LongHouse Reserve Celebrates its 28th Season with Rites of Spring: Season Opening

Will Ryman, LongHouse 6 (2019)

LongHouse Reserve is excited to open its 28^th season with Rites of Spring on Saturday, April 27 from 1:00 to 5:00 PM.  The gardens will be filled with spectacular displays of flowering trees and showy daffodils that over 30 years have multiplied by hundreds of thousands.  The daffodils are now augmented with great swaths of tulips and other spring blooms making this a season not to be missed.  New art has been installed for the 2019 season and includes extraordinary works by Wendell Castle, Jun Kaneko, Joseph Walsh, Young Jae Lee, and Will Ryman.  LongHouse founder, Jack Lenor Larsen, noted textile designer, author and collector, created LongHouse Reserve on colonial farmland at the edge of East Hampton’s Northwest Woods and opened it to the public in 1992.   This unique outdoor museum and arboreta is one of the most popular cultural destinations on the East End of Long Island.

Making his debut at LongHouse Reserve is Will Ryman who has created a towering, site-specific “Rose” installation on the LongHouse Pyramid Plateau. Stemming from the artist’s internationally acclaimed exhibition, The Roses, 2011 on Park Avenue in New York City, Will Ryman’s monochrome red rose LongHouse 6, 2019 embodies a duality located in the cultural significance assigned to this flower. This romanticized symbol of beauty and perfection is at odds with the sculpture’s exaggerated size, hand worked quality, and the missing petals it has shed around its base. This duality, frequently at stake in Ryman’s work, reveals the imperfect and temporary nature of all things. 

Jun Kaneko’s “Dango” 1996, a gift to LongHouse from the Judith and Gerson Leiber Foundation will take center stage in the Edward Albee Amphitheater and a magnificent bronze bench by Wendell Castle will invite visitors to relax in the gardens.  Rites of Spring will also premiere “Vessels”, an exhibition of stunning ceramics by noted artist Young Jae Lee.   Joseph Walsh, the brilliant furniture designer from Cork, Ireland, has created a site-specific wall shelf for LongHouse, “Enignum Shelf XXXVI” that highlights his mastery of curvilinear forms.

LongHouse Reserve members will enjoy the “perk” of exploring the grounds the 1^st Saturday of each month (First Saturdays) 11:00AM-1:00PM.  LongHouse will also offer 15% off on new, renewal and gifts memberships from now until opening day on April 27.