Guild Hall, one of the Hamptons’ premier arts institutions, is transformed after a $29 million renovation

When we talk about meaning in contemporary art, the context is essential. The same principle applies to art institutions, which can influence the public perception of an artist in a lasting way. The reverse could be true of guild hall in East Hampton. Calling the 90-year-old arts center a regional museum for local talent might be technically correct, but when the locals are titans like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Thornton Wilder and Edward Albee, the The provincialism implicit in this description is laughable.

Guild Hall’s human-sized galleries have more in common with the Whitney Museum of American Art or Lincoln Center than an average American art outpost. I don’t know if Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney summered in the Hamptons, but Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, Truman Capote, Jann Wenner, Alfonso Osorio and Henry Geldzahler did, as did (to name a few -a) Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, Ross Bleckner, Robert Longo, Eric Fischl and Alec Baldwin.

With their active participation, the expertise of Manhattan-based Peter Pennoyer Architects, and a $29 million renovation, Guild Hall reopened the weekend of July 1 to an enthusiastic crowd of artists, patrons and of friends. farm during two yearsit has transformed from a rainy weekend saloon for white elites into a wired, interdisciplinary, and inclusive year-round institution both forward-looking and worthy of its founding mission: to cultivate “the taste of the arts” and “a more refined type of citizenship.

So it is with the thinking of Mary Woodhouse, the philanthropist who donated the property on Main Street and $100,000 for construction – a colossal amount during the Great Depression of 1931 – without claiming the rights of denomination. His guild hall was no symbol of Golden Age madness. Nor was it intended to lick the wounds of the nobility who had lost their shirts in the stock market crash of 1929 and, because of Prohibition, could not easily drown their sorrows in drink at their estates in the East End.

Village residents, including dipsomaniac socialite John “Black Jack” Bouvier (father of former First Lady Jacqueline Kenny Onassis), raised the money to open the venue in five and ten dollar contributions. Volunteers from the surrounding pool of stars of art, music, film and literature supported the programming which is now professionally staffed. (The renovated John Drew Theater will reopen in September.)

Unlike the new Herzog & de Meuron design Parish museum building which opened in 2012 in the nearby watermill, Guild Hall was and remains a pocket weathervane for all the arts, not just the visual arts – more “arts town hall”, as the promotional material puts it, qu a social space. After a top-to-bottom, interior-to-exterior upgrade, the low-slung white building topped with the round, circus tent-like roof above its theatre, has a streamlined face and a new second garden. More important is the evidence of welcome changes to the interior.

“We’ve loosened our institutional tie,” says Andrea Grove, director of Guild Hall. It’s not just hype. I’ve been there occasionally for over 30 years and can’t recall a Native American artist ever appearing there until the July 2 dedication ceremony, when poet and playwright Andrina Wekontash Smith, a former Guild student Hall Art Academy founded by Fischl, read a commissioned poem in the language of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, the original inhabitants of the area.

Alongside Smith stood artist Renée Cox, an Amagansett resident since 1989. This was the year she left a successful career as a fashion photographer for art school and began making larger images. personal and conceptual. Fifteen fascinating examples that independent curator Monique Long has selected from several bodies of work dating from the early 1990s to 2022 make up the opening show, Renée Cox: Proof of Being (until September 4).

“It’s a new day for Guild Hall!” said Cox. Prior to the redesign, his larger photographs would not have passed through the old cottage-sized doors. Nor would they have fit on walls more evocative of a family living room. The old fireplace would have just gotten in the way.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish just by raising the ceiling eighteen inches and removing the crappy old moldings,” says artist Steve Miller. Pennoyer also uncovered skylights that diffuse daylight into each of the two exhibition spaces, made space for an education center and new offices, and installed temporary walls to accommodate the new video installation. disorienting Cox and hand-cut fractal collages.

It is also a winning result for visitors. Now they can float unhindered in airy rooms that feel truly uplifting and, in Long’s perfect setup, have plenty of mental and physical space to study the tedious details of Cox’s staged portraits, some in beautiful colors and others in exquisite black and white. white. In each, blackness is the subject and the point.

A heroic image of Ziggy, one of Cox’s two sons, draped in an American flag is almost hypnotic in its beauty and sensibility. The earliest self-portraits, shot on the streets of the South Bronx in the bad old days, are nudes that exude an electric sense of urban black femininity as well as great personal risk. Another pitfall is Signature (2017), a reimagining of Howard Chandler Christy’s 1940 history painting for the United States Capitol, Scene during the signing of the United States Constitution, with glamorous black men and women penning and testifying. Cox photographed his panorama at the historic home of Andrew Freedman in the Bronx. She also costumed attendees in a pastiche of period and contemporary styles, including fantastic Afro-futuristic headdresses and elaborate make-up. The work is both challenging and fun.

As Long says, “We wanted people here to understand what Renee is.”