Installation view of 85th Artist Members Exhibition, November 17, 2024 – January 5, 2025. Guild Hall, East Hampton. Photo: Gary Mamay
The Artist Members Exhibition began in 1938, and Guild Hall continues this long-standing democratic tradition by hosting the oldest non-juried museum exhibition on Long Island. This lively presentation features more than three hundred works and showcases a variety of mediums. As in the traditional salon exhibition, works by established artists are exhibited alongside those of emerging talents and first-time exhibitors, offering a sampling of artistic practices within our community. This initiative provides an opportunity for audiences to support and celebrate the artists who live and work in our immediate region and for artists to sell their works. In turn, artists show their commitment to and support of Guild Hall. Early participants included James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Alfonso Ossorio, Charlotte Park, Jackson Pollock, and many more.
Guild Hall invites nationally and internationally recognized art professionals to select the Top Honors Award and Honorable Mentions. The Top Honors Award recipient is given a future solo exhibition at Guild Hall.
Awards Juror Storm Ascher selected Michael A. Butler of Sag Harbor as the Top Honors recipient for his work Lilies of the Field. Michael Butler is an artist, historian, and humanitarian, and describes himself as an intuitive self-taught artist, defining his style as narrative folk art and primarily works in acrylic. The intricate details in his small-scale works have a powerful impact.
In addition to the Top Honors prize, Ascher awarded Honorable Mentions to Lilah Yektai, Ross Watts, Anita Giraldo, Raphael Ogoe, and Kenneth Jackson.
Note: Artwork purchased from AME must be picked up in person when the exhibition closes, from January 9-11, 2025, between 10 AM and 4 PM. Artwork will not be mailed.
Galleries are open Thursday to Sunday, 12-5 PM. Museum admission is always free.
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Storm Ascher
Storm Ascher is an independent curator, writer, and founder of Superposition Gallery and The Hamptons Black Arts Council. She has a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts (2018), an MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute and Claremont Graduate University (2020), and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Honoree for Art & Style 2022.
Storm founded Superposition Gallery in August 2018. She started her curatorial projects with a mission to subvert gentrification tactics used in urban development through art galleries. She refers to her gallery as “a socially conscious approach to contemporary art with a focus on borrowed space”. Superposition Gallery has drawn in exhibition participation from over 100 artists of different cultural backgrounds and multidisciplinary practices, such as Layo Bright, MR. WASH, Derrick Adams, Ludovic Nkoth, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Tariku Shiferaw, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Nate Lewis, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Helina Metaferia, and Muna Malik. By starting a nomadic gallery model without a brick and mortar address, the gallery has continued to grow their community outreach through site specific iterations of borrowed space in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and internationally. Storm has fostered partnerships with various institutions and brands who look to the Superposition program for partnership activations— launching spaces around the world.
In 2023, Storm founded the Hamptons Black Arts Council—a 501(c)3 non profit charitable organization based in New York State — which is dedicated to upholding the legacy of Black art institutions on the East End of Long Island. Storm’s development of the Hamptons Black Arts Council focuses on Advocacy, Acquisition Development, and Infrastructure and Operations. Storm’s curatorial work and community involvement through HBAC has increased awareness of Black art organizations through public programming, education, and networking; grown the contemporary collections of artwork by artists of diverse backgrounds through exhibitions and fundraising; and maintained their museum galleries and staff retention through fundraising. Recent exhibitions through The Hamptons Black Arts Council mission include Tariku Shiferaw’s first museum solo show Making Space: One of These Black Boys at the Southampton African American Museum, as well as Spectrum of Echoes, an exhibition in partnership with UBS which included works by Sanford Biggers, Tomashi Jackson, Che Lovelace and more.
Storm worked at various galleries and institutions prior to starting her own curatorial program and organizations, such as LAXART under Hamza Walker, David Lewis Gallery, Marciano Foundation, and Spruth Magers. She has curated for the Eastville Museum in Sag Harbor, Phillips New York, Phillips Los Angeles, Southampton African American Museum, UBS Global Art, and OOLITE Arts in Miami.
She is on the Advisory Board of Inversion Art, which invests in and stewards visual artists who are at an inflection point in their careers. She is also on the board of Rose House Residency, an artist incubator program in a Victorian home in Cobleskill, NY, and the Core Committee of The Circuit, a Black arts coalition. She is on the steering committee of the Art Basel Women’s Wealth Summit with Unlocked Foundation and UBS Women’s Wealth Segment, which has a mission to close the gender pay-gap across industries.
Storm was awarded the Alumni Scholarship award at The School of Visual Arts in 2018 for her thesis documentary and paper #gentrify2017 and delivered the valedictorian speech at her graduation from SVA at Radio City Music Hall, along with artists Maya Lin and Milton Glaser. She has contributed extensively as an independent writer and art critic to Cultured Magazine—most notably her profile of artist Wangechi Mutu and curator Claudia Schmuckli for their museum presentation at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Other writing contributions include TiltWest, The Brilliance of the Color Black Through the Eyes of Art Collectors, Widewalls, Galerie Lelong, and more. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, Hyperallergic, CULTURED, Artsy, The Miami Times and others. She was recently named in The New Generation of Black Women Gallerists by Artsy and the Dan’s Papers Power List of the East End.
Sponsors
The Artist Members Exhibition is supported, in part, by the Giuppy Nantista Fund and the Helen Hoie Fund.
Visual Arts programs are supported by funding from The Michael Lynne Museum Endowment and The Melville Straus Family Endowment.
Additional support provided by Friends of the Museum: Sara Amani and Timothy Ward, Danielle Anderman, Shari and Jeff Aronson, The Artist Profile Archive, Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann, Cara and John Fry, Susan Lacy, Robert Longo and Sophie Chahinian, Onna House, Lisa and Richard Perry, Laurie and Martin Scheinman, Jeff and Audrey Spiegel, Hillary and Jeff Suchman, Barbara Tober, Jane Wesman and Don Savelson, Neda Young, and an anonymous donor.
Free gallery admission is sponsored, in part, by Landscape Details.