The Parrish Art Museum has announced its 2025 exhibition schedule, a diverse lineup featuring five solo shows dedicated to Shirin Neshat, Sean Scully, James Howell, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Nina Yankowitz.
“Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire,” opening April 20, and “Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk,” launching May 11, are the year’s “anchor exhibitions,” said Corinne Erni, the museum’s chief art and education curator. “They are both heavy hitters,” she said, “but they are completely different. Sean is probably one of the greatest abstract painters, and Shirin works in video, photography, and her imagery is black-and-white. They are a great counterpart.”
“The museum’s ambitious 2025 program underscores the Parrish’s commitment to excellence and to presenting artists whose work resonates both locally and globally,” said its executive director, Monica Ramirez-Montagut. “This year’s diverse lineup — spanning painting, photography, video, and installation — highlights the dynamic dialogue between artists and themes of place, memory, and our exquisite surroundings on the East End.”
Ms. Erni, the curator of “Born of Fire,” along with Scout Hutchinson, associate curator of exhibitions, has known Ms. Neshat for more than 30 years, and not because of the art world. “We met in African dance class,” she said. “It’s a passion for both of us. So I’ve seen her grow as an artist.”
“Born of Fire” consists of specific bodies of work from four different time periods. The first, the photographic piece “Women of Allah” (1993-1997), was created after Ms. Neshat returned to Iran in 1990, her first time there since 1974, when she left to study art in Los Angeles. While she was growing up, most Iranian women weren’t covered up, but when she returned, they were. She posed for the photographs dressed in the chador and, in some, holding a gun. The images are overlaid in Farsi calligraphy, all of which the artist did by hand.
The exhibition will also include “The Book of Kings,” a portrait series inspired by “Shahnameh,” an 11th-century Persian verse poem that celebrates the Persian empire and the martyrdom of its people. For “Land of Dreams” (2019), Ms. Neshat photographed Americans in the Southwest, asked them about their dreams, and wrote those dreams in Farsi over their images. The final work in the show, “The Fury” (2022-2023), a two-channel video piece, addresses the sexual abuse of female political prisoners in Iran.
The show will devote a small gallery to objects from Ms. Neshat’s own collection, which includes work by Iranian and Middle Eastern artists as well as pieces by friends, including Robert Longo and Marina Abramovic.
Sean Scully’s 1981 painting “Backs and Fronts,” which has been called “a 20-foot-wide manifesto,” consists of 11 striped panels in varying widths, heights, and colors. Kelly Grovier of the BBC elaborated on that, saying, “It changed the course of art history in the early 1980s by restoring to abstract painting a dimension it had lost — its capacity for intense feeling.” Brushstrokes were visible, there was no grid, and the work had “broken free of the constriction of taped lines,” according to the Parrish.
“Backs and Fronts” is the starting point of “Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk,” a show of more than 70 works organized by Ms. Ramirez-Montagut with Kaitlin Halloran, the museum’s associate curator and publications manager. From there, the show tracks to 1982, when Mr. Scully spent a month in residence at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk.
“During that time he immersed himself in nature,” said Ms. Halloran. The Irish-born painter had grown up in Dublin and London and was living on Duane Street in TriBeCa at that time, “so it was really a pivotal moment for him. The colors start to shift, but it’s much more pivotal in the sense of an experience he had, going down to the beach and really taking in Montauk and what it has to offer.” There are 14 of the Montauk paintings in the exhibition, which have come from private collections as well as Mr. Scully’s own.
The show includes works from his “Wall of Light” series, which was inspired by a trip to Mexico in the early 1980s, where he was fascinated by the play of light and shadow on Mayan ruins, and from his “Landline” series, which was shown at the Venice Biennale before traveling to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibition concludes with a series of monumental assemblage paintings begun in 2024 and shown for the first time at the Parrish.
The fall exhibitions, set to open on Sept. 14, feature the painter James Howell and the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Organized by Ms. Halloran and Ms. Hutchinson, “James Howell” highlights the minimalist works by Howell (1935-2014), whose paintings, prints, and drawings explore the infinite tonal variations of gray.
Howell was influenced in the 1960s by his friendship with Fairfield Porter, who encouraged him to experiment with acrylics. By 1968 he was primarily making abstract paintings and exhibiting widely.
In 1983 he created a studio on San Juan Island, Wash., a remote spot 100 miles northwest of Seattle, where shifting tones of gray sky, water, and fog had an impact on his work, which lost all of its contrast. He moved to New York City in 1992, and between 2006 and his death he worked out of his studio in Montauk, where, as in the Northwest, the ever-changing nature of the elements — fog, water, and light — provided fresh inspiration for his fascination with the seemingly infinite array of grays.
“Time Exposed: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes,” organized by Ms. Halloran, features 51 photographs that were donated to the museum by the Joy of Giving Something Foundation in 2022. Mr. Sugimoto left Japan in 1970 to study art in Los Angeles, at a time when Minimalism and Conceptual Art dominated art practice.
Beginning in 1980, he traveled to remote corners of the world to capture the variable moments where the sky meets the sea, using a 19th-century black-and-white film camera. The portfolio ranges from crisp, clean skies to misty, overcast scenes of the Adriatic Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Ionian Sea, Pacific Ocean, and Tasman Sea among others.
“They are beautiful,” Ms. Erni said of the series. “I feel it creates a very nice response to the James Howell exhibition, because both artists are about gray scales but working in very different mediums.”
The 2025 exhibition schedule will conclude with “Nina Yankowitz: In the Out/Out the In.” Set to open on Oct. 5, the show will originate at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Fla., this summer.
Throughout a career spanning almost six decades, Ms. Yankowitz has consistently pushed against boundaries, starting in the ‘60s when she created a series of unstretched canvases that blurred the line between painting, sculpture, and textiles. On one of them, “Oh Say Can You See: A Draped Sound Painting,” she painted the first few notes of the national anthem on cloth and draped it loosely on the gallery wall. It was accompanied by a recording of the notes.
The exhibition will include abstract paintings, audio works, installations — including “Hell’s Breath,” a ceramic tile mural that hasn’t been seen since its 1982 debut at MoMA PS1 — and more recent multimedia works. Throughout the artist’s career, viewer participation and immersive environments have been critical elements of her work.
Ms. Yankowitz was a founding member of the feminist Heresies Collective (1976-1993), and elements of social justice underpin her work, as do humor and innovation. Since 1993, she has divided her time between SoHo and Sag Harbor.
