BY ELISA CAROLLO
Every summer, New York's wealthiest residents migrate east to Long Island to spend the season in the Hamptons. Yet the area's artistic history long predates its current identity as a luxury enclave. Beginning in the late 19th century, Hudson River School painters helped establish the East End as a seasonal artists' colony, drawn by its pastoral landscape, coastal scenery and distinctive light. By the early 20th Century, the South Fork had become an established summer retreat for artists, writers and affluent New Yorkers.
The region became even more central to American art after World War II, when artists moved east in search of cheaper housing, larger studios and distance from the city. In 1945, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner settled in a modest farmhouse in Springs, then a rural hamlet north of East Hampton, purchased with financial assistance from Peggy Guggenheim. They were followed by other Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Elaine De Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler and Adolph Gottlieb.
Today, the Hamptons are far more closely associated with wealth and luxury, and few artists can still afford to live there. The area has shifted from an affordable artists' colony into a seasonal marketplace and concentrated extension of the New York art world. That transformation accelerated during the pandemic, when many galleries and all three major auction houses opened East End outposts to serve the collectors who had relocated there. Although several of those spaces have since closed, the Hamptons still offers plenty of exhibitions worth seeing each summer. Here are this season's must-see shows.
Sanford Biggers: Drift
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill | Through September 13, 2026
Operating at the intersections of African diasporic history, spirituality, mythology and popular culture, Sanford Biggers engages both creatively and semiotically with symbols of power, race and the ways they have been historically narrated. Through appropriation and fluid remediation, he embraces an idiosyncratic hybridity that reflects centuries of cross-cultural exchange, building a symbolic vocabulary attuned to today's global culture. Clouds are a recurring motif in Biggers's practice and the central element of his exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in the Hamptons. Suspended from the ceiling and drifting through the gallery, they create a shifting environment that suggests relentless adaptability and fluctuation, resisting stable or singular forms. Titled Unsui (Cloud Forest) (2025), the monumental installation draws simultaneously on Japanese, European and American art traditions, becoming a visual metaphor for the Zen Buddhist principle of moving through the world without attachment or resistance to change. The illuminated cloud sculptures enter into a dynamic choreography with quilt works from Biggers's Codex series, which feature spray-painted cumulus forms in a nod to his teenage years as a graffiti artist. Other works from his Chimera, Mirror and Codex series complete the ensemble, evoking a reality in constant drift and transformation that resists fixity and instead encourages multiple perspectives.
