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LongHouse started as the personal vision of Jack Lenor Larsen. He bought 16 acres on Hands Creek Road in East Hampton back in 1975, and in 1986 completed a 13,000 square foot, four-level structure—inspired by a 7th century Japanese Shinto shrine—that was intended to be both home and public gallery space. He went on to create gardens and an arboretum and sculpture, crafts and plant collections.
This vision of integrating the arts with everyday life was so appropriate, so timely, that it could not remain entirely personal, and in 1991 LongHouse Reserve was formed as a nonprofit charitable foundation with a board of directors. Since then it has only gotten better. The wondrous gardens are like nothing most of us have seen, a compendium of species, alive with diversity and character, size, shape and color carefully arranged, dazzling the eye, playing with perspective, drawing you in and leading you on.
Notable artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Alfonso Ossorio, Lynda Benglis, Dale Chihuly, Toshiko Takeazu, Tony Rosenthal and Willem de Kooning—among many others—are represented in the installations and sculpture. Yoko Ono created an oversized, outdoor chessboard on permanent loan to LongHouse.
With a board and public mission, change is inevitable, an indicator of what happens when a personal vision grows into a public institution. This year, for example, the board managed to open LongHouse to visitors more days and hours than in the past. While this might deprive Larsen of some privacy, it did not create a conflict, and there are no signs of strain between Larsen and a board that deeply respects his goals and desires.
Larsen is best known as a textile designer, but he is also a scholar, curator, author, and an authority on traditional and contemporary crafts. His designs are in museum collections around the world, and he has consulted with and taught at numerous art centers and institutions.
Dianne Benson, Co-President of LongHouse, said to me, “Of all his callings, he has chosen to label himself a weaver and has made his global reputation as a textile genius. Yes, he has woven threads and yarns and silks and leather—even grass and glass; but more significantly, he is a weaver of ideas; almost Biblical in his ability to cross-fertilize.”
The future is on a number of minds. What will LongHouse eventually look like? I don’t mean the gardens and the galleries; we already know that. The bigger question is how people will perceive it. As an aesthete’s fancy or a genuine contribution to community and culture? Will it be a “resort museum,” a cooler, smarter, greener version of some mogul’s Palm Beach or Santa Barbara collection? Or will the bold adventure into the various arts coalesce to make a permanent statement about living with grace and beauty?
LongHouse is about more than the collection. Even with all the important names represented there, it is small, and the superb selection of crafts is highly specialized. This is not a collection to set the museum world on fire. LongHouse officially has museum status, but calling it a reserve and not a museum was rigorously correct.
Its strength lies in its concept, and that brings us back to the personal vision of Jack Lenor Larsen. The audacity of his view is the totality of it, the idea that art lies not only in sculpture itself, but in the context and surroundings. That art exists in a woven basket or a carved bowl, in the structure and interplay of trees and plants, in light and shadow, in man’s shaping of earth, water, wind and sky. Art is all around us. The world can be a place of impressive beauty, and LongHouse Reserve, with judicious planning, might very well become one of its foremost galleries.