Andrea Grover. Photo: Jessica Dalene
Cocktails & Exhibition Preview: 6 PM
Dinner and Dancing: 7 PM
After Party: 9:30 PM
Dinner tickets are sold out. Email events@guildhall.org to join the wait list.
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Co-Chairs: Barbara Lane and Galia Meiri-Stawski
Join us for Guild Hall’s Summer Gala on Friday, August 7, 2026, celebrating the arts and the community that sustains them. The Gala will feature our galleries and gardens, culminating in dinner and dancing on our beautifully appointed grounds.
Guests will enjoy an exclusive first look at two landmark exhibitions, Ross Bleckner: Never The Less and Eric Freeman: The Volume of Color, featuring luminous abstract paintings by two artists who had a deep artistic and personal connection. Ross Bleckner, a Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award recipient (2000), has a long and meaningful relationship with our institution.
This year, we are honored to celebrate Andrea Grover on her 10th anniversary as Executive Director. Through her visionary leadership, Guild Hall has expanded its role as a dynamic cultural institution, championing ambitious artistic programming while guiding the transformation of our campus into a state-of-the-art home for creativity.
As our most important annual fundraiser, the Summer Gala provides critical support for hundreds of year-round programs in visual arts, performing arts, and arts education. Thank you for ensuring that artists, audiences, and students of all ages continue to find inspiration and connection at Guild Hall.
Contact Kendra Korczak, Director of Events and Corporate Relations, at 631.324.0806 x116 or events@guildhall.org with any questions.
Tickets are tax-deductible as allowed by law $160.00 of each dinner ticket, $75.00 of each Cocktail ticket, and $50 of each After Party ticket used are considered goods and services. Please consult your tax advisor.
Can’t attend? Make a contribution to the Summer Gala HERE.
*Dinner tickets are sold out.
Andrea Grover
Andrea Grover is a curator, writer, and nonprofit arts leader with 25+ years of experience with socially engaged and interdisciplinary artistic practices. She is the Executive Director of Guild Hall, a historic civic arts institution in East Hampton, NY, founded during the Great Depression with a mission to build a better society through the arts. From 2022–25, she led a transformative renovation of the Guild Hall campus, modernizing its 1930s-era infrastructure to support contemporary performance, exhibition, and education. She simultaneously created an interdisciplinary program team that provides thought partners for new works like the recently developed First Literature Project (Shinnecock language revitalization in VR) by Wunetu Wequai Tarrant and Christian Scheider.
Grover began her career in community-centered art by founding Aurora Picture Show, Houston, in 1998, a nonprofit moving image art center originally located in her home, a converted church in the Sunset Heights. Her curatorial focus has long included artist-led experiments in public space, alternative infrastructures, and cross-disciplinary inquiry. While Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, she launched initiatives such as Parrish Road Show, Platform and PechaKucha Night Hamptons, and received a Tremaine Foundation grant and ADAA Curatorial Award for Radical Seafaring, a landmark exhibition of artists creating works on the water. At Carnegie Mellon University, she curated 29 Chains to the Moon and Intimate Science, exhibitions about artists’ solutions for global problems.
Through her writing and curating, she frequently engages themes of art, science, and social change. She has served on panels for the Pew, Rauschenberg, and Pulitzer Foundations, and taught at the University of Houston and Texas Southern University. She is a past fellow of the Warhol Foundation, Center for Curatorial Leadership, and Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Syracuse University.
Photo: Sean Zanni/PMc
Ross Bleckner
Ross Bleckner was born in New York City and raised in Hewlett, on Long Island. He received a Bachelor of Arts from New York University in 1971, and a Master of Fine Arts from Cal Arts in 1973.Bleckner has exhibited throughout the United States and Internationally at venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunsthalle, Zurich; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Reina Sofia, Madrid; L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern; and his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, among others.For seventeen years, Bleckner served as the president of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, a non-profit, community based, AIDS research and treatment center. And in 2009 he was awarded the title of Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations for his work helping to rehabilitate child soldiers in northern Uganda.Ross Bleckner lives and works in East Hampton, NY, and New York City.Eric Freeman
Eric Freeman (1970 – 2021) was born in Brooklyn, New York and after receiving a B.F.A from Tuffts University, he split his time between Sagaponack and New York City. He exhibited nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, Stefan Stux Gallery, NYC, Glenn Horowitz Booksellers Gallery, East Hampton, NY, Western Project, Culver City, NY, Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland and Gallery 56, Budapest, Hungary. His work is included in the collections of Guild Hall, the Parrish Art Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, and Saatchi Gallery, London.
Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
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Hamptons Magazine
Wine and spirits generously provided by Amagansett Wine & Spirits, Cornelia and Ralph Heins, Amante 1530, and Wölffer Estate Vineyards.
