WATER MILL, NY.- On Sunday October 29, the
Parrish Art Museum opened Artists Choose Parrish, Part III: the third installment of a landmark exhibition series featuring 41 internationally renowned contemporary artists with deep roots on the East End of Long Island, presenting their work alongside their selections from the permanent collection. Artists Choose Parrish Part III highlights 9 artists—Richard Aldrich, Joanne Greenbaum, Virginia Jaramillo, Rashid Johnson, KAWS, Mel Kendrick, David Salle, Sean Scully, Amy Sillman—and is on view through February 18, 2024.
The artists were invited to delve into the Museum’s 3,600-volume holdings online and at the Parrish to select works. As in Part I and II, the artists reminisce on the relevance of the East End in their lives and approach to art. The exhibition series continues and deepens the multilayered anthology of visual dialogues from unique perspectives, revealing a shared sense of community on the East End and continuing the artistic legacy of the region that radiates in the global art world. By pairing their work in unexpected and creative manners with work by Museum collection artists from the past and present, the participants crafted new narratives that explore perception and perspective, place and identity, formal connections, or personal and professional relationships.
In this final iteration, many of the artistic dialogues were marked by a philosophical and contemplative investigation. In addition to honoring and celebrating the artists they revere, several of the artists who were invited to choose works from the collection were looking for pairings that evoke a range of emotions and moods of the human condition, from sorrow and humor to the weird and ambiguous.
Richard Aldrich thinks the main purpose of art is to be weird. The viewer should think to themselves “why is this like this?” The hope is that experiencing the work will help people reflect upon their own ideas. In this way art can become a philosophical template, helping to advance other fields by example.
When he first saw Blue and Silver, painted by James Abbott McNeill Whistler in 1890 and The Monastery, painted by Albert Pinkham Ryder in 1885, he laughed and thought “what are these?” The water color resembles the color scheme of his own painting, Two Figures in Their Proper Environment, from 2023. According to Aldrich, Pinkham Ryder is an underappreciated artist who paints his soul onto the canvas.
Joanne Greenbaum has always been fascinated by groupings of similar things, so responded immediately to John Ferren’s 1953 painting, New York Summer Landscape, with its array of colored marks. Initially, she did not perceive it structurally, but now understands it as a painting with an underlying structure and additive painting methodology similar to her own.
In Greenbaum’s own work, there are no do-overs or corrections, the editing comes after waiting and looking. Using the Ferren painting as a reference point, she added other selections from the collection that have a similar slowness about them, trusting the first thought as the best thought, and moving forward from there. This includes works by Lee Bontecou, Rainer Fetting, Donald Judd and Lee Krasner.
Rashid Johnson looked to works by Dawoud Bey and Vija Celmins, as they are two artists whose work is central to his thinking. However disparate the pairing may seem, ideally the gesture highlights the range and diversity of artists’ inspirations. Johnson hopes that by seeing these works beside his own, the wide range of how art can affect us is illustrated.
KAWS was struck by the diverse range of works in the Museum’s collection, but ultimately chose the Winslow Homer watercolor The Trawlers, from 1887, as it reminded him of a recently completed series of paintings that depicted some of his characters adrift in water. The frozen moment of the composition made the action of the scene ambiguous––his own work, Tide, from 2020, prompts the question if COMPANION (a Mickey Mouse-inspired character) is leisurely floating or is he struggling to stay above the surface?
Mel Kendrick’s piece, Untitled, 2023, is a prototype for a much larger concrete outdoor installation that was included in “Seeing Things in Things,” his recent survey at the Parrish. The sculpture was made up of multiple pieces set on a narrow shelf, touching, or not touching each other. When viewed from straight on they were connected by the white line that ran through them.
Approaching the Parrish’s collection, he chose art that incorporates the line as a connecting device. According to Kendrick, Dorothea Rockburne’s piece Sahura, from 1980, is totally self-referential in terms of the decisions made in reaction to the size and shape of its materials. It is an installation, not a painting, held to the wall and completed by the vertical line drawn on the wall. Jennifer Bartlett’s One Foot Line, from 1974, consists of two panels connected visually by a measured line. The actual line is completed in the space between the panels, which is the wall itself.
Barry Le Va’s drawing 12 Lengths Walked Zig Zag, from 1973, is created with straight lines and arcs on gridded paper. His actual logic is often impenetrable. Kendrick views this as a map for one of his movement pieces, a way of experiencing a space.
peter campus’s 2010 video Passage at Bellport Harbor was his final choice. The line in this is the constant horizon. Spanning 25 hours and running on a loop, the only movement is the desultory swinging of anchored boats in the foreground. It brings in the concept of the “water line” which has been a constant but not often stated theme in Kendrick’s own work.
David Salle chose a disparate group of works, from different periods and in different styles, from artists who would seem to have little in common. He was thinking about what makes these works, coming at us from such different starting points in time and place, cohere into a legible identity? In what language can they be said to speak to each other, as well as to us?
The works range in date from the beginning of the 20th century to last year. Most of them were made between the 1920s and 1970s—approximately 50 years of painting. The classical genres of representation are all present: landscape, still life, bodies and faces, as well as several different stripes of abstraction. It's all painting. In Salle’s eyes, what they have in common is an image of the artist as a solitary figure. All the works draw from the well of loneliness.
The mysterious collage by Balcomb Greene, or the geometric drawing by Dorothy Dehner do not seem to be that far removed from Walt Kuhn's portrait of a clown. All three works say: I, alone, was here. This is what I saw. Salle says, “Stubbornness, ebullience, adventurousness, the desire to claim for oneself a piece of lived experience—the maverick American mind—it's all here.”
Sean Scully chose the work of Dorothea Rockburne, namely The Cross is the Center, Tintoretto, from 1988-89, because of their longstanding friendship and the opportunity to show his love and respect for her. He first saw her folded Robe paintings in the John Weber gallery on West Broadway in the late 70s. One aspect of these works that fascinated Scully was that their physical size became smaller as they were being made, because they were folded in and on top of themselves. He found this original, particularly in relation to the history of shaped painting. He shows her work alongside his own painting, Landline Red Ray from 2017.
Amy Sillman’s selections move from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the mysterious to the absurd, from the head to the body, from silence to laughter, and maybe back again. Alongside Sillman’s painting The Banana Tree, from 2023, she includes works by a range of artists, including Sydney Albertini, Louisa Chase, Perle Fine, Gertrude Greene, Agnes Martin, Betty Parsons, Richard Tuttle, and Joe Zucker.
She states: “We start at the sublime end of my mood-swing spectrum with works of quiet contemplation: a watercolor view of the Long Island shoreline by Mike Solomon and a reductive study of the weather by Agnes Martin where a soft grey slab hovers above a cream-white one. We come to schematic scenes like a sailboat and an evergreen tree, or a fruit bowl on a provisional garden table. Then color gets more juicy and line gets more jangly: a mossy green ground is fruited with little red and gold speckles; unnamable shards are buffeted inside a brilliant orange field. Tangles, knots, and lay-lines indicate a topography, or a whirlwind of furious gyration, or lead to a volcanic explosion. As we approach the comic end of this mood spectrum, ’life-like’ things start looking comically strange and feeling off-real: puzzling nudes, comically glum part-objects, a rotary phone with two truncated torsos, an egg made of wood, an aquarium made of cotton balls. You start to understand why ‘funny’ is also a way of saying ’strange,’ and why strangeness indicates the anxiety of not being sure of where you stand.”
