Two New Exhibitions Open at the Parrish Art Museum This November

At a Glance

• Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet: November 22, 2026 through February 14, 2027, in partnership with The FLAG Art Foundation
• William Merritt Chase and Walter Granville-Smith: American Impressionists of the East End: November 14, 2026 through March 21, 2027
• Where: Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill opens two exhibitions a week apart this month. One brings an internationally celebrated sound installation to the East End for the first time. The other returns to the painters who first drew New York artists to Long Island’s light and landscape.

Presented with The FLAG Art Foundation, Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet is the first exhibition of the artist’s work on the East End of Long Island. Over a forty-year career, Cardiff, born in 1957 in Brussels, Ontario, has become known internationally for immersive multimedia installations and audio and video walks, often made with her longtime collaborator George Bures Miller.

The 2001 installation reworks “Spem in Alium,” the forty-voice motet by English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. Fifty-nine individually recorded voices play from forty speakers arranged in an oval, grouped into eight five-voice choirs, so listeners can walk among the parts. “I wanted to step inside of the music and actually hear each of the different harmonies,” Cardiff has said of first hearing the piece in 1998.

The exhibition is curated by Scout Hutchinson, The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish, and Jonathan Rider, FLAG’s Director, with Caroline Cassidy, FLAG’s Deputy Director.

William Merritt Chase and Walter Granville-Smith: American Impressionists of the East End is the final installment of PARRISH USA250: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the museum’s series marking the nation’s semiquincentennial. Drawing on private collections and the Parrish’s own holdings of Chase, one of the largest public collections of his work, the show places the two painters in dialogue.

Chase built a career across America and Europe. Granville-Smith, trained largely at the Art Students League in New York, worked as an illustrator for Harper’s, Scribner’s and Century before turning to landscape. He settled in Bellport, painting the bays, marshes and barrier beaches in a quieter register than Chase’s sunlit views of the Shinnecock Hills.

“[T]his exhibition examines how two painters with distinct training discovered a new American identity and source of inspiration on Long Island’s East End,” said Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Executive Director of the Parrish Art Museum. “As our recognition of America’s semiquincentennial draws to a close, the works of Chase and Granville-Smith remind us of not only the East End’s enduring role in shaping American creativity and identity, but also the part our region’s artists have played in imagining new paths forward during times of transformation.”

Exhibition dates are provided by the museum and are subject to change.