Peter Marino to Open New Arts Foundation and Museum in Southampton

As if his big opening reception for Counterpoint: Selections from The Peter Marino Collection at Southampton Arts Center wasn’t news enough on Friday, Hamptons architect and art collector Peter Marino announced that the exhibition was the first public reveal for Peter Marino Art Foundation.

This story is also covered on BehindtheHedges.com.

Housed next door to SAC at the long-vacant former Rogers Memorial Library building (at 11 Jobs Lane), Marino’s new space will feature a permanent public exhibition showcasing artworks from his vast collection, along with a rotating schedule of shows featuring local guest artists and collaborators. Peter Marino Art Foundation will also offer work in tandem with SAC to offer educational programming “aimed to engage visitors, younger audiences and students,” according to the announcement.

Marino plans to restore the two-story, nearly 8,000-square-foot building starting in September 2019. It was originally designed in 1895 by R.H. Robertson and opened to the public the following year as the Rogers Memorial Library.

Instantly recognizable for his leatherman attire reminiscent of Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, Marino is well known both as a patron of the arts and for his architectural work integrating site specific art commissions—a cross-disciplinary practice he pioneered.

The exhibition, on view at SAC through September 23, represents his first cultural contribution to Southampton, but it’s clearly only the beginning. Through the new foundation, Marino is seeking to integrate his lifelong involvement with art across disciplines and mediums with the local community.

Counterpoint comprises contemporary and modern works from Marino’s collection that influenced him personally, while also defining the cultural landscape of their time, he explains. Among them, the show features the first work Marino acquired from his friend Andy Warhol in 1978.

All the art is arranged in four galleries, each with a separate theme:

The Gardens Gallery serves as a connection to Southampton with imagery and sculptures from Marino’s Southampton gardens and images of his local architectural projects. The Pop Art Gallery features paintings and sculptures from notable Pop artists. The Treasury Room focuses on photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Marino’s sculptural bronze boxes. And the Modern German Art Gallery showcases a monumental Anselm Kiefer work and six paintings by Georg Baselitz.

The emphasis on Baselitz is consciously alligned with exhibitions held around the world this year, honoring the artist’s 80th birthday, including a Baselitz retrospective at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland and a show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, to which Marino loaned a work from his own collection.

Christophe Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice provides the exhibition’s soundtrack, drawing viewers from the Modern German Artists gallery to the adjacent theater where Francesco Clemente’s watercolor, “Elysian Fields,” hangs across the stage against a brilliant pink backdrop. This is one of the original sets Marino designed for his opera, produced at his New York home in 2013.

Marino is the Principal of Peter Marino Architect PLLC, the New York-based architecture firm he founded in 1978.

He was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and was honored with the insignia of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2017 for his work in art and architecture. Marino was also the recipient of the Museum of the City of New York’s City of Design Award and the Trophee des Arts Award from the French Institute Alliance Française also in 2017.

Marino is also Chairman of the Venetian Heritage Foundation and is currently supporting the restoration of three life-size Antonio Rizzo statues for the Ducal Palace.

Visit southamptonartscenter.org for more.

To read more about Peter Marino, Counterpoint and the Peter Marino Foundation, pick up our August 3 issue.