Gossip Central

Hamptons Journal: Longhouse’s Artistic Legacy as the East End Expands as a Destination for Fine Art

Wood stitched with wire does not sound like an ideal way to structure an outdoor shed, but that’s what Steven Ladd and his brother William Ladd used to create one of the masterful works showcased at this year’s Longhouse Benefit. As Steven guided visitors through this piece, open on both ends, he explained how he learned to sew using his grandmother’s sewing machine, and in fact, the upstate New York resident wore slacks and a shirt that he had made himself. It defied the imagination to think how that textile practice might be translated to their sculpture titled “Right Here, Right Now.” Similarly, Taiwanese artist Cheng Tsung Feng invited celebrants into an airy bamboo pavilion, “Fish Trap VI.” The spirit of Longhouse founder Jack Lenor Larsen could be felt in these works on this annual occasion with Robert Wilson, Nathan Lane, Alice Aycock, and many others celebrating his legacy at the best art party of the summer.

Newer art venues in Montauk flourish: The Ranch, the site of the famed Deep Hollow Ranch, where for years a summer concert would bring hoards to the East End, to be seated on haystacks and hear, for example, Paul Simon one year, The Eagles the next, and James Brown. Repurposed barns featured Frank Stella’s sculpture at the early part of summer. His larger pieces were spread out on the immense, now grassy field. Currently, in The West Barn, hangs, Jo Messer’s “Whale Tail,” a presentation of nine new paintings of women emphasizing limbs and gesture in incongruous position saturated in monochromatic palettes. The exhibition title comes from “a resurgent trend of hiking a g-string thong above the waistline as overt provocation.” Yes, provoke it does.

James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: Lesson in Survival: 1971 at the Vineyard Theater

A young poet, Nikki Giovanni interviewed an elder statesman of letters, James Baldwin, on television in 1971. Enacted, voiced onstage at the Vineyard Theater, Lessons in Survival: 1971, joins a series of plays produced at this downtown venue that makes use of actual words uttered in real life situations to create a theatrical experience: Tina Slatter’s Is This a Room and Lucas Hnath’s Dana H. Deirdre O’Connell won the Best Actress in a Play Tony Award for her performance, after the work transitioned to Broadway. Bringing true words to theater turns out to infuse otherwise merely remarkable events with even greater power. 

Calling Baldwin (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) Jimmy, suggesting an informality that seems unimaginable today for such an austere figure, Giovanni (Crystal Dickinson) first wants to know why he expatriated to Paris for much of his writing life. To anyone’s ears, then and now, the loaded question would trigger a discussion of the largest subject in American history, the subject of slavery, and though 1971 was well after the emancipation of African Americans, the untoward legacy is foremost still in today’s reckoning for both blacks and whites.

The Garden as Art: Longhouse/ The Return of Guild Hall’s Popular Tour

Textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen died in December of 2020, but Longhouse, the spectacular arts reserve off East Hampton’s Northwest Woods continues his tradition with an exhibition of his work. Influenced by his travels, the show is a glimpse into the adaptation of worldly visions into a uniquely American aesthetic. Of course, that’s only one reason to visit Longhouse, which features sculpture throughout, such as an iconic geodesic dome from Buckminster Fuller and Yoko Ono’s “Wishing Tree.” And what about the gardens, and arches of bright baby pink roses!!!!

Guild Hall returned to its tradition, “The Garden as Art” tour featuring artists’ work on the grounds of their East End sanctuaries. I’d like to tell you that Tony Ingrao and Randy Kemper’s gorgeous grounds with its statuary and expert landscaping was my favorite. Or the artist Ross Bleckner’s studio left open for all to see, particularly showcasing the paintings so influenced by gardens. The “best” distinction goes to Tucker Marder who took visitors around his “Folly Tree Arboretum,” speaking of each tree and its specific ecological distinction: the “Moon Tree,” for example, a clone of a Sycamore that went to the moon as a seed with astronaut Stuart Roosa in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission.

The Times of Bill Cunningham: “We all get dressed for Bill”

Mark Bozek’s documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, features a fresh look at his subject from a 1994 taped interview: Hard working and uniquely talented, Bill Cunningham eschewed the limelight yet pursued and promoted style, at celebrity functions and on the street, often perched on his bike on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59^th Street where Bergdorf Goodman sits majestically. Ah, the department store. It’s a dying breed, just like the self-effacing Cunningham himself. Anna Wintour famously quipped, “We all get dressed for Bill,” extolling the special fame of fashion and street photographer Bill Cunningham. When he died in 2016, Wintour wondered if there’d ever be another like him.

