Already midway through the summer season, the Hamptons continues to be one of the East Coast’s most vibrant cultural destinations, with a calendar filled with exhibitions, pop-ups, performances, and culinary experiences. Alongside its celebrated social scene, the region’s galleries and museums are presenting thoughtful exhibitions that examine the evolving language of contemporary art through painting, sculpture, photography, and installation.
This season, artists revisit the legacy of American abstraction at HESSE FLATOW EAST, reinterpret the landscape through a contemporary lens, and transform everyday materials into poetic meditations on memory, texture, and making. A new artist book celebrates the creative community surrounding LongHouse Reserve, while solo exhibitions explore everything from porcelain as a metaphor for resilience to wood as an endlessly expressive material. Together, these Hamptons exhibitions reveal an art scene that is as reflective as it is experimental, connecting generations of artists while asking timely questions about history, materiality, and the ways we experience the world today.
“SPLASH”
Night Gallery and HESSE FLATOW EAST
Amagansett
Sarah Blaustein, “Blue Swirl,” 2026, ink and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
Cato Ouyang, “carrier / the seeking soul,” 2026, wood, cyanotype on cotton, plaster, extruded polystyrene, steel, soapstone, found textile, 75 x 41 x 17 in. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
Twenty-two artists come together in “SPLASH,” a group exhibition at HESSE FLATOW EAST in collaboration with Night Gallery, that examines what it means to be an abstract painter today. Working across diverse approaches to non-representational art, the exhibition considers how a new generation is extending the legacy of American abstraction on its own terms. Artists from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and beyond converge in Amagansett—a place forever linked to Lee Krasner, whose paintings were shaped by the area’s distinctive light and landscape. That same environment now provides the backdrop for an exhibition centered on today’s material and sensory practices.
Each artist approaches abstraction differently—through gestural marks, geometric compositions, luminous color, dense surfaces, or quiet, intimate forms—yet together they reveal a shared belief in color, texture, and mark-making as a language capable of communicating beyond representation. Housed in the former studio of Donald Baechler, HESSE FLATOW EAST deepens the exhibition’s dialogue with art history, making abstraction part of the experience from the moment visitors enter.
What we love: The exhibition creates a compelling conversation across generations. From its historic setting to the works on view, “SPLASH” articulates how today’s artists continue to build upon—and reshape—the legacy of American abstraction.
“SPLASH” at Night Gallery and HESSE FLATOW EAST.
July 11–August 8, 2026
Michael Bühler-Rose: “Halo in a Haystack”
Halsey McKay Gallery
East Hampton
Michael Bühler-Rose, “USM,” Summer ’26 (03), 2026, Wood Intarsia/Inlay: Aale, Rose wood, Ebony, Light Champa, Dark Champa, Kadyakshe, Jackfruit, Paduk, Orange Fruit Wood, Satran, Slate Matte Madhe, Teak and Tadsal 14.65 x 20.57 x 1.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Halsey McKay Gallery.
For his first solo exhibition with Halsey McKay Gallery, Michael Bühler-Rose reimagines the Renaissance studiolo through a deeply personal lens. Inspired by the famed Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio—now housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—the artist transforms the intimate space of study and contemplation into a portrait of contemporary identity. Drawing from memories of the Hare Krishna community, underground music culture, and academic life, Bühler-Rose creates intricate wood intarsia compositions based on photographs of meaningful objects, books, instruments, and personal collections. Forgoing pigments or stains entirely, each veneer is selected for its natural grain, tone, and texture, allowing the material itself to build the image.
What we love: Bühler-Rose offers a contemporary interpretation of Renaissance intarsia that turns everyday possessions into a portrait of memory and identity, prompting viewers to consider how the objects we collect quietly shape the lives we build around them.
Michael Bühler-Rose at Halsey McKay Gallery.
July 18–August 10, 2026
“Builders”
Halsey McKay Gallery
East Hampton
Sam Moyer, “Clipping 39,” 2026, Marble, acrylic on plaster-coated canvas mounted to MDF, 24 x 18 x 1 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Halsey McKay Gallery.
Among this summer’s standout Hamptons exhibitions, “Builders” explores what happens to an artwork after the moment of completion, shifting attention from the finished image to the processes, structures, and materials that bring it into being. Bringing together intergenerational artists across a range of career stages, the group exhibition examines how ideas become embodied through acts of construction, revision, and accumulation. Paintings are cut, folded, woven, stitched, layered, and built upon, while pigment settles like sediment or relief. Found materials—including plaster, fabric, and food—support, interrupt, or even destabilize the image. Rather than concealing these mechanisms, the artists bring them to the forefront, revealing making itself as an essential part of the work. Across mediums and generations, “Builders” highlights a shared material intelligence that balances density with lightness, permanence with fragility, and structure with permeability.
