There’s a glorious past to Guild Hall, the 93-year-old regional cultural hub in East Hampton, N.Y., where Gwen Vernon created benefit dance festivals, Edward Albee directed theater in the 1970s, Thornton Wilder starred in his play “Our Town,” and which Willem De Kooning once referred to its members as “family.”
The project is sweeping, touching just about all aspects of the 24,000-square-foot building and the 46,000-square-foot property at 158 Main Street. It’s involved overhauling the theater, the three gallery spaces, outdoor areas, entrances, lighting and adding amenities, such as a café. According to Guild Hall’s records, the institution was founded by Mary Woodhouse, a wealthy seasonal resident “with a passion for village preservation and improvement projects,” who donated land and $100,000. The name Guild Hall comes from the British guild halls used for civic and cultural purposes.
Next, Grover leads the way to the main gallery, where “the past” on this day was represented by an exhibit of photographs of artists by other artists, called “A Creative Retreat: Portraits of Artists,” which closed May 6. Photos showed such luminaries as Alfred Stieglitz, Frank O’Hara, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Ralph Ellison, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, among others, at cookouts on the beach or poolside in thein the 1950s and ’60s.
Cohen says that one of the first things he did in reimagining Guild Hall for the future was to purchase the house next door. “We call it the Guild House. The rationale was to have a house for artists or performers to stay overnight, and rent it as a meeting space. Before we had no real space where we could do this.
Among the upcoming shows, Billy Porter on July 12; the Branford Marsalis Quintet on July 17; the New York City Ballet Guild Hall also has a “Creative Lab” classroom where guest artists teach, and an “Academy of the Arts,” which is an honorific body of artists, performers, writers, designers, thought leaders, all living in the community and connected to Guild Hall through programming, curating exhibitions, or performing. “It’s kind of like the core of artists we work with. There about 210 Academy members. We’re like a sandbox for them,” Grover says. Among the members: guitarist G.E.
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