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 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.