Southampton Arts Center, once the Parrish Gallery (1897)

Southampton, N.Y. — Samuel Longstreth Parrish, Southampton’s best-known benefactor, was a successful Quaker attorney from Philadelphia, built what is today the Art Museum at Southampton.

Parrish developed a taste for art of the Italian Renaissance as a student at Harvard College and began collecting art seriously in the early 1880s, just after moving his successful law practice from Philadelphia to New York.

During that time, he regularly visited his family home in Southampton. The Village, a popular summer resort then as it is now, quickly caught his interest and Parrish soon became an active member of the community.

During a trip to Italy in 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 bought a small parcel of land next to the Rogers Memorial Library on Jobs Lane and commissioned a fellow Southampton resident, the architect Grosvenor Atterbury to design the building. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Atterbury continued to work on the design of the Museum over a period of nearly 20 years.

Developments at the Museum slowed considerably after Parrish’s death in 1932, along with the Great Depression and war years that followed. By 1941, the Village of Southampton accepted the building, grounds, and founding collection as a gift from Parrish’s estate, and the Museum was eventually renamed Parrish Memorial Art Museum.

In 1952, Rebecca Bolling Littlejohn, a civic-minded Southampton resident with a deep interest in the arts, became President of the Parrish Board and took on the overwhelming task of reviving the Museum.

Under Littlejohn’s leadership, a heating system was installed in 1954, allowing the building to remain open year round. That same year, the Museum was granted a charter from the New York State Board of Regents, recognizing it as an educational institution, and the name was changed to The Parrish Art Museum, Inc.

Perhaps most important, Littlejohn believed the Museum should look not only to the past civilizations but to American artists—especially those who had lived and worked on the East End of Long Island.

She generously bequeathed her impressive collection of American paintings, including works by William Merritt Chase, Thomas Moran, and Childe Hassam, to the Parrish. This became the core of the outstanding collection of American paintings held by the Museum today. In 1957, the Museum mounted its first major exhibition: a retrospective of works by Chase.

By the mid-1980s it was clear that the Parrish had outgrown its original building, which lacked the basic infrastructure necessary for a professional museum as well as the space to showcase both its collection and temporary exhibitions.

In 2005 the Museum purchased 14 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. In July 2010 the team broke ground and the 34,400 square-foot building opened to the public November 10, 2012.

The building they left behind in Southampton was the property of the Village of Southampton. Losing a major art museum and having a beautiful empty building on its hands, the Village did quite a bit of soul-searching to maintain the coherence of the historic building and the values it represented.

The town leaders agreed that a multidisciplinary, mixed-arts use for the building would not compete with the Southampton Cultural Center on Pond Lane, another key element of the arts district. Rather, they said such a facility would complement the offerings at the Cultural Center.

The Parrish Gallery they left behind, built in 1897, became the Southampton Arts Center. Today, this art center provides a dynamic and historic venue to present the highest quality programming to our entire community through partnerships with a diverse slate of world-class artists, performers, educators, and cultural institutions.

Southampton Arts Center offers year-round programming includes visual arts, film, live performances, talks, wellness, sustainability, and children’s activities.

Southampton Arts Center is committed to community building through the arts.

They present and produce inspiring, inclusive, socially and regionally relevant programs across all disciplines – welcoming, connecting, and collaborating with the diverse members of New York’s East End community and beyond.

Influenced by the rich cultural tradition and artistic history of the region, Southampton Arts Center drives cultural engagement and economic vitality.

Their goal is to be distinguished as a destination for multigenerational audiences to have artistic, educational and transformational experiences. Using the arts as a unifier they continue to provide a platform for the many voices who comprise our region creating mutual understanding and effecting positive change.

The Southampton Arts Center’s mission is not just to promote art. The foundation works to encourage creative expression, familial unity, and community. Its galleries often show East End artists and its theater features performances, movies and live music.

The building is surrounded by lush lawns on which children and adults can gather in the spring and summer months for musical treats or for art-centered workshops.

It’s an interactive cultural center, really. Michele Thompson, director of the Center, has big plans to make the space more “organic” to the community.

“We’re working on making modern amenities happen for the Center,” Thompson says. “We really need to accommodate the flexibility of artists now.”

Enthusiastic and extremely knowledgeable, Thompson is devoted to the betterment of the Center. She wants to bring the Center’s facilities up to date and to also bring more natural sunlight into the second gallery space as a means of balancing art and the outdoors.

Wanting to reinvigorate the space, she’s partnering with institutions like the Bay Street Theater, the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery of Columbia University, to name a few.

She’s added staff and she’s had over 10,000 visitors flock to the Center from July to August 2014 alone. Thompson will soon announce upcoming corporate sponsorships.

The space retains its historical integrity with beautiful features like its brick façade and walls, the wrought-iron side door and gates, and the interior ceiling’s plaster friezes. Inside, you may notice how the pure white walls in the gallery are kissed by soft, warm studio lights that shine on artwork of vastly different sizes and content. It is truly a calm, clean, and spiritual environment.

Greco-Roman busts adorn the shady lawn just beside the entrance, an example of Samuel Parrish’s passion for iconographic art and serious art collecting. This is display enough to convince anyone to further explore the establishment.

Or it could be the last thing that you visit—coming out of the museum, you’re drawn to peek behind the brick walls overlooking Jobs Lane. The busts will be there, lined up like tombs at a national cemetery, waiting ever patiently for your admiration.

The Southampton Arts Center is located at 25 Jobs Lane in Southampton. Call 631-283-0967 or visit southamptoncenter.org.

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