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The Women Who Built the Hamptons Art Scene

Without these artists, philanthropists, gallerists and curators, the East End of Long Island might still belong to potato farmers.

In a way, it all started with a railroad. In another way there were too many forces to count that made the East End of Long Island—familiarly known as the Hamptons, or “out East” to locals—a globally recognized arts scene, but women were essential. In a changing society, women had choices and mobility they’d never had before; many turned toward the arts.

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In 1870, the Long Island Railroad ran a line that expanded service from New York all the way eastwards to the farming and seafaring towns of Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. In 1884, Mary and Thomas Moran were among the first artists to set up easels in East Hampton. Others followed. The pristine landscape with wide, flat fields of green and never-ending skies surrounded by waterways creates the kind of light that inspired the Dutch masters.

“It’s the power of the beauty of the landscape out here. It tends to make people notice it and work with it,” April Gornik, a contemporary painter and one of the women who keeps the Hamptons arts scene vibrant, told Observer. “It’s the light, but the light results from the fact of it being the end of an island that jumps out into the Atlantic. And then the way that everything spreads out. To me, it’s like an exhalation.”

After living and working out East for some 40 years, Gornik and her husband, artist Eric Fischl, founded The Church, a nonprofit multidisciplinary arts venue in Sag Harbor. Her curatorial work has deepened her sense of the history of women........

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