Company Profile
Parrish Art Museum
Company Overview
Inspired by the natural setting and artistic life of Long Island's East End, the Parrish Art Museum illuminates the creative process and how art and artists transform our experiences and understanding of the world and how we live in it. The Museum fosters connections among individuals, art, and artists through care and interpretation of the collection presentation of exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, programs and artists-in-residence. The Parrish is a center for cultural engagement, an inspiration and destination for the region, the nation, and the world.
The Parrish has defined and embraced a unique position combining strong local ties and a global outlook to create original exhibitions, scholarly publications, and innovative educational initiatives. The unique architecture of the building dovetails with the Museum’s programmatic content. It is clear from the level of community engagement, far-reaching critical acclaim, attendance, membership, and support for the Museum that the Parrish is an impactful institution. High-quality presentations often feature artists in their first-ever museum exhibitions, or explore specific bodies of work that have not been widely seen and appreciated. The annual reinstallation of the permanent collection showcases artworks organized around themes that offer visitors a new way of seeing and experiencing art. The Museum recognizes that the key contribution it can make to scholarship in the humanities is to focus on a greater understanding and appreciation of the cultural history of Long Island's East End. The Museum maintains that the region has been an important catalyst for creativity with a long history that merits consideration as a global influencer. Exhibitions focus largely on the themes related to those that have drawn and continue to draw artists here: the unique natural environment and the supportive community of fellow artists. Our program highlights the ways our region has influenced the history of art and ideas. The goals of Parrish exhibitions are to: 1) explore themes and concepts related to those that have drawn and continue to draw artists to the East End; 2) illuminate the creative process; 3) provide access to work by under-recognized artists; 4) promote connectivity among artists of different generations and career levels; and 5) exhibit and interpret the permanent collection. The program serves and reinforces these principles and enhances our goals for creative collaborations with museums, schools, and other cultural entities nationally and internationally.
Company History
The critically acclaimed Herzog & de Meuron-designed building opened to the public in November 2012. Sited on fourteen acres of meadow in Water Mill, New York, the architecture and landscape honor the East End's built and natural environment and provide a new way to experience art with a sense of place afforded by no other museum.
Early Years: The Art Museum at Southampton
Samuel Longstreth Parrish (1849-1932) was born into a family of prominent Philadelphia Quakers and educated at Harvard College, where he first developed his taste for the Italian Renaissance. Parrish began collecting art seriously in the early 1880s, shortly after moving his successful law practice from Philadelphia to New York. During these same years, he regularly visited his family home in Southampton. The village, then as now a popular summer resort, quickly caught his interest and before long he became actively involved in its affairs.
While traveling in Italy in the fall of 1896, Parrish decided to build a museum in Southampton to house his rapidly growing collection of Italian Renaissance art and reproductions of classical Greek and Roman statuary. He purchased a small parcel of land adjacent to the Rogers Memorial Library on Jobs Lane and commissioned a fellow Southampton resident, the architect Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956), to design a suitable structure. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Atterbury designed the museum over a period of nearly twenty years.
The first Art Museum at Southampton, as the Parrish was then known, was a single large exhibition hall. Constructed in wood and entered from Main Street, the hall was built during the summer of 1897. A Concert Hall was added in 1905, and the wing to the street was constructed nine years later. An Aboretum was laid out on the Museum’s grounds as well, with a plant list contributed by the well-known landscape architect Warren H. Manning (1860 – 1938).
The Parrish Art Museum
Parrish’s death in 1932, coupled with the Depression and the war years that followed, slowed developments at the Museum. By 1941, the Village of Southampton accepted the building, grounds, and founding collection as a gift from Parrish’s estate.
In the 1950s, a civic-minded Southamptonite with an abiding interest in the arts, Mrs. Robert Malcolm Littlejohn, became President of the Board and took on the overwhelming task of reviving the Museum. A heating system was installed so the building could remain open year-round and a charter was obtained from the New York State Board of Regents, recognizing the Museum as an educational institution.
Perhaps most important, Mrs. Littlejohn believed the museum should look not only to the past civilizations but to American artists, especially those who had worked on the East End of Long Island. Her estimable collection of American paintings, including those of William Merritt Chase, Thomas Moran, and Childe Hassam, which she bequeathed to the Parrish, became the core of the outstanding collection of American paintings held by the Museum today.
Expansion
By the mid-1980s it was clear that the Parrish had outgrown its original building, which lacked not only the basic infrastructure required by a professional museum but also the space necessary to share its collection with the public along with temporary exhibitions. In 2005 the Museum purchased fourteen acres in Water Mill, New York, and the Board of Trustees selected the internationally celebrated architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron to design a new and expanded building there. Ground was broken in July 2010, and the 34,400 square-foot building opened to the public November 10, 2012.
Notable Accomplishments / Recognition
With the opening of the new Museum facility in November 2012, the Parrish has, over the past 3 ½ years, experienced unprecedented growth, defining the Parrish's role as a major destination for the area's cultural tourism, and continues to capitalize upon its enhanced service for new audiences and programs of greater scale and significance. Importantly, attendance and membership since the opening has remained essentially steady (attendance at approximately 63,000 annually, double the attendance from its former site; membership has grown from 1,716 to 3,977) and reached an additional 82,000 through its travelling exhibitions; presented 120 multidisciplinary public programs in 2015, in collaboration with a growing list of cultural partners, a significant increase from 60 in 2013 and 90 in 2014. In 2015 we proudly developed two very special educational initiatives to serve visitors with Alzheimer’s and individuals on the autism spectrum, and launched an artist-in-residence program that allows students to work in collaboration with professional artists. Employment opportunities have grown and staff has increased to 42 (including additional security, and extra work for musicians, caterers, plus additional help during special events).