PARRISH ART MUSEUM PARTNERS WITH HAMPTON JITNEY AND
SME TO FEATURE WORKS FROM THE PARRISH ART COLLECTION
ON THE HAMPTON JITNEY
First Jitney to Feature American Impressionist William Merritt Chase
And to Hit the Road October 26, 2010
SOUTHAMPTON, NY 10/19/10 — The Parrish Art Museum announces a partnership with the Hampton Jitney in which the Museum will present works from its 2600-piece art collection on a bus wrap designed by SME, a global strategic branding and design firm, to be installed on one of the Jitney’s fleet of buses beginning October 26 and continuing through the spring 2012 opening of the new Parrish Art Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron. The bus wrap featuring an artwork will change seasonally and it is expected that the Museum will present four works per year.
The Museum has worked with SME to create this new campaign to promote awareness of the Museum’s collection, its exhibitions, and its accessibility to Manhattan via the Hampton Jitney. The first Parrish Art Museum Hampton Jitney will feature William Merritt Chase’s 1895 painting The Bayberry Bush (Chase Homestead in Shinnecock Hills). The pastoral scene, which features an Impressionist landscape inhabited by nineteenth-century ladies picking fruit from a bush, is blown up to more than ten times its original size and demonstrates the kinds of remarkable works, from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries that are included in the Parrish’s important collection.
“We are thrilled to work with the Hampton Jitney and present the Parrish Art Museum’s incredible collection in a new light as it rolls through Manhattan and on the Long Island Expressway, reminding visitors and residents that we have a museum with a world-class collection of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century art right here on the very accessible East End. We are grateful to Geoff and Andrew Lynch of Hampton Jitney for partnering with us on this initiative, and to Ed O’Hara and Asher Rumack of SME for developing the design for the wrap,” comments Parrish Director Terrie Sultan.
SME is a global strategic brand development firm, based in New York City, with a wide range of brand building services and more than twenty years of expertise in nonprofits, higher education, and sport and entertainment.
Hampton Jitney was founded in 1974 by Jim Davidson and grew from a small fleet of vans to the most important provider of public transportation between New York City and Eastern Long Island. The company was purchased by the Lynch family in 1988 and currently operates nearly fifty vehicles carrying tens of thousands of people per year. Hampton Jitney is a strong supporter of community events and organizations. The company is both the Official Media Sponsor and Official Transportation for the Parrish Art Museum.
About the Parrish Art Museum
The Parrish Art Museum is an American art museum located in Southampton, New York. Founded in 1897, the museum celebrates the artistic legacy of Long Island’s East End, one of America’s most vital creative centers. Since the mid 1950s the Museum has grown from a small village art gallery into an important art museum with a collection of more than 2,600 works of art from the nineteenth century to the present. It includes such contemporary painters and sculptors as John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Elizabeth Peyton, as well as such masters as Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. The Parrish houses among of the world’s most important collections of works by the preeminent American Impressionist William Merritt Chase and by the groundbreaking post-war American realist painter Fairfield Porter. A vital cultural resource serving a diverse audience, the Parrish organizes and presents changing exhibitions and offers a dynamic schedule of creative and engaging public programs including lectures, films, performances, concerts, and studio classes for all ages. On July 19, 2010, the Parrish broke ground on a new building designed by internationally acclaimed architects Herzog & de Meuron. The 34,500-square-foot facility will triple the Museum’s current exhibition space and allow for the simultaneous presentation of loan exhibitions and installations drawn from the permanent collection.
On view October 10 through November 28: American Still Life: Treasures from the Parrish Art Museum, a show of more than forty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from 1871 to the present, all drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection.
The Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State’s 62 counties, and the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.
CAPTION: Rendering of Hampton Jitney Courtesy of SME and featuring William Merritt Chase, The Bayberry Bush (Chase Homestead in Shinnecock Hills). ca. 1895. Oil on canvas. 25 1/2 x 33 1/8 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Robert Malcolm Littlejohn, Littlejohn Collection
