Photo by Jessica Dalene.
Take a tour of the 83rd Artist Members Exhibition with Andrea Grover, Executive Director.
This year Guild Hall Celebrates its 90th Anniversary and its 83rd Artist Members Exhibition. The first Artist Members Exhibition took place in 1938, shortly after Guild Hall’s inception in 1931. The exhibition is the oldest non-juried show on Long Island and one of the few non-juried exhibitions still running. Deeply rooted in the history of the East End artist colony, early participants included Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Alfonso Ossorio, Perle Fine, Bill King, James Brooks, Charlotte Park, John Little and many more, showing their support of Guild Hall and its role as their community Museum, Theater, and Education Center.
Due to the wonderful popularity of this exhibition, around 400 artists participate each year. The Artist Members Exhibition attracts remarkable art world professionals as awards jurors who select winners in the categories of Top Honors, Best Abstract, Best Representational, Best Photograph, Best Work on Paper, Best Sculpture, Best Mixed Media, Catherine and Theo Hios Best Landscape Award, Best New Artist and up to 10 Honorable Mentions. The Top Honors winner is also awarded a solo exhibition in the Museum at a later date. We are honored to welcome Antwaun Sargent as this year’s awards juror.
The new tradition of creating an ecommerce website in conjunction with the exhibition continues this year in addition to virtual gallery tours and artist talks.
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Andrea Grover
Andrea Grover is the Executive Director of Guild Hall, the cornerstone cultural institution of East Hampton, that combines a museum, theater, and education center. Guild Hall is presently undergoing a facility-wide capital improvements project to bring the 1930s-era building and grounds up to state-of-the-art performance and functionality. Grover has 25 years of experience in curatorial and nonprofit leadership with a focus on innovative and participatory arts programming. Most recently, she was the curator of the 2021 exhibition, Alexis Rockman Shipwrecks presented at Guild Hall, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, The Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC, and Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ. Prior to joining Guild Hall in 2016, she was the Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, where she was awarded both a Tremaine Foundation and an AADA Curatorial Award for her exhibition, Radical Seafaring. At the Parrish, she established the extremely popular community-driven program PechaKucha Night Hamptons, and the exhibition series Parrish Road Show and Platform. Grover founded the nonprofit film center Aurora Picture Show, Houston, Texas, at age 27. With expertise in artists who work in scientific or technological spaces (art + science), she has served as a panelist or advisor for Pew Foundation for Arts & Heritage, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Bogliasco Foundation. She has taught interdisciplinary courses at the University of Houston, and Texas Southern University, and has been a guest speaker or juror at SXSW Interactive, Austin, Texas, and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, among many others. Grover has received fellowships from the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Warhol Foundation. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Syracuse University.