LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton’s 16-acre sculpture garden and nature sanctuary, will open its 2024 season on March 30 with its annual Rites of Spring celebration.
“This season will be our liveliest ever! We have art, performances, conversations, craft workshops, and well-being activities for the whole family,” said Director Carrie Rebora Barratt. “LongHouse Founder Jack Lenor Larsen left us with the instruction to be relevant, not reverent, and we follow his lead with an exciting season of art and events, carrying out our mission of inspiring living with art in all forms. We’ve become Long Island’s largest and most community-engaged open-air cultural institution.”
This season, visitors will see new art and design works from Monica Banks, Anna Kang Burgess, Maryam Eisler, Maren Hassinger, Fitzhugh Karol, Bill King, Paola Lenti, Robert Lobe, Mark Mennin, Isamu Noguchi, Kenny Scharf, Agathe Snow, Toshiko Takaezu, Lenore Tawney, Martha Russo, performances by Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, The Iris Trio, Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company, Neo-Political Cowgirls, Young Concert Artists, and talks with Jonathan Adler, Liz Collins, Lynne Cooke, Machine Dazzle, Alastair Gordon, LongHouse curator Glenn Adamson, and more. Permanent favorites, by Buckminster Fuller, Sol Lewitt, and Yoko Ono, and renewed loans by Daniel Arsham and Ai Weiwei (to name a few), will welcome guests back.
The season opens with “Full Circle: Toshiko Takaezu and Friends,” in conjunction with the Noguchi Museum’s retrospective of her work, both curated by Glenn Adamson. At LongHouse, the core of the exhibition are the pieces Larsen acquired from his friend, Toshiko, and gifts from her to him, including the iconic Gateway Bell.
For its 2023 season, in tandem with the concurrent retrospective “Toshiko Takaezu: Within Worlds” at The Noguchi Museum, LongHouse will display the full complement of its Takaezu works for the first time, supplemented by key loans, with the work of other artists whose lives and careers were deeply touched by Takaezu, including Lenore Tawney, Anna Kang Burgess, Fitzhugh Karol, and Martha Russo.
Monica Banks has created a series of ceramic miniature dining vignettes for birds to experience eating seeds and sipping water from a scaled-down version of the patio dining they see on summer days. Banks shared, “I’m trying to imagine the birds’ point of view, I’m experimenting with what they might be curious about, and how I might inspire in them the delight they create in me while observing them.” They will be placed throughout the garden as the season goes on.
The Rites of Spring opening weekend will begin on Saturday, March 30, at 10:30 AM. Activities include fashioning a spring headdress with Neo-Political Cowgirls, a talk with Glenn Adamson and Martha Russo on “Full Circle,” and Kendama Meditation with Juan Yanez. Guests will have a chance to experience new art in the gardens, including Agathe Snow’s “Out of the Storm,” Bill King’s “Kontest,” Monica Banks’s “Bird Happenings,” and Robert Lobe’s “Dryad.”
For a full schedule, visit longhouse.org.