Woody Allen Attends Screening of One Child Nation

The special screening of Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation, hosted by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin at Lincoln Center this week, had some special guests among the attending elite of New York documentary filmmakers: Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi. The subject of this riveting documentary is the effect of China’s one child policy in that country. Said to help with population control, the rule of law, enforced in China from 1979 to 2015, severely punished families for having more than what was allowed, with forced sterilization and late term abortions. In the general propaganda extolling the virtues of keeping down the country’s birthrate, pop culture musical numbers show festively dressed women singing how wonderful life is with only one. Needless to say, families were devastated.

Remembering Halston in a New Documentary

Fashion designer Halston was a presence in Montauk in the heady 1970’s, renting from Andy Warhol on an oceanfront property east of town. One of the joys of Frederic Tcheng’s documentary Halston, produced by Roland Ballester, is seeing Halston at leisure with family seaside. Like Warhol’s estate, co-owned by filmmaker Paul Morrissey, Halston eventually went corporate, taking his Bergdorf Goodman pedigree to the masses in an ill-advised deal with J.C. Penney. For Halson’s A-list career, this was the beginning of a down journey. Yes, all of that is explained in the film, in the cocaine fueled, wild parties seen in archival footage. Using interviews with Pat Cleveland and Joel Schumacher, Halston’s unique moment in fashion is illuminated. His models, known as the Halstonettes, worshipped him. Looking movie star elegant, hair slicked back, impeccably groomed, he was in his heart, a Midwesterner, and wished most of all to re-establish his American roots.

“Camp” at the Metropolitan Museum: Susan Sontag as Metaphor

The sound of typewriter clicks permeates “Camp: Notes on Fashion” the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute’s extravaganza exhibition, relieved only by a recording of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. The MET gala, its yearly benefit this week, may only exist as a distraction from all that the “Camp” show shows, with un-wearable art on celebrities devised to do and outdo the “camp” theme, dressing up itself as camp. But the exhibition, taken from Susan Sontag, the twentieth century diva of cultural dialogues, is a cerebral tour de force.

Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards: Seeing Red on Heart Disease

“I see a sea of red,” became the cliché of the night at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room for the Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards. Indeed, red was encouraged for stars on the red carpet, Angela Bassett, Susan Lucci, and everyone else, and it seemed a giant homage to Valentine’s Day and the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration all wrapped in one. But the unifying image was the heart, meaning heart health for women. Lucci, the queen of soap operas, told a story of being the picture of health and suddenly feeling pressure in her chest in October, averting a heart attack. Bassett, the queenly Ramonda in Black Panther, lost her mother in 2014 to heart disease. She wanted to create awareness for the link between Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. Each speaker, and including doctors Dr. Sharon Hays and Mary N. Walsh, had a message: these episodes are preventable.

A Jason Wu Fashion Show at the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation Annual Luncheon

As noted in the past: It is a truth widely held, that ladies who lunch are wont to shop. And so a fashion show to benefit the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation has become an annual luncheon event. The options for lavish spending were displayed at Susan Gutfreund’s apartment in May, featuring models wearing Jason Wu’s dresses and gowns currently available on Bergdorf’s third floor. While the designer was not present, his assistant assured everyone he sincerely wished he could be, but was mid-air en route to Asia, launching a new fragrance. We would all get one in a goody bag, along with a cupcake from Magnolia. For guilt free spending, the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation benefits from a portion of the sales. Dr. Samuel Waxman, formidable and inspiring, spoke to the rapt crowd, many women beautifully dressed for the occasion.

Heavenly Bodies: The Metropolitan Museum’s Religious Commitment

To say the latest MET Costume Institute exhibition, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” is up there, as gorgeous, generous, and sumptuous as these yearly shows get, is to flirt with the ethereal. The Catholic imagination, as His Eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, stated in his remarks at the MET’s Temple of Dendur, where divine cookies and coffee approached the sacrament, is testament to Christ’s art. The church is about truth, good, and beauty in praise of God, he said. One part Vatican, and another Versace, with gem-stones and jewels, capes threaded in gold juxtaposed with modest peplum monk-styled couture and almost no skin-revealing gowns and wedding dresses, the fashion inspired by Catholicism is a revelation.