James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation Donates Art Holdings, Archives to Parrish Art Museum
In 1947, the Abstract Expressionists James Brooks and Charlotte Park first spent a summer in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, because “Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner were urging them to come,” Terrie Sultan, the director of the Parrish Art Museum, said in an interview. Pollock and Krasner made their pitch by saying, “this is such a great place to work, there’s a really strong community here, but no one really gets in the way of you being in the studio,” Sultan continued. The two newcomers “worked on this tiny little shack on the Montauk bluffs,” and by 1957 “they had moved to Springs”—a hamlet in East Hampton—“and established themselves as very key members of the artistic community out here.”
Now, 70 years after that first summer, a large collection of works by the artists are headed to the Parrish, in Water Mill (another Hamptons hamlet), from the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation, which was established in 2010 to handle their legacies and art holdings after Park’s death at the age of 92. (Brooks died in 1992, aged 85.) In a rare move, the foundation has decided to give all of its assets, including its art and archives, to the Parrish, and to dissolve. . .