more, that was probably as satisfying as receiving their fill.
Trying to sort out three exhibitions' worth of this theme is overwhelming, to say the least. While the first part opened in April, the show was launched to the media in a presentation at Christie's auction house the first week in February last year. Artists who participated outlined their thinking in how they approached the exercise, giving those who attended much to think about before the first choice was hung.
Part I, which was divided into two subparts, closed last summer. Part II is set to close on Sunday, but Part III will be up for a few weeks after that. There have been plenty of wonderful moments in the shows, but some artists seemed to go above and beyond in their selections and choices of their own artwork, in inspiring and edifying ways.
In that first group, it's hard to deny the impact and lasting impression of Ugo Rondinone's selection of Alan Shields's loosely woven composition "Devil, Devil, Love," matched with his 26-panel grid installation of "the alphabet of my mothers and fathers" on all four walls of the gallery. The white-painted plywood panels each held a variety of gilded preindustrial farm tools collected from tag sales Mr. Rondinone had frequented for the past few years.
The installation had a dizzying quality that overwhelmed the space it occupied. The full-size shovels, hoes, scythes, hammers, pans, rakes, and other implements, some with a purpose hard to ascertain or lost on contemporary audiences, implored those present to acknowledge them and contemplate their sun-soaked history. The artist chose this work to illustrate an important aspect of the area's traditions and the Italian immigrants who left the city to farm on Long Island.
The Shields piece, which might have been lost in this vertigo-inducing room of Apollonian light and heat, benefited from its central location. It grounded the space and permitted easy perambulation about it, which gave viewers a better understanding of its intricacies. The cotton belting he framed with wood and embellished with acrylic, thread, and beads looked like a painting freeing itself.
Similarly, Nina Yankowitz required a full room to mount an exercise in perception and viewpoints. Different seating options provided unusual perspectives of prints and paintings by herself and artists such as Tara Donovan, Jimmy Ernst, Rashid Johnson, Louisa Chase, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins.
Eric Fischl used about 70 percent of the wall space in the museum's large gallery for a lengthy examination of portraiture from the Parrish and from his own oeuvre. His focus, subverting the historically male painter's gaze to examine that of the female subject, is hardly original. Yet the fresh context brought life to the older portraits, one dating back to the early 19th century and one painted as late as 1970, almost all by men.
The female subjects in these paintings, whether nude or clothed, mostly stare directly out of the canvas, back to the artists painting them. The frank appraisals on their faces of what they are seeing, including the viewers, it seems, imply intelligence and depth of personality. They neatly paralleled Mr. Fischl's own paintings, where his subjects' expressions are sharp and challenging. Narrowing the genre conceptually imbued each painting with spirit and an idea, enlivening the experience and reminding us why the human subject remains compelling after centuries of exploration.
Michelle Stuart's exceptional choices of 19th-century paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and William Merritt Chase evinced a preference for darkened subject matter and a nostalgia for paintings she saw in her childhood. Her own two groupings of photographs offered a suggested narrative that felt dark and similar in substance to her selections.
Ryder, an influential artist in modernism, reappears in Part III as one of Richard Aldrich's selections, exploring the "weirdness" of discovering certain artists in this context. He found other gems, such as a small James Abbott McNeill Whistler watercolor seascape and a photo portrait of that artist from 1885. His own piece captures the mood and palette of the Whistler work, but has a structure similar to Ryder's.
Part II had a mix of strong maximal moments along with minimal ones. A powerful installation, which pulled out of storage some collection gems that may not have seen the light of day for years or decades, consisted of Suzanne McClelland's four linear abstractions based in words and a large selection of lithographs and drawings in which the use of line is similar or prioritized. Those who have a chance to see this section before it closes should take a close look before these works return to their slumber.
