About Visual Arts

Leo Villareal, Celestial Garden, 2023. LEDs, custom software, electrical hardware, steel, vinyl, audio. 340 x 126 inches (864 x 320 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. Celestial Garden © Leo Villareal. Photo: Gary Mamay Photography

The Guild Hall Museum celebrates the East End of Long Island’s history as a vibrant creative community, featuring artists who live and work in the area. In 1973, the Guild Hall Museum received formal accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums and is still one of 1,000 that hold this distinction. The Museum mounts eight to 10 exhibitions annually, ranging from the historical to the contemporary and focusing on artists who have an affiliation with eastern Long Island. We invite our community to engage with the arts and to participate as artists themselves.

Critical to our mission is our work with artists at all stages of development, and the arc of our exhibition program demonstrates this range each year. Our Student Art Festival features the youngest artists of our region, who are paired with visiting artists whom Guild Hall commissions to teach in our local schools. We present works by 300+ local artists through the Artist Members Exhibition (AME), established 85 years ago and one of the few non-juried exhibitions remaining today. To address specific needs of our community, we recently established a dedicated slot for early/mid-career artists to showcase in the spring; our summer exhibitions feature internationally celebrated artists; and finally, we are a collecting institution and draw on the permanent collection for topical thematic shows.

Guild Hall’s Permanent Collection houses 2,400 works of art, with an emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries in all mediums, from painting, sculpture and photography to video, and installation art by artists of the region.

PROGRAM SPONSORS

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, and Neda Young

Free gallery admission is sponsored, in part, by Landscape Details.