With wine poured, memories shared and art and messages scrawled across gallery walls, East End Arts on Saturday evening bid a sentimental farewell to its longtime gallery at 133 E. Main St.
The event, called “The Forward Frame,” drew a good-sized crowd to the East End Arts Council’s East Main Street gallery for what organizers framed not as a final goodbye, but an “until we meet again” moment before the historic building is moved and raised up as part of Riverhead’s town square redevelopment.
Guests gathered for hors d’oeuvres, beer and wine, performances and brief remarks from arts leaders and public officials, then lingered in the gallery, adding their own notes and drawings to the walls in a final act of communal art-making in the space.
East End Arts Executive Director Wendy Weiss told the crowd the evening was about honoring the history of the building while looking ahead to what comes next.
“This is not goodbye,” Weiss said. “It’s until we meet again to this space.”
East End Arts has called the building at 133 E. Main St. home since 1977. Known as the Davis-Corwin House, the structure dates back to the 1840s. It is one of four historic buildings on the town-owned East End Arts campus that are slated to be relocated and raised because of flooding concerns. The others are the Benjamin House and barn (c. 1860) and the Fresh Pond Schoolhouse (c. 1822) The gallery building is also expected to be shifted eastward to make room for a new hotel project being developed by J. Petrocelli Construction, whose principal Joe Petrocelli was appointed by the town as master developer for the town square project.
No date has yet been announced for the move.
East End Arts has relocated its offices and its instruction space to a town-owned building on Griffing Avenue, next to Town Hall. It will temporarily relocate its gallery to 48 W. Main St., Weiss said, allowing programming to continue during the transition. That site is across the street from its 11 West Gallery in the Peconic Crossing building.
Speakers at Saturday’s gathering included Weiss, East End Arts board vice president Andy Tarshis, Suffolk County Legislator Greg Doroski, Riverhead council members Bob Kern and Ken Rothwell, and Supervisor Jerry Halpin.
Tarshis said the temporary gallery on West Main Street is “a wonderful space that’s going to allow us to continue… having the capability, the ability, the facility …to show the art of the tremendous number of artists on the East End, and those who are becoming artists on the East End.”
Kern lauded Weiss and her staff for what he said they’ve accomplished with the arts council. “Since Wendy and her team have taken over, the art has really gone up about 20 levels, and I think that’s really, really important, not only to Riverhead, but for the people that come here,” Kern said. “I mean, I say it all the time publicly. You know, a lot of artists that show here are showing in major galleries. So this is serious. You’ve got real artists doing real stuff,” he said.
“From day one, East End Arts was part of the decision-making on what we were doing here,” Rothwell said. “And the goal was to create long-term foot traffic, pedestrian traffic, that would gather in a town square and would come here and enjoy this.”
Doroski said spaces like the East End Arts gallery matter because they bring people together in a way that cannot be replicated online. “I believe that the arts serve as an anchor in a community. You know, as we look at placemaking, the things that make a place — what it is that make people come to a downtown— the arts is a vital part of that, and East End art is a vital part of that in downtown Riverhead,” Doroski said.
Halpin reflected on the organization’s longstanding importance to Riverhead families and young artists. He said he and his wife have been supporters of the organization since the day they moved to Riverhead. “Both of our daughters, who performed in the arts at a collegiate level, and one of them that continues professionally, began right here at the East End Arts. It is an amazing place,” Halpin said.
“As Thomas Merton said, art is something that you can lose yourself in and you can find yourself at the exact same time. And we as humans right now stand at a crossroads where so much is throwing us, so much, so many different things, and art is always going to be a place where we can find ourselves and lose ourselves,” Halpin said.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Denise Civiletti
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