Ac-qui-si-tions
October 24, 2009 – January 17, 2010
2009 ACQUISTIONS CHECKLIST
Ac-qui-si-tions is an exhibition that will feature a selection of recent acquisitions from the Guild Hall museum permanent collection.  Guild Hall’s mission is to collect and exhibit artists who have a connection to the eastern End of Long Island. This exhibition will highlight the work of over 35 artists in a variety of mediums including, paintings, prints, collage and photographs. Artist’s included in this exhibition are; Linda Alpern, Jennifer Cross, Peter Dayton, Jim Dine, Tom Ferrara, Cornelia Foss, Dorothy Frankel, David Gamble, Michael Goldberg, Eunice Golden, Robert Goodnough, Ingebord ten Haeff, Claus Hoie, Helen Hoie, Howard Kanovitz, Stanley Kearl, Mel Kendrick, William King, Cynthia Knott, Harry Kramer, Laurie Lambrecht,  Ibram Lassaw, Conrad Marca-Relli, Rima Mardoyan, Paton Miller, Robert Motherwell, Hans Namuth, Costantino Nivola, Elizabeth Peyton, Fairfield Porter, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Semmel, David Slivka, Raphael Soyer, and Darius Yektai. The works span a variety of media including, paintings, prints, collage and photographs.

Drawn from Guild Hall’s permanent collection, Please Send To: Ray Johnson features over 30 works by the famously reclusive artist, the majority of which are classified as Mail Art, a movement pioneered by Johnson in the 1950s. The artist sent small, mixed-media works to a network of fellow artists through the post, instructing them to intervene in the original work or forward the materials to another person. Mail Art offered Johnson alternative modes of circulating ideas and gaining recognition, and one could argue that these subversive methods anticipated the digital dissemination of images through platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

The cryptic arrangements of notes, doodles, newspaper clippings and rubber stamped texts in these works offer great insights into the shifting social dynamics of this fertile period in American art. As viewers try to decode the visual information presented, they are drawn into Johnson’s complex observations about his immediate art orbit and society at large. Despite regular exhibitions with Feigen Gallery and a 1970 show of his Mail Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist remained wary of the public eye. When he retreated to a suburb on Long Island, limiting his communications to the telephone and post, his work became increasingly populated by narratives surrounding the celebrities and members of the art scene he had vacated.

In January of 1995, Johnson ended his life by jumping off the Sag Harbor – North Haven Bridge, a mysterious gesture that was true to his life’s work. This final performance was orchestrated to include a legacy in the form of thousands of works, carefully arranged in his otherwise empty home in Locust Valley. In Johnson’s absence, his works became more readily available for public consumption, and historians began to recognize these works as early examples of Pop art and Conceptual art.

This extensive and important cache of material entered Guild Hall’s Permanent Collection through the Tito Spiga Bequest, for whom one of the museum’s galleries is named. As with all of the museum’s holdings, the works reveal the rich culture and relationships to the region, and the museum’s commitment to preserving that history.

The Artist Curated Collection: Toward Abstraction
February 24 – March 25, 2018
Curated by Bryan Hunt
Moran Gallery

2018 ARTIST CURATED COLLECTION CHECKLIST

Organized by Bryan Hunt, Toward Abstraction, features paintings and works on paper that demonstrate the path an artist takes from representation to abstraction. Spanning genres and generations, Hunt’s choices offer the viewer an opportunity to examine the process of abstraction. While some artists approach this undertaking reductively, distilling the subject to its essence, others choose a more expressionistic path, or even a conceptual one. Some straddle multiple methodologies, defying categorization altogether. Using figure and landscape as bookends, the selection follows the formal trajectory from these foundations “toward abstraction.” On Sunday, March 18 at 2pm, Jess Frost, Associate Curator/Registrar of Permanent Collection, will discuss the inspiration behind this new series, and give insights into the selection process.

Recollection: Selections from the Permanent Collection
October 21 – December 31, 2017
Curated by Jess Frost, Associate Curator/Registrar of the Permanent Collection
Woodhouse Gallery

2017 RECOLLECTIONS CHECKLIST

Recollection will feature masterworks from Guild Hall’s Permanent Collection, alongside some of the Museum’s rare and unusual holdings. This exhibition is the first of an annual series that will be drawn from Collection and archives, and coincides with a major digitization project that will enable greater educational access to Guild Hall’s notable holdings.

Eighty-six years after Mrs. Lorenzo E. Woodhouse dedicated Guild Hall as a cultural center for the community in 1931, the Guild Hall Museum has amassed over 2400 works by artists associated with the institution and the region. The Permanent Collection includes paintings, sculpture, prints, watercolors, photographs and drawings dating from the 19^th Century to today, by internationally distinguished artists such as Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Cindy Sherman, Mary Heilmann and Frank Stella, and representative of major art movements from American Impressionism to Contemporary art.

Highlights of the exhibition will include a number of significant works recently returned from the traveling exhibition Guild Hall: An Adventure in the Arts, such as Fairfield Porter’s The Plane Tree, 1964, and Elaine de Kooning’s painting Bacchus #63, 1982. Also on display are Frank Stella’s Lanckorona III, 1971, and artist Al Loving’s torn canvas painting Untitled, c. 1975. Additional artists included are; Ross Bleckner, John Chamberlain,Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Hiroyuki Hamada, Bryan Hunt,Lee Krasner, Ibram Lassaw, Roy Lichtenstein, Costantino Nivola, Alan Shields, Pat Steir and Jane Wilson.