Object & Thing, a New Art and Design Exhibit, Honors a Majestic Hamptons Home

For the past four years, Abby Bangser, the former artistic director of Frieze Art Fairs, has organized intimate group shows of artists and designers at architecturally important homes. Object & Thing has made stops at the Noyes House in New Canaan, Connecticut and the Rose House in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and the 2023 edition is on view for the next three months at LongHouse Reserve, the East Hampton home of the late textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen.

Called "A Summer Arrangement," the exhibition by Bansger, LongHouse's curator-at-large Glenn Adamson, and the buzzy interiors stylist Colin King, pulls together over 100 works by 32 artists—including Rashid Johnson, Gaetano Pesce, Ludmilla Balkis, Kiva Motnyk and Paul Arnhold—some created specifically for the site.

"Instead of considering the neutrality of a white walled gallery space, for these exhibitions, artists can engage with very specific creative histories as well as the design of these spaces," Bangser tells T&C.

Larsen, who died at 93 in 2020, was one of the most influential textile designers of his generation, and many of his designs, which adorned postwar American homes, offices and hotels, are now in permanent collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre. He started working on LongHouse in 1986, collaborating with the architect Charles Forberg to fashion a home inspired by a Shinto shrine that became, in the words of the New York Times, "his most potent legacy." It opened to the public in 1992 and today it is a non-profit museum, educational institution and sculpture park that boasts large-scale works by Dale Chihuly, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Yoko Ono and Takashi Soga.

Visitors to the Object & Thing exhibition, which is open until September 3, will find a juxtaposition of Larsen's treasures and contemporary talent. On the home's first floor, his signature Magnum fabric shares space in a guest bedroom with ceramic vases by Balkis—whose work is also on view at Roman and Williams Guild Gallery in New York City, until July 22—and textile works by Motnyk. Elsewhere, glass works by Arnhold sit alongside delicate wooden combs by Teague Costello of Teague's Path, and Simone Bodmer-Turner contributed a series titled "House Paintings" made from lily stems, cattail leaves and soiled salvaged floorboards.

King, who recently published his first book for Rizzoli, brought harmony to the disparate range of pieces and disciplines. "Colin’s role in installation design focused on the placement of both the artworks selected for the exhibition, as well as gaining familiarity with the way Larsen lived with objects, embracing an approach that finds art in all forms–shells from the beach, treated with equal care as well-known artworks," Bangser says.

The dialogue between two generational sensibilities is what distinguishes Object & Thing exhibitions. "A Summer Arrangement" is first and foremost a gallery show, with works for sale, but it also helps keep alive the legacy of a 30-year-old institution and its founder. Bangser conceived the project with LongHouse's director Carrie Barratt, who previously enjoyed a long curatorial career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a percentage of the show's sales will benefit the organization.

"In our partnership with LongHouse, we hope to support their work by bringing new audiences to visit," Bangser says.

Lead image, left to right: Paintings by Megumi Shauna Arai; hand-stitched pillows by Kiva Motnyk with pillows from the collection of LongHouse; Cody Hoyt's Untitled Vessel (2017); and Rashid Johnson's Untitled Ceramic (2019) on a table by Wharton Esherick from the collection at LongHouse.

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