“I just started using color in my drawings,” says Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, 29, as she leads me through the living room of her childhood home in Springs, the woodsy, low-profile hamlet of East Hampton, New York. She gestures to a stack of pastel watercolors on the coffee table. “Color is always more fun.”
I haven’t seen Lucy in over a decade; her white-blond hair, once long and tangled from daily ocean swims, is now straight and cropped at the chin. Her raspy laugh is endearingly familiar, as is the buzz of guests drifting through the open kitchen. It’s a cloudless day in May, and she’s set up a makeshift studio on the patio: two easels and a low wooden table with bubbling paint tubes and brushes.
Lucy is part of a long line of de Koonings who have made art in or around this backyard. Her grandfather Willem de Kooning bought the land in 1963, building a house and studio on a few wild acres off Springs Fireplace Road. On the opposite end of the oak-dotted lawn, his two-story studio still stands. His wife and artistic counterpart, Elaine de Kooning, kept a studio across the narrow harbor in the North West Woods; and Lucy’s mother, Lisa de Kooning, sculpted bronze-cast animals—elephants, cows, rams—many of which still keep watch over the house.
And then, in high school, it was us—a scruffier coalition of local teen artists who worked across various mediums at the de Kooning residence: sculpture (constructing launch ramps for our skateboards), interior design (holding Lucy upside down to stamp painted footprints on the ceiling), and performance art (how many times could one listen to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”?). Growing up, the de Kooning home became an unofficial meeting ground for creative tomfoolery: Lisa de Kooning was a firm believer in play. “With my mom, there was always paint, art, animals, and fun,” she says. Lisa adopted all kinds of animals for the property: Sara and Joe, the mini ponies; pigs (Peter, Wilbur, Daisy, and Dude); a Clydesdale named Bubba; and Lulu, a white cockatoo. She also helped turn Lucy’s bedroom into what we all called “the neon room,” a UV-lit sanctuary where friends had free reign to paint on the walls, so long as they didn’t tag their names, which was deemed “boring” by the de Kooning clan.
Though it’s been 12 years since her mom’s death, Lucy has continued her legacy of nurturing play and creativity in young artists. For the past three years, she has been teaching art to 120 middle schoolers on the Upper West Side, helping bring to life their wacky cardboard suits and plaster sculptures. Her last day at the Stephen Gaynor School is June 14; after that, she’ll move to Springs full-time to pursue painting. (She has a group show opening on July 5 at the Keyes Art gallery in Sag Harbor, and she’s already donated five of her watercolors and a painting to summer fundraisers for the Springs Historical Society and the Springs Food Pantry.)
“The work I make in Springs is very different from what I make in the city. The energies of my lines and colors shift,” Lucy says. And then, there’s the energy of the space. “It can feel overwhelming to be making art next to someone that I just so deeply admire,” she says, laughing and glancing into the backyard. “He’s always right there.”
Thirty-year-old Benjamin Sosne, who grew up in Southampton and also remembers Lucy’s house as “a nurturing environment where creation was always encouraged,” has only recently turned to art himself. Leaving behind a career in real estate, he now spends long stretches alone in an industrial studio, experimenting with paint, sculpture, and cannons. “It’s rare to find community and mentorship,” Benjamin says. But, luckily, he found both with the Cutticas.
Benjamin’s studio is one of several metal warehouses on the Cuttica family’s 40-acre property in Flanders, about 50 minutes west of Springs on Montauk Highway. Once a duck farm, the land was transformed in the early 2000s by sculptor and metalworker Gloria Kisch; today, it’s an eccentric sprawl of 60-foot pine trees, rocky streams, three ponds with snapping turtles, and whimsical metal pieces from Gloria’s collection.
After acclaimed Argentine painter Eugenio Cuttica and his wife Ruth Cuttica bought the place in 2019, the Argentine crew—with sons Franco and Lautaro—hauled their surfboards, two Boston terriers, wood sculptures, and ceiling-high canvases over from East Hampton. Since then, the family has reimagined the property as Campo Cuttica, a working studio, gallery, family compound, and overall destination for arty bohemians. Artists who rent studio space at the campo aren’t just given access to a nature preserve—they’re welcomed into the family.
