FLAG Art Foundation and Parrish Art Museum Plan New Exhibition Partnership

The New York–based FLAG Art Foundation and the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, have announced a new partnership that will see the two organizations collaborate on three exhibitions annually beginning next year and extending until 2030.

The exhibitions will be jointly organized by the Parrish’s curatorial team and that of the FLAG Foundation and will be staged in two adjoining galleries at the Hamptons museum. The inaugural exhibition, a solo exhibition for Ellsworth Kelly featuring work from across his eight-decade career, will open in March 2026.

The partnership builds on an existing one that launched last year when the Parrish and FLAG launched an exhibition series, titled “FRESH PAINT,” featuring a previously unshown work by a contemporary artist. That collaboration was so fruitful that the two institutions have decided to expand it further.

“Teamwork and working together is something that I have always cherished, and much of my business career has been driven by partnerships,” FLAG Art Foundation founder Glenn Fuhrman told ARTnews in a recent Zoom interview. “FLAG is certainly built on the nature of partnerships. We’re all bringing together different things.”

“It’s worked very well, which is why we are expanding,” said Parrish executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut.

Additionally, the museum’s Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Parrish will now be officially called The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. Ramírez-Montagut said she had suggested the named position as a “talent retention” tool, adding that “as a regional museum hitting above its weight, with very talented curators doing tremendous work, we need to make sure that we continue to be attractive to museum professionals and keep them working at a regional level.”

That position will be held by Scout Hutchinson, who joined the Parrish in October 2024. Hutchinson has worked with FLAG on several “Fresh Paint” exhibitions. Hutchinson has frequently conducted studio visits with FLAG’s director Jonathan Rider as part of the organization of the series, many of which the two have co-curated.

“This is another way of thinking about how to support artistic practice beyond our brick-and-mortar space,” Rider said. “Our mission is all about how to support contemporary practice in all forms, and the idea of being able to do three more museum-caliber exhibitions per year is incredibly exciting for us at this time.”

“The teamwork has been a wonderful partnership for us,” Hutchinson said. “Being able to partner with other small but mighty teams like [the one] at the FLAG Art Foundation is a way to bounce ideas around together and grow our curatorial experience here at the Parrish.”

The Kelly show, produced with the artist’s estate and his gallery, Matthew Marks, is “something really special,” Fuhrman said. “Ellsworth spent a lot of time in the Hamptons. He knew and loved the community very well.”

Ramírez-Montagut said they decided on Kelly as the first show in part because of his ties to the East End, as the museum often highlights artists with connections to this part of Long Island.

Fuhrman, who has a family home in the Hamptons, has been visiting the East End for decades, since he graduated college, and over the years, he began visiting the region’s museums, including the Parrish. He soon befriended the museum’s previous director, Terrie Sultan, and their bond eventually led Fuhrman to agree to a long-term loan of two sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein, Tokyo Brushstroke I & II (1994), that have stood outside the museum since 2014. Over the years, he would loan other works like Isa Genzken’s Two Orchids (2015/16).

After Sultan departed the museum in 2021, Fuhrman thought his involvement with the Parrish—beyond the Lichtenstein loan—might fizzle out as can happen during a leadership change. But Ramírez-Montagut contacted him soon after starting in 2022.

“From the very beginning, I walked out of that first meeting saying, ‘This is an exciting moment for the museum. This is going to be a new vision, a new eye toward the future,’” Fuhrman recalled. “I was excited to see if I could just even be a little bit supportive.”

That initial conversation ultimately led to the launch, with Fuhrman’s FLAG Art Foundation, of the “Fresh Paint” series in 2024. Staged in the lobby and open to the public free of charge, the shows are based on ones held through FLAG’s “Spotlight” initiative. “Fresh Paint” has seen the two organizations partner on single-work shows for artists like Lauren Halsey, Derrick Adams, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Raven Halfmoon, and Rudolf Stingel.

Ramírez-Montagut said the series interested her because it runs counter to how museums usually operate. Most institutions plan exhibitions years in advance, not only to appropriately research a given artist or subject, but also to fundraise for them. “We were missing having that finger on the pulse, being there with the national discourse, and being able to be responsive to what’s happening with more immediacy,” she said.

When she arrived, Ramírez-Montagut was interested in thinking through what the Parrish would contribute to its audiences, both the local community that lives on the East End year-round and the wealthy summer crowd, which often includes members of the international art world. Ramírez-Montagut noted that the Parrish serves a 50-mile radius and works with five school districts.

“We are the leading regional museum,” she said. “The Parrish is an institution with two arms: the left arm is the year-round community that we’re there to serve, and the right arm is programming art of the highest caliber possible to be able to meet the expectations of art experts, many of whom come to the Hamptons in the summer.”

She added, “The way that we’ve been programming the museum is by embracing that dichotomy.”  

The continued focus on year-round programming is one aspect of the new exhibition collaboration with Flag, which will stage three exhibitions annually. The first will typically run from February/March to June, the second from July to October/November, and the third around the holiday season. The partnership, Ramírez-Montagut, allows “us to start building that high-caliber program through the whole year.”

This is not the first time that FLAG has collaborated with an institution in order to support contemporary art. Since 2018, Fuhrman has partnered with fellow collector Suzanne Deal Booth on the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which she had launched in 2016. That prize is awarded biannually and comes with $200,000 as well as a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Austin, which co-organizes the prize, and FLAG in New York.

Fuhrman, who likened his involvement to being at the “35,000-foot level,” said that he sees the partnership with Parrish as a potential model for other museums. He likened it to the support he and his wife, Amanda, gave to the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia several years ago that allowed it to go admission free.

“If this leads to five other partnerships with between private foundations and five other museums around the country, more power to it,” Fuhrman said. “That just leads to better exhibitions, better support for museums, better support for artists. That would be a great victory for us.”

Ramírez-Montagut added, “It not only checks a lot of boxes, but it does it in a different way that perhaps museums are not so used to operating. That opens the possibilities for other museums to see that there are different ways of operating.”