Acclaimed art, sculpture and public garden, LongHouse Reserve will kick off its 21^st Season on Saturday, April 28, 2012 at their annual Rites of Spring Season Opening. The Rites of Spring will offer visitors an opportunity to experience a number of unique and dramatic art forms that will entice any imagination.

This year, LongHouse Reserve will proudly unveil two incredible exhibitions which will be on display throughout the summer season:  Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature and Accumulations: NOW.  Located on 16 acres in East Hampton, LongHouse Reserve was founded by legendary textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen and is an inspiring and creative world that collectively encompasses education, nature and art.

Additionally, LongHouse will launch its first museum store located on the grounds entitled INstore that will offer treasures from around the world and will be personally curated by Mr. Larsen.  Also, a new sculpture will be added to the garden by Isamu Noguchi.

At the season opening, when hundreds of daffodils planted on the property will be in full bloom, LongHouse will unveil Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature curated by Bonnie Rychlak- a gathering of pioneering, conventional, and idiosyncratic works and practices, having no sweeping ideology in common.   The expansive gardens of LongHouse will provide a perfect setting for these works which have never before been displayed in an outdoor gallery.  Six artists will be featured as part of this exhibition including works by:  Jene Highstein, Anne Chu, Ronald Bladen, Brian Gaman, Judith Shea and Daniel Wiener.

It will be an extensive exhibit of sculpture at LongHouse and feature a diverse and remarkable group of work.  These signficent works will temporarily join the objects on permanent view at LongHouse, which includes works by renowned artists such as: Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, Willem de Kooning, Toshiko Takaezu, Dale Chihuly, Lynda Benglis, Peter Voulkos, Miguel Barceló.

“Everything can come alive when contradictions and oppositions accumulate,” says Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature guest curator Bonnie Rychlak. “Some individual works may become muted as they coalesce together into the controlled wildness of the LongHouse gardens. Some of the sculptures may appear to be normally a part of the landscape while other could look superimposed onto it but each will have a new orientation and new possibilities for extending their meaning, offering up to the viewer, a fresh and exhilarating reexamination of each sculptures’ object hood. “

LongHouse’s second exhibition of the season will be Accumulations: NOW, which will include a number of inimitable pieces from the collection of the late Dena Katzenberg as well as works from Anni Albers, Olga de Amaral, Junichi Arai, Peter Collingwood, Helena Hernmark, Sheila Hicks, Chunghie Lee, Dorothy Liebes, Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ethel Stein and Lenore Tawney on display April 28 through October 6. In 2013, LongHouse will follow with a primitive and ethnographic exhibition, then, featuring craft from the last 5,000 years.

“Accumulations: NOW marks LongHouse ‘officially’ becoming a major craft exhibitor,” says LongHouse Reserve founder Jack Lenor Larsen.

LongHouse Reserve Hours:

Open days for members and the public are 2 to 5 p.m.
Wednesdays and Saturdays, from April 28 through October 06 (Columbus Day weekend)
July and August only Wednesday through Saturday

About LongHouse Reserve:

Through its arboretum, sculpture gardens and programs, LongHouse Reserve brings together art and nature, aesthetics and spirit, with a strong conviction that the arts are central to living wholly and creatively. LongHouse Reserve is a not-for-profit museum that encompasses nearly 16 beautiful acres in East Hampton, New York.  Each year the LongHouse Reserve presents major exhibitions in both the pavilion and the gardens. Currently, there are more than 60 sculptures for the gardens including works of glass by Dale Chihuly, ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu, and bronzes by Miquel Barceló, Peter Voulkos, Lynda Benglis and Willem de Kooning. Works by Alfonso Ossorio, Claus Bury, Yoko Ono, Pavel Opocensky, and Takashi Soga are also on view, while the installation of a Fly’s Eye Dome designed by Buckminster Fuller and a site-specific Sol Lewitt add interesting scale and dimension. Visit www.longhouse.org , Facebook page or @LongHouseEH !

133 Hands Creek Road  East Hampton
(631) 604-5330