John Graham, Mascara (1950), via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Divided into two opposite galleries inside the Parrish Art Museum’s sleek architecture, John Graham: Maverick Modernist, a comprehensive survey of the 20th century Ukrainian-American painter, offers a breakdown of the artist’s ever-evolving four-decade long career from 1920s and onward.  Curated by Alicia G. Longwell, the show recaps Graham’s defiant approach to Modernism, considering his sharp divergence from his dedication to modern art for the sake of figurative portraiture of female sitters in the 1940’s. Even then, at the height of his career, referring to Graham as a maverick would not be misguided: his models’ cross-eyed expressions, excessive make-ups, and mathematical details on their faces clash with easy readings as representational, and offer an intriguing historical context for much later practice in contemporary painting. (more…)

The new Parrish Museum building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is a sleek longhouse-inspired design, almost resembling an ultramodern chicken coop in Southampton. It hosts details such as a 600-foot-long outside wall of seamless concrete with a surface impression of wood grain, and the roof extends dramatically over a courtyard for outdoor events. The museum originally agreed to an $80 million design that was a host of connected buildings that would look like Long Island artist studios, but eventually requested the current iteration, costing just $26 million. (more…)