Impressions Transferred: Lasting Legacies of Robert Rauschenberg presents a selection of works from Guild Hall’s permanent collection, complemented by loans from friends, peers, and others closely connected to Rauschenberg and Guild Hall. Together, they celebrate his influence and legacy. The recently published book I Don’t Think About Being Great: Selected Writings, featuring reproductions of Rauschenberg’s handwritten notes, offers a compelling testament to his impact in his own words.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg (1925–2008) studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina before relocating to New York, where he redefined the possibilities of art making. His practice blurred distinctions between painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and printmaking, often incorporating everyday materials such as fabric, found objects, magazine images, and photographic transfers. In 2005 Guild Hall presented Robert Rauschenberg: Hoarfrosts, a focused exhibition of his ethereal fabric works. His engagement with the East End was fostered through friendships and collaborations with figures such as the cultural critic John Jonas Gruen, who documented the vibrant artistic circles of Long Island and New York.

Presented as part of Rauschenberg 100, the global centennial celebration of the artist’s birth, this exhibition honors the artist’s vision of collaboration, experimentation, and social engagement. His innovative approach made him an ideal touchstone for Guild Hall’s Teaching Artists Program, which developed artworks inspired by his practice, such as those on view in the Student Art Festival exhibition. Through this initiative Rauschenberg’s legacy continues to inspire artists and students to explore and create without limits.

As we mark this moment of reflection, Impressions Transferred celebrates Rauschenberg as both visionary artist and dynamic connector. Through his work and through his own words in I Don’t Think About Being Great, we are invited to observe, respond, and carry forward his spirit of generosity and innovation.

This exhibition is organized by Melanie Crader, museum director and curator of visual arts, with support from Philippa Content, museum manager and registrar, and Claire Hunter, museum coordinator and curatorial associate.

Ross Bleckner emerged as a leading artist in New York during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, creating paintings that explore change, loss, memory, and the human body. A central figure in the decade’s revival of painting, he developed a practice that merges psychological, social, and political themes within a strong conceptual framework. In 1995, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a mid-career retrospective of his work, underscoring his importance in contemporary art.

This exhibition highlights a lesser-known part of Bleckner’s process, offering new insight into one of the most prolific painters of our time. Bleckner begins by making his own paint and testing it on black paper, where the experimental brushwork often produces striking results. From there, he creates a series of small canvases that gradually increase in scale, leading to the large paintings for which he is best known.

Over decades, this approach has yielded hundreds—if not thousands—of works. Guild Hall presents a selection of these rarely seen studies alongside major large-scale paintings. While rooted in process, the smaller works stand powerfully on their own. Together, they reveal the breadth of Bleckner’s artistic vision, offering an expansive view of his practice across time—an illustrated timeline through painting.

This exhibition is organized by Melanie Crader, museum director and curator of visual arts, with support from Philippa Content, museum manager and registrar and Claire Hunter, museum coordinator and curatorial associate.

Claire Watson is the 2023 Top Honors recipient of the 84th Artist Members Exhibition, selected by Virginia Lebermann, cofounder and board president of Ballroom Marfa. This exhibition marks Watson’s first major institutional solo presentation on the East End of Long Island, where she has maintained a home and studio in Water Mill for three decades.

Watson’s sculptures and mixed-media assemblages are composed from found materials. In her recent work, she deconstructs salvaged leather garments and reconfigures them into new formal compositions using traditional sewing and pattern-making techniques. These works highlight the tactile and structural qualities of leather, transforming utilitarian objects into forms with renewed expressive potential. The traces of wear embedded in the garments suggest histories of the body and labor, which Watson refashions into abstract meditations on human form and presence.

This exhibition is organized by Melanie Crader, museum director and curator of visual arts, with support from Philippa Content, museum manager and registrar and Claire Hunter, museum coordinator and curatorial associate.

This exhibition traces a decade of evolution in the artist’s practice since his 2016 residency at Guild Hall, the inaugural program of our Artist in Residence initiative. Known for his saturated color, reflective surfaces, and emotionally charged scenes drawn from daily life and memory, Niles has developed a distinctive visual language that challenges conventions of portraiture.

Early in his career, he became frustrated with traditional methods of rendering skin tone, finding they lacked the depth and dimension he observed in real life. This led him to experiment with color—layering pinks, oranges, and purples to evoke an internal light. His chiaroscuro-like approach reveals both a dedication to craft and a palette that defines his work across portraits, domestic interiors, and landscapes.

Guild Hall is pleased to present a selection of works from the past decade, juxtaposing recent and earlier pieces which highlight the growth and complexity of Niles’s practice.

This exhibition is organized by Melanie Crader, museum director and curator of visual arts, with support from Philippa Content, museum manager and registrar and Claire Hunter, museum coordinator and curatorial associate.

Jason Bard Yarmosky’s work centers on themes of aging, time, and memory—subjects the artist has been fascinated with since childhood. Born in 1987 in New York, Yarmosky developed a connection to these ideas through his close relationship with his grandparents, who were six decades his senior. Growing up, he often visited museums where he noticed the historical aspect of idealized beauty, which often emphasized youth, yet he yearned for a varied perspective that reflected a broader personal experience.

For over ten years, his grandparents were the subjects of his portraits, helping him explore the complex aspects of growing older including vulnerability, care, wisdom, and humor. These works became a celebration of aging, resisting cultural tendencies that diminish joy, individuality, and dignity in later life.

Through his practice, Yarmosky mixes traditional 17th- and 18th-century painting techniques with contemporary imagery, incorporating dreamlike elements, theatrical costume, and staged interiors that heighten a sense of intimacy. The use of costuming functions as a throughline in his work: it both conceals and reveals, able to disguise or bring out aspects of identity. The play of masks, uniforms, and imagined roles underscores how play is often discouraged as one grows older, yet reclaimed in the freedom of later life.

Yarmosky’s paintings move between tenderness and absurdity, between the heaviness of mortality and moments of celebration. His imagery suggests that humor and imagination persist even in the face of loss, and that through portraiture, costume, and the space of the interior, stories of aging are both preserved and transformed.

Yarmosky has visited the East End of Long Island since early childhood. Long known as an area of respite, he returned to his family’s home—architect Andrew Geller’s iconic Double Diamond House—in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, following the passing of his grandparents, as a restorative experience for his life and practice.

This exhibition is organized by Melanie Crader, museum director and curator of visual arts, with support from Philippa Content, museum manager and registrar and Claire Hunter, museum coordinator and curatorial associate.