The Must-See Shows in the Hamptons This Summer
- Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill
- Through September 14, 2026
In tandem with Biggers’s exhibition, the Parrish Art Museum is also restaging Dennis Oppenheim‘s epic earthwork Wishing the Mountains Madness in the Parrish Meadow, with related documentation—including aerial photographs and maps—displayed in the museum lobby. Oppenheim was a pioneering American conceptual artist whose restless practice spanned Land Art, performance, body art, photography, film, installation and large-scale public sculpture. In the late 1960s, he became closely associated with Land Art, working directly in fields, snow, soil and other outdoor environments to create temporary interventions that often survive only through photographs, maps and films. First realized in 1977 as an ephemeral intervention during a visiting artist workshop at the University of Montana, the original work consisted of 54-foot-wide plywood stars distributed across a grassy, two-acre hillside. Some were painted white, while others appeared in pale shades of red or blue. While nodding to the nation’s bicentennial the previous year, the work also suggests a cosmic upheaval in which the stars have fallen to earth. The title refers to what Oppenheim saw as a jarring contrast between Montana’s “very beautiful and serene” natural landscape and the diversity and energy of New York City in the late 1970s—a kind of creative “madness” he felt was missing from the region’s bucolic lifestyle. On June 14, during Community Day, which also coincided with Flag Day, visitors were invited to participate in the reenactment by freely placing sculptures referencing the current fifty-star flag across the museum’s meadow. The project was conceived to celebrate “the expanse of the sky above earth, freedom in general, and freedom of expression—values and aspirations embedded in the spirit of the nation,” according to Amy Oppenheim, who now leads the Dennis Oppenheim Estate.
