Arts & Entertainment

NY Mag: New Parrish Is an Unexpected Monument

Justin Davisonson writes, "Cancerous construction has eroded the East End's natural charms, but the new Parrish cultivates memory, linking the vanishing terrain outside with the painted land within."

The new Parrish Art Museum opened to the public last week, and the reviews have been pouring in, including from New York Magazine's Justin Davidson, who writes that, "The design springs from that milky East End radiance that has seduced artists from William Merritt Chase to Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, and Jane Freilicher."

Davidson lauds Swiss architects' Herzog & de Meuron's use of natural light.

"Museum curators are not generally fond of natural light, which has a disruptive habit of changing, shifting, and throwing down spatters of glare," he writes. "But the architects — and lighting designers from the engineering firm Arup — thought that perhaps art should be seen by the same light that painters use."

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  • RELATED: VIDEO: Get a Look at the New Parrish

Davidson also favors the landscape architecture:

"Part of the new Parrish’s allure is the precision with which the architects placed it in the meadow, a solid white bar pillowed on a living bed of green. The landscape architects at Reed Hilderbrand took a distinctively un-Hamptons-like approach: Instead of barricading the museum behind a high hedgerow, they swaddled it in tall grasses that, when they reach their full four-foot height, will hide nothing but muffle the traffic noise, soften the harsh stroke of roadway, and let the site flow into the vineyard beyond."

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Read the full review at nymag.com.


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