Affinities for Abstraction

Affinities for Abstraction: Women Artists on Eastern Long Island, 1950-2020, is a freewheeling look at the work of 42 artists who have called the Hamptons home for a week, a season, or a lifetime. Organized by the Museum’s Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., the exhibition tells the sweeping story of artists with ties to the region who have expanded and exploited the language of abstraction.

Beginning in the 1950s, women artists who pursued abstraction were consistently relegated to an ancillary role in the male-dominated realm of Abstract Expressionism, despite their novel and often critical contributions to the movement. Several of these influential artists happen to have made the East End of Long Island their home for a week, a season, or a lifetime. Affinities for Abstraction brings together works by these five seminal figures with those of thirty-five other women artists who, over the past seven decades, have transformed abstract art and continue to expand its limits. All the artists in the exhibition have experienced the East End as a nexus of creativity, affording them camaraderie and inspiration amid the abundant natural beauty of land, light, and sea.

Affinities for Abstraction reveals often surprising connections between the well-known early practitioners and successive waves of artists who have enlarged and exploited the language of abstraction. In 1952, Frankenthaler became the first artist to unfurl an unprimed canvas on the floor and flood it with paint that seeped and stained of its own volition; with this signature gesture, she invented a particularly lyrical type of color-field abstraction. Hartigan’s canvases, though filled with active gesture, never abandoned content and were often embedded with social commentary. Later generations have revised the term “abstract” in myriad ways that reflect the ongoing vitality of the pursuit: Mary Heilmann counters the rigors of Minimalism with rollicking brushwork; Joan Snyder’s vertical paint streaks freeze mid-drip; and Howardena Pindell’s hole-punched circles build up complex surfaces. Today, artists such as Amy Sillman, Jacqueline Humphries, and Sue Williams affirm and reinvigorate this tradition with new and distinct strategies toward content, shape, color, line, and gesture.

Often rejecting the dominant midcentury themes of myth and archetype to pursue a different collective vision, the women artists of the East End, from then to now, have traced an interweaving skein of approaches that reveal a deep, ever-evolving engagement with abstraction.

Learn more at the Parrish Art Museum.