Cloud Watching at the Parrish Midsummer Gala

Written by:

Christine Schott

BFA / Featured Image: Allegra Sky Leguizamo, John Leguizamo, Sanford Biggers, Arana Hankin-Biggers

07/23/2026

The Parrish Art Museum built this year’s Midsummer Gala around a single image: clouds. The theme was “A Night in the Clouds,” synthetic cotton-and-wire clouds floated above the dinner tables on the museum’s terrace, and Sanford Biggers’ suspended cloud sculptures, currently on view in the museum’s largest gallery, served as the evening’s visual centerpiece.

On Saturday, July 18, the weather took the theme literally. Flash floods swept across the East End, forcing the annual benefit indoors. But if there was one place to be in the Hamptons that night, it was still the Parrish. Unable to gather for cocktails on the museum’s meadow, as has long been tradition, artists, collectors, patrons, and philanthropists lingered in Herzog & de Meuron’s remarkable Water Mill building.

Like so many of the Hamptons’ marquee summer events, the evening also served as an unofficial reunion for Palm Beach’s seasonal art crowd. Guests spent time with Sanford Biggers’ monumental sculptures, Tony Bechara’s vibrant abstractions, and Emmi Whitehorse’s meditative compositions before dinner moved onto the covered terrace beneath the floating cloud installations.

This year’s gala honored philanthropist Ellen Katz alongside artists Enoc Perez, Joan Semmel, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The evening also paid tribute to the late Pat Steir, who died in March at 87. Best known for the poured “Waterfall” paintings she began in the 1980s, Steir had long been part of the Parrish’s story. The museum owns her 2008 hand-painted monoprint Triptych Sparkle and will present a major retrospective, Color Wheel and Waterfalls, next May.

Founded in 1898 and housed since 2012 in its Herzog & de Meuron-designed home, the Parrish has become one of the East End’s defining cultural institutions, pairing ambitious exhibitions with year-round educational programming for the local community. Visitors this summer can also see Robert Indiana: One Through Zero, while the fall calendar turns toward the museum’s own archive. Abstract Expressionism: The East End, 1940 to Today, opening September 27, draws from the permanent collection to trace the movement from Pollock and Krasner’s Springs years through later East End painters like Suzanne McClelland and Pat Steir herself. In November, William Merritt Chase and Walter Granville-Smith: American Impressionists of the East End will open with the museum’s own holdings, the largest public collection of Chase’s work anywhere, alongside his extensive archive.

The FLAG Art Foundation, meanwhile, has committed to three exhibitions a year at the Parrish through 2030, an extension of the Fresh Paint series that in June brought a Tschabalala Self painting to the East End for its first U.S. showing.

By the end of the evening, the gala had raised more than $1.7 million in support of the museum’s exhibitions, education initiatives, and community programming. Ironically, the weather may have made the gala even more memorable, as guests found themselves immersed in the museum itself, surrounded by the art their support helps make possible. It was an unexpected reminder of exactly what the Parrish exists to celebrate.