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Recap | 2019 East End Studio Tour

Attendees received a behind-the-scenes look at three artist studios in The Hamptons.

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Leadership Council Members Carol Ross and Marjorie Silverman and Board Member J. Whitney Stevens hosted an intimate tour of three artist studios on Long Island’s East End on August 2, 2019. Led by Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects at Parrish Art Museum, the group visited the studios of artists Eric Freeman, Steve Miller (Fellow in Painting ’04), and John Torreano (Fellow in Painting ’91). The ticketed tour concluded with a seated lunch with the artists at a private residence in Bridgehampton, where guests dined on heirloom tomato, peach, and mozzarella salad; grilled cedar plank miso cod; and raspberry pie.

“It was an exciting mix of artists who each had a different approach to their visual art,” said NYFA Board Chair Marc Jason. “Two of the artists were former Fellowship recipients, and I enjoyed seeing them and their work in this later stage of their careers,” added Jason.

Tour attendees were given an insider’s look into each artist’s approach, philosophy, and methods. Said NYFA Board Member J. Wesley McDade: “We were able to see Eric Freeman actually working on a piece in his studio, Steve Miller walked us through the silkscreen process with his studio press, and John Torreano showed us one of his column pieces in a fairly raw state. It provided a lot of insight into both the intellectual and physical underpinnings of each artists’ work.”

The annual East End Studio Tour benefits NYFA’s programs for artists throughout Long Island and New York State. Past tours have included artists Alice Aycock, Ross Bleckner, Quentin Curry, April Gornik, Hiroyuki Hamada, Mary Heilmann, Brian Hunt, Donald Lipski, Toni Ross, Joan Semmel, Arlene Slavin, Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas, and Joe Zucker.

Eric Freeman is an American artist whose monumental, monochromatic oil paintings are rendered in an abstract vocabulary that evokes optical illusions of landscapes. His paintings reference the legacy of Color Field Painting, an art movement hailing—like himself—from New York. Experimentation with color is an integral part of Freeman’s practice; the special glow of his canvases is achieved with bold and unusual color combinations. He has held numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, and his work is included in the collections of Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY; Saatchi Collection, London; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.

Steve Miller is a multimedia artist who investigates the ways in which art, design, and scientific technology intersect in contemporary culture. His work spans the disciplines of painting, photography, and sculpture, and has played a critical role in pioneering the Sci-Art movement. With more than 50 solo exhibitions at major institutions across the globe—including the National Academy of Sciences, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Hong Kong Arts Center—his work has been reviewed in Le Monde, ARTnews, The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. In addition to serving as an editorial advisor and contributor to the photography journal, Musée, Miller is the author of Radiographic(Glitterati, 2017) and the recently-released Surf/Skate: Art and Board Life (Glitterati, 2019). He divides his time between homes in New York City and the Hamptons.

John Torreano discovered the lure of the East End after moving to New York City in 1968. In 1969 he was invited to the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, and since then he has maintained a connection to the East End. Torreano is known for using gems and other unusual materials to make “cosmologies” that challenge such modernist dogma as Essentialism, with theory and imagery related to astronomy. He has exhibited in galleries and museums including Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis. Torreano has received the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant for Visual Artists, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. His work is represented by The Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY and Lesley Heller Gallery, New York.

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Images from Top: Attendees gather at a private residence in Bridgehampton following the East End Studio Tour; Eric Freeman, Steve Miller, and John Torreano in their respective studio spaces; and Corinne Erni leading the tour at John Torreano’s studio. All images credit Thomas Kochie for NYFA.