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.

Ross Bleckner: Building Up Courage (working title) highlights a lesser-known part of the artist’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.

Exhibition Walkthrough & Book Launch with Melanie Crader and Liane Thatcher

Please join Melanie Crader, Guild Hall museum director and curator of visual arts and Liane Thatcher, Mary Heilmann’s Studio Director of over 25 years, for an exhibition walkthrough of Heilmann’s exhibition Water Way. This conversation will coincide with the launch of Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973-2019, the first publication dedicated to Heilmann’s works on paper practice which feature many of the works included in the artist’s Guild Hall exhibition.

Books are available both signed and unsigned in advance as an add on to your ticket purchase, or unsigned in-person while supplies last. To add the book to your purchase, choose the “Products” tab before checking out. Books are $48 signed, and $38 unsigned, plus tax.