A Season in Light: The Parrish Art Museum’s Transformative Year of Exhibitions

Unfolding like a masterfully curated portfolio, the Parrish Art Museum’s 2025 season radiates with modern brilliance and contemporary relevance. Framed by its striking cedar-clad architecture and deep-rooted connection to the creative legacy of the Hamptons, the museum continues to draw collectors, curators, artists, and patrons into a dialogue shaped by time, place, and light. Throughout the year, the Parrish presents a dynamic array of temporary exhibitions, from fresh installations drawn from its world-class collection of more than 4,500 works to focused retrospectives and group shows that explore timely, resonant themes.

This year, the Museum widens its aperture, offering not just exhibitions, but experiences that speak across disciplines and continents. Through five distinct programs spanning abstraction, photography, collectible automotive design, and meditative minimalism, the Parrish positions itself not merely as a regional institution, but as a cultural interlocutor.  It is a place where legacy meets experimentation and intimacy meets innovation.

This is not simply an art season. It is a statement: that the Hamptons remain an incubator of artistic relevance.  The Parish Art Museum is a place where reflection is possible, curiosity is cultivated, and cultural conversation is always in motion.

Shirin Neshat: Born of Fire
April 20 – September 1, 2025

This spring, the Museum plays host to Born of Fire, a quietly powerful solo exhibition by Shirin Neshat, one of the most resonant voices in contemporary photography and video art. The Iranian-American artist has long been recognized for her elegant black-and-white portraiture layered with Persian calligraphy and her cinematic video narratives that navigate the intersections of displacement, gender, and spirituality.

At the Parrish, Neshat’s presence underscores the Museum’s ongoing global outlook, placing East End light in conversation with voices from beyond its shore. While the full installation remains purposefully elusive, what it evokes is unmistakable: the emotional topography of exile, resilience, and remembrance.

Neshat’s subjects, predominantly women are rendered with both strength and vulnerability, occupying the liminal space between silence and speech. In their eyes and inscriptions, we find stories not just told, but held. The Parrish becomes, in this moment, a sanctuary for voices too often unanchored—a place where grace and gravity coexist.

Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk
May 11 – September 21, 2025
The season’s curatorial crescendo arrives with Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk, a landmark retrospective that brings one of abstraction’s most architectural and poetic minds back to the terrain that helped shape him. Organized by Executive Director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Ph.D., and Associate Curator Kaitlin Halloran, the exhibition assembles over 70 works, anchoring Scully’s multi-decade journey in the seminal summer of 1982.

It was during his time at The Edward F. Albee Foundation that Scully first engaged with Montauk’s natural quietude. Departing from the strict geometries of his earlier urban works, he embraced the textures and impermanence of the rural landscape, painting directly on found wood, assembling multi-panel compositions that feel at once constructed and intuitive. These rarely seen works now return home, joined by pieces from his Wall of Light, Landline, and newly introduced Tower series.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue from Hatje Cantz offers rich essays by Deborah Solomon and Steven Henry Madoff, along with a spirited dialogue between Scully and Ramírez-Montagut, opening a window into the artist’s rigorous yet lyrical worldview.

On July 25, the Museum hosted Windows and Openings, a special evening with Scully in the Lichtenstein Theater. With characteristic candor and gravity, he traced the evolution of the window as both metaphor and motif, from 1973’s Windows to 2022’s Dark Windows. For Scully, a painted frame is never simply a surface. It is a portal through which structure, memory, and emotion emerge and dissolve.

Parrish Art Museum & Hedley Studios: Automotive Experience
July 3 – August 23, 2025

Outside the galleries, the Museum’s grounds offered a wholly different aesthetic encounter: motion. In a first-of-its-kind partnership, the Parrish collaborated with Hedley Studios to present Automotive Experience which is a sculptural installation of electric automobiles that married mechanical ingenuity with reverent design.

Featured were three limited-edition electric vehicles: the Bugatti Baby II, an artful 75% scale tribute to the 1924 Type 35; the Aston Martin DB5 J, evoking the mystique of Bond-era elegance; and the Ferrari Testa Rossa J, constructed in collaboration with Ferrari Classiche and built from original 1957 blueprints, using hand-rolled aluminium.

More than collectibles, these vehicles stood as kinetic sculptures.  They are objects that echo the language of fine art while retaining the craftsmanship and precision of master engineering. Hedley Studios, led by founder Ben Hedley, remains the only workshop licensed by Aston Martin, Bentley, Bugatti, and Ferrari to recreate icons of automotive history with such reverence.

On August 8, Ben Hedley will appear at the Museum for a Collectors’ Talk, offering deeper insight into how function, legacy, and aesthetics can inhabit the same form. In doing so, the Parrish reaffirms its commitment to expanding the definition of art, welcoming innovation without abandoning tradition.

James Howell: The Infinite in Gray
September 14, 2025 – February 8, 2025

The season closes with subtle radiance. The Infinite in Gray is the first major retrospective of the late American painter James Howell (1935–2014), whose work invites quiet contemplation and slow looking. Howell’s journey, from figurative beginnings in the 1960s to the meditative gray-on-gray abstractions of his final years unfolds as a practice in restraint and refinement.

Where others seek spectacle, Howell offers stillness. His monochromes, built from mathematical pigment systems and informed by spiritual inquiry, are not static they shimmer with perceptual depth. With every tonal shift, he beckons the viewer into a deeper state of presence. These are not simply paintings; they are quiet revelations.

Curated by Kaitlin Halloran and Scout Hutchinson, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and rare prints, presenting Howell’s full vocabulary of silence and structure. The show is accompanied by a documentary, Thoughts of Infinity, directed by Halina Dyrschka, and a scholarly catalogue co-published with Hatje Cantz.

“Everything is interrelated, nothing is isolated,” Howell once remarked. This exhibition honors that conviction, rendering it in texture, tone, and time.

A Museum in Motion

What emerges from this ambitious season is more than a series of exhibitions. It is a testament to the Parrish Art Museum’s evolving role as both custodian and catalyst. A place where historical memory, personal vision, and future curiosity are held in balance.

From the rigorous abstraction of Scully to the poetic activism of Neshat, from the contemplative geometry of Howell to the mechanical grace of Hedley’s electric masterpieces, the Museum engages its audience in layered encounters, each distinct, yet resonant.

In a moment when cultural institutions are called to be not only guardians of art but stewards of meaning, the Parrish remains quietly radiant, unhurried, unfailing, and unwavering in its belief that art, at its best, invites us not just to see, but to understand.