Donald Sultan also took a "more is more" approach to his selections and installation. The artist chose a sizable number of his own large-format pieces and 14 others by Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Sonnier, Charles Burchfield, Valerie Jaudon, and others. The room feels like a gathering of friends, and Mr. Sultan's choices were based on both a maturity and a certainty in the artists he assembled along with a similar effort to pull their work out of storage for a fresh look. It is a room built for maximum visual impact, and it shows.
In more minimal pairings, Stanley Whitney matches his free-hand geometric abstraction "Where Love Can Stay" with lithographs by Romare Bearden and Philip Guston. Bearden was chosen because of his print's powerful use of color. Guston's print attracted Mr. Whitney because of the artist's influence on him at a pivotal time in his life. It's a brief interlude, but one that brings the artist's work into direct connection with his choices in vastly different ways.
Sheree Hovsepian placed her photo collages with the collages of Gertrude Greene, a midcentury female artist who deserves more attention.
Ms. Celmens contributed one ocean mezzotint to the show and matched it with a moody, soft-focus gouache of Montauk made by Ellen Phelan in 1981. She said she was attracted to the work by its being both abstract and representational, as well as spontaneous in a way that contrasts with her yearlong effort to make the print.
Rachel Feinstein's sculpture "See You Soon," made of wood, plaster, wire, and resin with gold leaf and enamel, is a show-stealer at around six feet by six feet, with a generalized subject and composition we have been conditioned to associate with Christian themes. In her treatment, she seeks to universalize the imagery to join "cultures together through symbols." Audrey Flack's "Lady Madonna" hangs the way it might in a chapel, displayed along with the sculpture. Ms. Feinstein sees Ms. Flack as a contemporary artist who has a deep affinity for the past and enjoys using female imagery in her work.
In Part III, Rashid Johnson matches his oil on cotton rag "Untitled Anxious Drawing" in the Parrish collection with a number of Polaroids by Dawoud Bey and a rich black and speckled linocut evoking deep space by Ms. Celmens in a striking minimal grouping.
Similarly spare but carrying much impact is Sean Scully's oil on aluminum "Landline Red Ray," which he paired with Dorothea Rockburne's "The Cross Is in the Center, Tintoretto." The strong reds and monumental size of both works produce a real visual punch that gathers even more strength from the gigantic KAWS painting on the wall opposite. KAWS paired his painting with a Winslow Homer watercolor that he chose because its subject was similar in theme to the painting, part of a series he had completed around the time of his selection.
Given space limitations, there are many other artists who could not be discussed here, but most were featured previously in articles advancing the opening of each part of the show. It would be remiss, however, not to mention the battle for dominance of the large gallery in this iteration. It's a match between Amy Sillman and David Salle, who, like Mr. Fischl, both created exhibitions within the exhibition.
To keep things straight, Ms. Sillman's installation is set off by a rich blue background on three walls. From her own description, her selections move from "the sublime to the ridiculous" in a literal way, as works transition from somber moods to strange and unusual choices in subject matter and presentation. Her artists include Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, Joe Zucker, and Perle Fine.
Mr. Salle's selections were derived from an attempt to bring works from different periods that have different styles over a 50-year span together in a way that promotes cohesion. While he is successful in that goal, the most gratifying thing about his grouping is the unusual, mostly forgotten, or emblematic artwork he has thrown in the mix. Jackson Pollock, Lester Johnson, Thornton Dial, Dorothy Dehner, Balcomb Greene, Malcolm Morley, John Sloan, and so many more are revived or reinvigorated in this context. The salon-style installation has paintings stacked on top of one another in a Wunderkammer style. Mr. Salle's two works are set among them with no attempt to draw specific attention to them or separate them from the whole.
As much as his choices strike him as commonly communicating the idea of the artist in isolation and loneliness, the works also speak to the haphazardness of notoriety and long-term fame. "Stubbornness, ebullience, adventurousness, the desire to claim for oneself a piece of lived experience -- the maverick American mind -- it's all here," he has said. Yet there's another message, one contrasting eminence with oblivion.
