Join us for a book launch celebrating the release of Liberty Labs, a new publication tracing the birth and evolution of the shared design and fabrication studio housed in a 19th-century warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Founded as a collaborative workspace for designers, makers, and artists, Liberty Labs has grown into a dynamic creative community shaped by experimentation, shared resources, and collective exchange.

The book explores Red Hook’s early industrial history and the neighborhood’s transformation alongside the founding and ethos of Liberty Labs. Through essays, archival material, and rich visual documentation, the publication highlights the practices, biographies, and projects of both past and present members of the collective, offering insight into the studio’s collaborative model and creative output across disciplines.

Copies of Liberty Labs will be available for purchase at the event, and guests will have the opportunity to celebrate the publication with members of the Liberty Labs community.

This program is free with Museum admission.

A collective soundtrack created by neighbors, visitors, strangers, and friends.

Join us for a vinyl listening and music-sharing gathering hosted by Liberty Labs member Joel Seigle—industrial designer and custom sound system builder.

Remember vinyl? The weight of it. The crackle before the needle settles. This is an invitation to slow down and listen together. Bring a record or two—old favorites, rare finds, beloved classics, borrowed gems, inherited oddities, or total mysteries you’ve never actually played. If it’s on vinyl, it belongs here.

We’ll take turns and share the room. No playlists. No skipping ahead. Just sound, stories, and the quiet thrill of hearing something new through someone else’s ears.

Come as you are. Bring what you love (or what confuses you). Let’s listen together.

$12 / $10 for Seniors, 65+
Free for Members, Children, and Students

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Joel Seigle is a designer and maker whose practice is shaped by a balance between nature and urban culture. Raised outside Chicago in a family connected to the lumber trade and trained in industrial design at Pratt Institute, his work spans a range of materials while maintaining a clean, modern aesthetic.

Evan Yee is a founding member of Liberty Labs and a Brooklyn-based artist and fabricator who grew up between Oakland, California, and Sag Harbor, New York. His practice evolved from painting into multimedia sculpture, installation, and metalworking, which now anchors his work.

This exhibition marks the first major institutional solo presentation of Eric Freeman’s work in the East End, where the artist lived and worked for many years. Freeman’s radiant abstractions transform color into planes of light and pigment that construct space rather than merely depict it. Layers of luminous varnish and saturated tone generate a visual depth that feels structural—at times almost architectural—drawing viewers into fields of color defined by both intensity and calm.

The Volume of Color brings together a selection of paintings alongside a small group of furniture pieces designed by Freeman, revealing a practice shaped by the productive tension between control and emotion, precision and presence. His work enters into quiet dialogue with the legacies of Josef Albers, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, and James Turrell. Freeman’s subtly modulated surfaces, sleek yet unmistakably hand-painted, balance intellectual rigor with sensory immediacy, collapsing distinctions between painting, object, and environment.

Presented following the artist’s death in 2021, the exhibition honors Freeman’s sustained contribution to contemporary abstraction and affirms his lasting connection to the East End’s artistic landscape, where his work quietly expanded the possibilities of color, light, and spatial experience.

This exhibition is co-curated by artist Nathan Dillworth and 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.

GALLERY HOURS:
WEDNESDAY TO SUNDAY, 12-5 PM from August 9-September 6
THURSDAY TO SUNDAY, 12-5 PM from September 10-October 27

NEW: Third Thursdays! On the third Thursday of every month from May through September, galleries will stay open until 7:30 PM, and will include live music in the garden and exhibition-related programs to follow.

MUSEUM ADMISSION:
$12 / $10 for Seniors, 65+
Free for Members, Children, and Students

 

Michael Butler is the Top Honors recipient of the 85th Artist Members Exhibition, selected by Storm Ascher, independent curator, writer, and founder of Superposition Gallery and the Hamptons Black Arts Council.

A self-taught artist with a strong interest in art and history, Butler has exhibited widely over the past three decades. His small-scale narrative paintings draw on mythology, religion, dreams, and storytelling to illuminate overlooked histories—particularly those of enslaved and Indigenous communities on the East End. Rooted in the belief that the past remains a living part of the present, Butler’s work gives visual form to the lives and events often left undocumented. Descended from a Sag Harbor family whose presence dates to the 1920s, Butler has made the village his full-time home since 1988.

Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Butler describes his practice as narrative or “intuitive” painting. Through a sense of wonder, he constructs imagined realities that merge historical fact and creative vision—echoing a poetic, dreamlike spirit while asserting a distinctly contemporary voice. Butler’s practice reimagines collective memory as an active, evolving narrative, transforming fragments of history into visual allegories that connect personal lineage with broader cultural identity.

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.

GALLERY HOURS:
THURSDAY TO SUNDAY, 12-5 PM

MUSEUM ADMISSION:
$12 / $10 for Seniors, 65+
Free for Members, Children, and Students