The Arts Remain Big Business on the East End
It was a windy winter night, but even though it was cold outside, it was crowded inside The Church, at 48 Madison Street in Sag Harbor. A creative arts and community center just off Main Street, The Church is part museum, part meeting place and part teaching venue, as well as one of Sag Harbor’s arts anchors.
“I think the arts play a significant role. You bring people from all over,” Kristen Santori, communications and outreach manager for The Church, says as people mill around. “That influences local businesses and shops.”
While the East End may be known for its beaches and summer homes, arts centers remain key downtown anchors all year long. They provide community and commerce, often on or near a village’s Main Street.
From a newly renovated Guild Hall in East Hampton to The Church in Sag Harbor, the arts are big draws and central elements of commerce for the East End downtown economy. Venues are being renovated, in some cases revived, not quite in a Renaissance, but a sign that the arts remain a key aspect of the East End.
“There’s no place on Earth like here — from its history to its present. Main Street is the window into its very complicated soul,” Julie Keyes, owner of Keyes Art, a gallery on Main Street in Sag Harbor, says. “When you walk into a town anywhere in the world, you can tell what the town is about by the stores on Main Street.”
While antique stores, diners and second-hand shops might make up a typical Main Street, art galleries and the arts often are prime components of East End downtowns.
Contributing to this are the many artists who live on the East End, attracted by everything from the light to the lifestyle, but also by a community of galleries and gallery-goers. And then there’s the disposable income of visitors eager to find art on the East End.
The Church, led by Executive Director Sheri Pasquarella and Chief Curator Sara Cochran, is an example of an arts anchor attracting crowds to art by often well-known, as well as some lesser known, local artists.
The Julie Keyes gallery is located on a kind of Sag Harbor gallery row near the Laura Grenning, Mark Borghi and Sarah Nightingale galleries all not far from The Church.
“Everyone has something very different. And we all want the other one to achieve (success),” Keyes says of the different looks and specialties of the galleries. “The streets are crowded today. The galleries are doing well.”
She adds that the pandemic and the internet, as people work from home, resulted in more full-time residents, benefiting the arts and economy, regardless of the season. While beaches depend on warmer weather for most of their attraction, art is a magnet all year long.
“So much has (been) altered forever. There are more year-round residents,” Keyes says. “If you work in middle management, finance, the arts, you can work part of the week online.”
The presence of artists also fuels the role of the arts in the region, historically and today.
Keyes says the owner of a local horse farm recently told her that his dentist, who had been Willem de Kooning’s dentist, had paintings worth seeing.
“The Hamptons are one of the great places to sell art,” Keyes says.
Other forms of art, too, have their place on East End Main Streets. Cinemas may be under fire as Netflix lets viewers be an armchair movie-goer in their own living rooms, but the Sag Harbor Cinema, following a fire, has been rebuilt and reborn as a nonprofit. This cinema, at 90 Main Street in Sag Harbor, has made a comeback.
“It was a big community effort to get that renovated,” Santori says. “It’s reopened, and it’s an integral part of Sag Harbor.”
A “community-based cinema,” it is a nonprofit whose Green Room provides a third-floor bar and a place to get together. The cinema is raising money creatively, including by offering naming rights to seats. A Cinephile Card offers admission to regular screenings, but not to special events, at the venue, which also offers Southampton Town resident discounts.
“Our members are the beating heart of Sag Harbor Cinema,” is the way the cinema puts it.
The history of artists and culture, in places like Sag Harbor, also makes art part of the DNA of these downtowns today and in the past.
“There are a great deal of artists out here: de Kooning and Pollock changed the art world. Before de Kooning, the art world was based in Paris,” Keyes says. “Then it was based in New York and the East End.”
Guild Hall, a museum, performing arts and education center founded in 1931, after being closed for renovation, has reopened its galleries and is in the midst of its own Renaissance.
“They just renovated it, and now it’s back,” Keyes says. “It’s a lovely place.”
Guild Hall, a nonprofit that typically presents more than 200 programs and hosts 60,000 visitors a year, has completed most of a $29 million capital improvement project.
Renovated galleries, grounds, classrooms and offices opened in July 2023. Work on the John Drew Theater is expected to be completed this July.
If places are important, though, it’s the people who have secured the East End’s place in culture. Keyes says people still ask how she can get access to “fantastic pieces by de Kooning, Pollack and Larry Rivers.”
“It’s January in the Hamptons. And I’m talking to people all day long about Larry Rivers, de Kooning and Pollock,” Keyes says. “They come here for it.”
Restaurants blend with art galleries in downtowns such as Sag Harbor, including the American Hotel and the Corner Bar. While the book The Art of the Deal may be famous, it’s the deal of the art as well that seems to matter here.
“Designers come from all over the world to Sag Harbor to purchase art,” Keyes says. “We have great access to New York, but it’s a kinder place.”