What we love: More than a survey of individual practices, the exhibition unfolds as a conversation among thirty artists. Together, their works create a symphony of materials, gestures, and ideas that resonate across generations.
“Builders” at Halsey McKay Gallery.
July 25–October 31, 2026
DayDreams
LongHouse Reserve and James Salomon
East Hampton
Jack Lenor Larsen, “Hills of Home,” 1970, printed textile (silk). Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Image © Cowtan & Tout inc.
Melina Hackett, “basil,” 2021, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
James Salomon turns his lens toward some of today’s most influential creative voices in the second volume of DayDream, featuring artists and cultural figures including Ai Weiwei, Laurie Anderson, Renée Cox, Eric Fischl, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Glass, Toni Ross, Julian Schnabel, Sean Scully, Dustin Yellin, and more. The publication brings together 44 contributors, each connected to LongHouse Reserve and invited to reflect on the relationship between art, nature, and humanity. Following the inaugural DayDream—published alongside Salomon’s curation of Berkshire Botanical Garden‘s summer exhibition last year—the new volume continues the series as both an artist book and a celebration of creative community.
As LongHouse Design Historian Glenn Adamson writes, “Alone among us, painters and poets are granted—they grant themselves—the right to explore their own awareness, with no predetermined end in mind.”
What we love: Rather than documenting LongHouse Reserve, each contributor interprets it through a distinctly personal lens, creating a portrait of the institution that is as diverse and imaginative as its creative community.
DayDreams by LongHouse Reserve and James Salomon.
August 13, 2026
Gabriela Vainsencher: “Basis”
Asya Geisberg Gallery
Tribecca
Gabriela Vainsencher, Installation view of “Basis,” 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Asya Geisberg Gallery. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
For her second solo exhibition of porcelain sculpture at Asya Geisberg Gallery, Gabriela Vainsencher shifts from earlier explorations of fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood toward a more structural and dramatic investigation of the body. Through pinched clay, carved surfaces, and contrasting matte and glossy glazes, she transforms porcelain into expressive, architectural forms. Two recurring motifs—the amphora and the portrait cameo—become increasingly asymmetrical and off-balance, lending the works an uncanny, almost surreal presence. A standout is Hope, a monumental sculpture depicting a woman compressed upside down inside a bottle, capturing both vulnerability and resilience. Throughout the exhibition, landscapes, windows, and seascapes introduce glimpses of the world beyond the domestic sphere, reflecting on the tension between domestic life and the outside world during the isolating years of child-rearing.
What we love: Vainsencher’s use of porcelain feels especially poignant. A material that must endure intense heat before reaching its final form becomes a powerful metaphor for transformation, resilience, and the emotional processes embedded within the work.
Gabriela Vainsencher at Asya Geisberg Gallery.
May 21–July 2, 2026
“THIS LAND: Considering the American Landscape”
The Church
Sag Harbour
James Perkins working on the beach. Photo by Leila Brewste. Courtesy of the artist and The Church.
One of this summer’s most thought-provoking Hamptons exhibitions, this transhistorical presentation reflects on the nation’s 250th anniversary by asking a timely question: “What is the American landscape?” Curated by Donna De Salvo and Seph Rodney, the transhistorical exhibition brings together historic and contemporary artists to examine how ideas of landscape—and America itself—have evolved over the centuries. On view are works by Jeremy Dennis, Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, Christina Fernandez, April Gornik, Leslie Hewitt, Sky Hopinka, An-My Lê, Zoe Leonard, Richard Mayhew, Charles Henry Miller, Kent Monkman, Mary Nimmo Moran, Thomas Moran, Arcmanoro Niles, James Perkins, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Lucy Raven, Anastasia Samoylova, Meg Webster, and selections from Dan Flavin‘s collection of Hudson River School paintings. While the Hudson River School celebrated an idealized vision of the sublime, often erasing Indigenous presence and signs of human intervention, today’s artists revisit the landscape as a site of memory, identity, ecology, and cultural reckoning. Together, the works trace the evolving meaning of the American sublime across generations.