On the other side of a large field, Franco Cuttica, 35, is driving an electric saw into a wooden horse, his shaggy hair tucked under a backward baseball cap. “I try not to mimic a horse,” he says, polishing a muzzle with a sander. “I let the wood become the horse that it already is.” He started making driftwood sculptures in high school, scavenging local beaches for the perfect pieces of washed-up wood. (I was a lanky eighth grader—bony in all the wrong places—the first time I saw his horses, which seemed so graceful by comparison.) Over the years, his high school hustle made him enough petty cash to cover his college tuition, evolving eventually into a profitable art practice on the East End.
“My father taught me how to make art,” Franco says, “but also how to sell art.” Indeed, Eugenio, whose large-scale figurative paintings have been exhibited across Europe, Latin America, and the US, exerts a fatherly influence across the campo. He offers feedback when asked, shares meals with the artists, and has an offhand quip for just about everything.
“Eugenio will take a look at my paintings and see what’s working or might not be working,” Benjamin says. “There are a lot of artists out there who are talented,” Franco adds. “But it can be a very lonely endeavor.”
The vision of the Cutticas is perhaps best expressed at their monthly summer asados. The centerpiece is a gargantuan grill where Franco barbecues 20-pound steaks for barefoot guests; around him, there is dancing, mingling, and live music, usually a mix of musicians from the area and Franco’s high school friends. With drinks in hand and dogs underfoot, guests can wander through the studios, which remain open for the occasion, canvases still tacky with wet paint. Invitations come by word of mouth, though Franco says he often drives around in his truck handing out flyers to people in town who “look interesting.” In a region defined by private estates and tall hedges, the Cutticas see sharing their land—and creating a space for both experimentation and celebration—as a duty.
Twenty miles east, past the Parrish Art Museum and down Scuttle Hole Road, Cornelia Channing, 28, is setting up for a softball game in her backyard: a 158-acre property better known as Channing Daughters Winery. “It may sound corny,” she says, rummaging through a plastic bin of sports equipment, “but with the privilege of having this space comes responsibility. We really want to make great use of it.”
Cornelia’s father, Walter Channing, bought the land in 1979, carving the hills and planting the trees and vines across a vacant potato field that would become the winery. He also built a woodworking studio, where he sculpted monumental pieces from felled trees the local fire department called him to salvage. “Walter was a force of nature, an athlete of art,” says Franco. “As a kid, being around someone who was making art like this was so exciting and fun,” Cornelia adds. His towering sculptures—inverted trees and a 40-foot-tall yellow pencil that looked like it could write messages in the sky—were totems of the backyard. “Creating this art kingdom was his life’s dream,” she says.
Now an editor at The New York Times, Cornelia spent years reporting for East Magazine and The East Hampton Star, developing a grounded, familiar voice that resonates beyond the East End. She and her sisters are also stepping into new roles at the winery as the longtime CEO retires this year.
It’s Memorial Day, and Molly Channing, Cornelia’s mother, is at the grill flipping hotdogs and hamburgers. The gravel crunches as more and more guests arrive with romping dogs, small children, and cases of seltzer. Local artists Scott Bluedorn, Ellie Duke, Harris Allen, Julian Mardoyan-Smyth, and Nick Whelan are scattered across the lawn. “The social life out here is crazy,” Cornelia notes. “There’s a huge number of people between 25 and 40 who live here year-round, and that’s really changed everything.”
The Hamptons of Cornelia’s making is a far cry from the $10,000-bottle-service scene patronized by linen-wearing frat boys and investment bankers. Her East End world revolves around a tight-knit network—group chats for potluck dinners, late-night screenings, and midnight ocean plunges. “The dream,” she says, “would be to invite more artists to bring their work to the sculpture garden. We’ve also talked about creating a residency where a wood sculptor could use the old studio.
“We re a real functioning art community,” Cornelia goes on. “My friends are ambitious—not just about themselves, but about this place too.”
