While its disruption was a mere inconvenience compared to the worldwide life and death consequences of COVID-19, the New York art scene still sank out of sight for months during the severe pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Social distancing and crowd control shut down museums and made traditional gallery shows impossible. Yet the warm weather months threw the industry a life preserver. Once the spring and summer temps of 2020 hit, galleries set sail for the Hamptons. Beach clubs and yacht slips soon stood in for white walls and track lighting as outdoor shows and the occasional auction quite literally breathed fresh air into the five boroughs’ ailing art world.
Dobrosława Nowak, founder and CEO of The Italian Art Guide, tells Observer that it wasn’t only the New York galleries who fled the city for Long Island in 2020. “Some wealthy collectors temporarily moved to the Hamptons. When collectors moved, galleries, auction houses and dealers followed by opening pop-ups or seasonal locations. Over the last five years, the Hamptons became a focused luxury market with art leading the way.”
Nowak cited the prime example of the powerful Pace Gallery opening a temporary 1,700-square-foot exhibition space in East Hampton Village. While Pace representatives didn’t respond to questions, Jess Frost, executive director of The Arts Center at Duck Creek, explains that Pace transformed the Vered Gallery space (originally established in 1977) into a specially designed white-cube that operated during the two COVID seasons: “They mounted ambitious exhibitions there, including a memorable Arlene Shechet sculpture show that felt every bit as serious as her last show in New York City.”
And the Hamptons effort was enough of a success for the gallery to maintain a presence out east. “I think a lot of [Hamptons] folks who were less familiar with the contemporary art scene had their horizons expanded that summer,” Frost adds. “It’s really easy to get myopic when you live here full time.”
Frost and Nowak do acknowledge that the Hamptons were an art destination in their own right before Manhattan’s COVID exodus, but agree that the pandemic forged an irreversible evolution. “Before 2020, the Hamptons already had a rich artistic history, with institutions such as the Parrish Art Museum and a long tradition of artists living and working on the East End,” Nowak points out. “However, its commercial gallery scene remained relatively modest. The pandemic sped up the Hamptons’ shift from a seasonal cultural destination to a significant node in the international art market.”
Frost celebrates the spotlight COVID turned on Long Island as the region took advantage of an unexpected opportunity: “COVID helped people realize that the Hamptons already had galleries with serious curatorial programs. Places like Halsey McKay and The Drawing Room weren’t simply responding to market trends. They’d been building thoughtful exhibitions for years.”
Jamie Marks, senior vice president at Proper Hospitality and spokesperson for the Montauk Yacht Club, points to that hotel as an example of an emerging art venue growing out of the Hamptons’ post-COVID identity. This summer, it expanded beyond hospitality to become a cultural destination via a new partnership with the artist-driven brand Platform. The site’s most recent solo exhibition featured new works by Brooklyn-based artist Joe Henry Baker.
Marks believes the demand for art outside the city hasn’t gone anywhere, but what replaced that first COVID-driven wave of permanent and satellite galleries is now more interesting. “The energy out east shifted toward a more flexible model with rotating exhibitions, artist collaborations and cultural programming that actually responds to the season and the community,” she says. “That’s the most exciting evolution… we’re not building static experiences. We’re building ecosystems that respond to the cultural moment, whether we’re at Art Basel Miami, Frieze L.A. or in Montauk with Platform and Joe Henry Baker.”
Offering an artist’s perspective, Chiara Rossetti—founder of Rossetti Art—stresses that COVID proved that a real market could exist outside the traditional Gallery District model: “That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s helped independent, direct-to-collector artists like me. Some of that energy in the Hamptons has cooled since 2021, but it left behind more legitimacy for art transactions happening outside Chelsea/Uptown. It drove private studio visits; direct sales; and artists building their own collector relationships rather than routing everything through a gallery. That’s the part of the story that outlasted the pop-ups themselves.”
Rossetti sees the Hamptons seasonal set-ups still around today treating the region as a priority second market worthy of consistent programming and ongoing relationships, instead of a seasonal overflow space for whatever a Chelsea space can’t fit.
Though the trend of city galleries and art spaces heading east in the warmer months naturally slowed once the pandemic abated, Nowak insists that there’s still sufficient Hamptons collector demand to sustain the satellite spaces. As a result, while the Hamptons are no longer the emergency alternative made necessary by COVID, it remains an important art destination forever evolved by the struggles of five years ago.
More importantly, Nowak says, the concept of decamping galleries took root and is now a strategy available to dealers chasing business. “After the pandemic, galleries around the world are more willing to meet collectors wherever they are geographically.”
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