What we love: The exhibition reveals how artists have continually redefined the American landscape, offering a powerful lens through which to understand the country’s shifting cultural identity.
“THIS LAND: Considering the American Landscape” at The Church.
June 20–September 6, 2026
Laurie Lambrecht: “texere: in nature with lines and hand”
The Drawing Room Gallery
East Hampton
Laurie Lambrecht, “Ramble/Wander (Sagg Swamp),” 2025, mixed media with hand embroidery and archival pigment print on linen and cotton fabric, 27 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Drawing Room Gallery.
Laurie Lambrecht, “Tidaled, Fishers Island,” #1, 2026, archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and The Drawing Room Gallery.
Among this season’s Hamptons exhibitions, “texere: in nature with lines and hand” draws upon the textures, colors, and patterns Laurie Lambrecht has observed throughout her decades on Long Island’s East End. Timed with the release of her new monograph, the exhibition surveys the artist’s distinctive mixed-media practice, showcasing the experimental techniques she has developed to evoke woodlands, beaches, wetlands, and other landscapes across the United States and abroad.
The title derives from the Latin word texere, meaning “to weave” or “to intertwine”—a fitting reference to Lambrecht’s process of layering photography with hand-drawn and textile-inspired interventions. Blurring the boundary between image and object, her works weave together line, texture, and material until it becomes difficult to distinguish where the photograph ends and the artist’s hand begins.
What we love: Lambrecht’s layered approach transforms familiar landscapes into tactile meditations on nature, inviting viewers to slow down and experience texture, color, and place in an entirely new way.
Laurie Lambrecht at The Drawing Room Gallery.
June 20–July 27, 2026
Mel Kendrick: “At the Core: sculpture and cast paper”
The Drawing Room Gallery
East Hampton
Mel Kendrick, Untitled, 2008, cast paper, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Drawign Room Gallery.
Mel Kendrick, “Frame,” 2026. Courtesy of the artist and The Drawing Room Gallery.
A new selection of sculptures by Mel Kendrick continues the artist’s long-standing exploration of the expressive possibilities contained within a single block of wood. At The Drawing Room Gallery, artworks such as Frame—carved from a found piece of street timber—contrast richly grained mahogany with pale blond wood, revealing dramatic splayed forms and jagged silhouettes born from the material itself. The exhibition also includes a small edition of bronzes and a cast paper relief created in collaboration with New York’s Dieu Donné, extending Kendrick’s investigation from solid wood to fluid paper pulp. Whether carving, cutting, rearranging, or casting, the artist transforms a single material into compositions that balance mass, void, and relief. Throughout the exhibition, wood emerges not as a static medium but as one rich with variation—its grain, color, and history becoming integral to each work.
What we love: One of this summer’s standout Hamptons exhibitions, Kendrick reveals the remarkable versatility of wood, exploring its potential in both solid form and paper pulp while allowing the material’s natural character to shape each sculpture.
Mel Kendrick at The Drawing Room Gallery.
June 20–July 27, 2026
Lola Montes: “Flower Flame”
Ashlee Harrison
Water Mill
Lola Montes, Installation View of “Flower Flame,” 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Ashlee Harrison.
To celebrate the inaugural edition of NOMAD Hamptons, Ashlee Harrison presented “Flower Flame,” an immersive installation by Lola Montes featuring sculptural mirrors, hand-painted terracotta reliefs, candelabras, vessels, furniture, and tableware. Conceived as an altar for gathering, dining, and storytelling, the presentation offered a moment of domestic intimacy amid the energy of the fair. Drawing inspiration from mythology, nature, memory, and the decorative arts, Montes transforms functional objects into sculptural works that blur the boundaries between design and fine art. Hand-built and richly glazed, her ceramics evoke archaeological fragments while remaining deeply rooted in contemporary domestic life.
The title, “Flower Flame,” reflects the duality at the heart of Montes’s practice: flowers symbolize growth, beauty, fertility, and impermanence, while flame evokes ritual, transformation, illumination, and renewal. At the center of the installation stood Amphibian, a ceramic-tiled table framed by intertwined leaves, artichokes, terracotta reliefs, mythological figures, and flowering candelabras—a richly layered environment that functioned simultaneously as furniture, fresco, and altar.
What we love: One of the most memorable Hamptons exhibitions this season, Montes elevates everyday objects into poetic works of art, using symbolism and craftsmanship to transform the rituals of domestic life into something quietly sacred.
Lola Montes at Ashlee Harrison.
June 25–June 28, 2026
