Announcing a Season of Exhibitions, Residencies, and Cultural Reclamation Across Sag Harbor and Southampton.

The Hamptons Black Art Council (HBAC), the nonprofit organization founded in 2023 by Storm Ascher to advocate for Black arts and culture on the East End, announces its most expansive summer season to date — a constellation of events, exhibitions, and activations stretching from Juneteenth through December that together make the case, undeniably, that Black artists and Black cultural institutions are not just present in the Hamptons art world, they are shaping it.

JUNETEENTH WEEKEND RETREAT

The Watermill Center x HBAC Artists’ Table Benefit Saturday, June 20, 2026.

This Juneteenth, The Watermill Center hosts HBAC’s annual three-day retreat for the second year, opening its legendary residency grounds to up to eight artists as the Council builds toward a permanent residency of its own. At the center of the weekend is the Artists’ Table, an intimate afternoon with Anthony Akinbola, one of the most compelling artists working today. Akinbola will install new work on Watermill’s iconic grounds, offer a private talk about his practice, and sit at the center of a chef-curated luncheon, designed in direct conversation with his art. Tickets for Artists’ Table are available for purchase here. 

Akinbola is a first-generation American raised by Nigerian parents across the United States and Nigeria, whose practice unpacks the rituals and histories connecting Africa and America. Working most iconically with du-rag fabric, he transforms an object of deep cultural intimacy into formally rigorous, monumental works, held in major institutional collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He is not a newcomer to this community —

Akinbola has been part of HBAC for five years, attending our Juneteenth retreats and building relationships on the East End that culminated most recently in a residency at the Church Sag Harbor. His connection to this land, and to this organization, runs deep. HBAC has worked alongside him since 2021 through Superposition Gallery, and this luncheon is a celebration of that sustained relationship — a chance for collectors, supporters, and fellow artists to gather around his work in one of the East End’s most storied creative environments.

Founded in 1992 by the late avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson, The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities situated on ten acres of Shinnecock ancestral territory on Long Island’s East End. With an emphasis on experimentation and collaboration, Watermill offers year-round artist residencies, public programs, exhibitions, and education programs, providing a global community with the time, space, and freedom to create and inspire.

HBAC’s Juneteenth weekend begins Friday evening at the Eastville Heritage House Museum, where Akinbola’s work will be on view as part of HBAC’s annual group exhibition, presented by Superposition Gallery, and will remain on display through December. Tickets and sponsorship opportunities available. Naming opportunities within the future HBAC Artist House are available at all giving levels.

HBAC Annual Group Exhibition IT IS WRITTEN in the sand at Eastville Heritage House Museum.

Opening Friday, June 19, 2026 | On View Through December Presented by Superposition Gallery.  

The Juneteenth weekend begins the evening before the Watermill benefit, at the Eastville Heritage House Museum in Sag Harbor, with the opening of HBAC’s annual group exhibition IT IS WRITTEN in the sand — presented by Superposition Gallery. Akinbola is among the featured artists, and his work is part of what inaugurates the museum’s first-ever contemporary art collection, stewarded by HBAC and permanently housed at Eastville Heritage House. The exhibition will remain on view through December, offering the East End’s summer and fall communities sustained engagement with some of the most vital voices in contemporary art — housed within one of the most historically significant Black cultural institutions on the Eastern Seaboard.

This Juneteenth also marks a profound expansion of the Eastville footprint, hosted by HBAC. Long-awaited weather-resistant art banners, commissioned and installed by HBAC, will line the fences of the Eastville Cemetery — a sacred site holding generations of the community’s Black and Indigenous ancestors — bringing art and visibility to a place that has long deserved both. Across the street, HBAC will activate the David AME Zion Church, a cornerstone of Eastville’s Underground Railroad history, after the community recently received the keys back from the town. Its reopening during Juneteenth week is not a coincidence — it is a homecoming. Together, these activations expand the living memorial that Eastville has always been, reclaiming and amplifying the full breadth of this community’s history for the generations of artists, visitors, and neighbors who will walk these grounds for years to come.

OPENING JULY 17, 2026
Damien Davis: Solo Exhibition at the Southampton African American Museum.

At the Southampton African American Museum (SAAM), HBAC presents a solo exhibition by Damien Davis, opening July 17 — a significant presentation within one of the East End’s most storied and site-specific cultural spaces.  SAAM occupies the former home of Randy’s Barbershop, a beloved institution in Southampton’s Black community whose walls once held generations of conversation, connection, and care. That history is not incidental to the space — it is the space. The barbershop as a site of Black community life, intellectual exchange, and cultural transmission lives in the very architecture of this building.

