Parrish Artwork Museum Announces New Director

The Parrish Artwork Museum, which showcases perform by Long Island artists, announced Wednesday that Kelly Taxter will be its next director. She succeeds Terrie Sultan, who helmed the museum for 12 years ahead of stepping down in June.

Taxter, who owned a gallery for several a long time and is at the moment the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Present-day Artwork at the Jewish Museum, explained the role will let her to merge her curatorial qualifications with her entrepreneurial spirit.

“We’re at a important moment for transform in the artwork environment,” she said. “And I’m fired up to be a element of it. I hope to make the museum suitable calendar year-round, on equally a area and world-wide amount.”

The Parrish was founded in 1898 in Southampton Village on Extensive Island’s East Stop. In 2012, a 34,400-square-foot facility, developed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron and showcasing sky-lit galleries and porches, opened a number of miles away in H2o Mill, N.Y.

Sultan oversaw the development and also arranged far more than a dozen exhibitions and assignments with Chuck Near, Tara Donovan and Maya Lin through her tenure.

Given that becoming a member of the Jewish Museum in 2013, Taxter has organized significant surveys of functions by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Rachel Feinstein and was a co-curator of an exhibition on Isaac Mizrahi. She also led commissions, projects and exhibitions with Eliza Douglas, Eva LeWitt and Vivian Suter, and will provide as visitor curator subsequent yr for the initial U.S. study of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who died in 2019.

The Parrish’s galleries have been shut considering that Jan. 5 amid growing coronavirus situations, although the museum hopes to reopen them in early spring. An outside sculpture exhibition in the museum’s 14-acre meadow, “Field of Dreams,” stays open up and totally free to people.

The museum is recognized for its yearly summer season fund-increasing gala, which is a highlight of the Hamptons social period and commonly attracts more than 500 attendees.

Mary E. Frank, the president and co-chair of the museum’s board, said that closing their doorways from March by early August final yr intended they missed out on profits from the prime summer time time. The museum slice its funds last yr to $4 million from $5.5 million and implemented short-term layoffs and furloughs, she reported.

The museum consists of additional than 3,000 items from the 19th century to the current in its permanent assortment, which include work by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning.

Taxter will officially start out her new role on March 22.