Thirty minutes down the South Fork, where Montauk’s strip dissolves into dune and scrub, another unconventional art space is quietly reshaping the landscape. Max Levai, 37, a former Manhattan dealer who once ran Marlborough Gallery, relocated to the East End during the pandemic and took over a 17th-century cattle ranch—believed to be the oldest in America. Once owned by Mickey Drexler, the 26-acre horse farm sits on a sandy road a stone’s throw from Peter Beard’s house and the Roosevelt estate. It’s now home to The Ranch: a working gallery housed in a converted horse barn.
“The idea here is to challenge what a gallery needs to be,” Max explains, as Monday, his 95-pound Rottweiler-hound mutt, does laps in an empty sand ring. Unlike the white-cube spaces lining Main Streets across the Hamptons, The Ranch invites artists to commune, work, and show on the rustic property. “I wanted to see what happens when you bring artists to a certain place and just let them exist and make art,” Max says.
The first permanent structure at The Ranch isn’t a gallery wall—it’s a living sculpture by Mamoun Nukumanu Friedrich-Grosvenor called Earth and Sky. Built from willow and bamboo, the 40-foot-wide geodome is planted directly into the field, its woven frame designed to shift and root further into the earth over time. Within five years, the willow will hold itself up entirely, and the bamboo will disintegrate. “There’s a commitment here that goes beyond money,” Max says. “There’s a responsibility I have in maintaining something that’s alive.”
Mamoun’s natural, architectural installations have become leafy fixtures across the Hamptons. We’re sitting inside his largest sculpture to date, its branches tied together in a twine knot 18 feet overhead. When the wind blows, there’s a brittle creaking sound as the structure sways.
Born in Southampton, Mamoun grew up in a house full of artists: his mother, Saskia Friedrich, and father, Jeremy Grosvenor, are both local artists; one grandfather is a land artist with work at Storm King; and his other founded the Dia Art Foundation. “I’m super influenced by my family,” he says, “but by this place, too.” Growing up amid such immaculate beauty, he explains, comes with a spiritual responsibility to “use the resources of this place for good.” His work is seemingly everywhere now: at Campo Cuttica, Folly Tree Arboretum, The Ranch, Tripoli Gallery, and scattered across private residences. Lucy hopes to bring one of his structures to the de Kooning estate, too.
Mamoun describes his sculptures as “paintings in time,” works that distort the ecosystem as they grow and evolve. Eventually, the fast-growing pioneer species—willows and poplars—will give way to longer-living trees like red maples and sycamores. “When I’m about 60,” he shrugs, “maybe I can take a break.” This spring, Mamoun also debuted a new series of sculptures and drawings at his first solo show at Tripoli Gallery, titled “Birds.”
Elsewhere, off the main route in Wainscott, Tripoli Patterson, 40, is ready to close up his gallery ahead of the holiday weekend. A former surfing pro born in Sag Harbor, Tripoli opened Tripoli Gallery in 2009 with a mission to make fine art more accessible and fun. “I want everyone to feel invited into the art world,” he says. “A gallery is a place you can walk into even if you’re not trying to buy art.”
His annual Thanksgiving Collective, a November group show featuring local artists, has become a staple of the Hamptons social calendar and a reunion for those, like me, who return only on holidays. This year’s 20th anniversary brought together 145 artists, including Cornelia’s older sister Sylvia Channing; Mamoun and both his parents; Lautaro Cuttica; and Tripoli’s younger brother, Yung Jake.
For Tripoli, art has always been a family affair. His father, Leonardo Patterson, a Costa Rican-born antiquities dealer, came to the East End in the late ’70s to meet Willem de Kooning and to show him a collection of Pre-Columbian artifacts. Through “Bill,” he met his future wife—a friend of Lisa de Kooning. “Naming Lisa my godmother, I was able to have someone who helped me start [my art career],” Tripoli says. Lisa helped him open his first brick-and-mortar space: the original Tripoli Gallery on Jobs Lane in Southampton. Years later, when he was relocating to Wainscott and preparing for his first solo show with Puerto Rican painter Félix Bonilla, Lisa helped him fly the paintings in from Puerto Rico.
Now Tripoli dreams of transforming his current gallery into a true community space, complete with a café, a library, and lots of hang space. “The Hamptons are about what s happening now,” he says. “Community is in our hands.”