Davis’s exhibition enters into direct dialogue with that legacy — and extends beyond the gallery walls. Works in the exhibition will be available for sale, with a portion of proceeds going directly toward the creation of an HBAC community garden on the museum grounds. The garden, currently in development, will be conceived thematically around cutting tools, medicinal plants and flowers, and the cultural history of the barbershop — honoring the layered meanings of a site where blades have always been instruments of both transformation and care, where plants have carried healing knowledge across generations, and where a chair and a mirror have long been the unlikely center of Black social life.  Every work purchased is not only an acquisition — it is a contribution to something that will grow, literally, out of this ground.

THE LARGER MISSION
The HBAC Artist House: Reclaiming Black Land on the East End

The Hamptons Black Art Council is raising funds to purchase a home in Sag Harbor — one of the few remaining historic Black beach communities in America — to establish a permanent artist residency program rooted in Black history, on Black land.  The Hamptons is world-famous as the birthplace of American Abstract Expressionism. What that story leaves out is that this land has always been Black land first.

Sag Harbor’s Eastville community is one of the oldest free Black settlements in the United States — settled by freed slaves, threaded through by the Underground Railroad, built up by Black whalers, tradespeople, and families who were here long before the art world arrived. In the 1940s, real estate investor and architect Amaza Lee Meredith understood that history and acted on it — purchasing the land that would become Azurest and reclaiming a Black shoreline that was already theirs by history, protecting it from the erasure consuming Black America’s coastline. It was not just a neighborhood. It was a declaration.  Now we are being called to reclaim it again. Rising property values and decades of displacement have steadily eroded Black ownership on the East End. The HBAC Artist House is an act of the same radical intention — a home purchased, a legacy protected, a community reaffirmed.

While we build toward that permanent home, The Watermill Center is holding space for us — hosting up to eight HBAC artists annually for a Juneteenth retreat on its legendary residency grounds. Today’s benefit is the bridge that gets us there. When we arrive, artists in residence will live and work fully immersed in this living Black historic district — not as visitors, but as inheritors. Every room, studio, garden, and bench will carry the names of the patrons who made it possible, permanently embedding their legacy in the architecture of Black cultural history on the East End.  Meredith reclaimed this land once. We are reclaiming it again.

MORE MUSEUM PARTNER ACTIVATIONS WITH HBAC THIS SUMMER
PARRISH ART MUSEUM

Tour of SANFORD BIGGERS: DRIFT
Community Day, Sunday, June 14th, 2026

GUILD HALL — Private Tour of ARCMANORO NILES: FORGOTTEN WORDS I NEVER GOT TO SAY
Saturday, June 20th, 2026, 6PM
Viewing of performance by LLOYD KNIGHT: THE DRAMA
Saturday, June 20, 2026, 7PM–8PM

ABOUT THE HAMPTONS BLACK ART COUNCIL
The Hamptons Black Art Council is a nonprofit organization founded in 2023 by Storm Ascher to advocate for Black arts institutions, artists, and cultural memory on the East End of Long Island. Through exhibitions, residencies, collection building, and community partnerships, HBAC is building the institutional infrastructure that ensures Black artists are not simply present in one of the world’s most prominent art markets — they are shaping it.  HBAC is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

ABOUT THE WATERMILL CENTER
The Watermill Center, founded by artist and director Robert Wilson, is an internationally recognized laboratory for the arts and one of the most important cultural institutions on the East End. Its ongoing partnership with HBAC reflects a shared commitment to expanding access, representation, and cultural equity in the arts.

ABOUT EASTVILLE HERITAGE HOUSE MUSEUM
The Eastville Heritage House Museum is dedicated to preserving the history and culture of Sag Harbor’s historic Black and Indigenous community. As the permanent home of HBAC’s inaugural contemporary art collection, Eastville Heritage House marks a new chapter in its legacy — one that honors the past while actively investing in the future of Black artistic life on the East End.

ABOUT THE SOUTHAMPTON AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM
The Southampton African American Museum preserves and celebrates the history, culture, and contributions of African Americans on the East End of Long Island. Housed in the former home of Randy’s Barbershop — a cornerstone of Southampton’s Black community — SAAM carries the memory of that space into its ongoing cultural programming and exhibitions.

ABOUT SUPERPOSITION GALLERY
A socially conscious approach to contemporary art with a focus on borrowed space, Superposition Gallery was founded in 2018 by artist and curator, Storm Ascher. She started her curatorial projects with a mission to subvert gentrification tactics used in urban development through art galleries. Superposition Gallery puts on exhibitions, performances, and events highlighting artists from around the world to foster relationships with collectors and institutions. Representation by Superposition Gallery gives artists a platform to exist in multiple contexts at once. By collaborating with spaces that have a consciousness of the neighborhood in which they reside, Superposition Gallery takes on the life of the nomadic artist and resident. The gallery engages in curatorial thought with a focus of creating community. Curatorial projects come to fruition through iterations of borrowed space in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and internationally.

For press inquiries, tickets, sponsorship opportunities, and Artist House naming and endowment information, please contact: storm@superpositiongallery.com