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77 in residence appeared that first evening: Texas painter Sedrick Huckaby, whom we last profiled for his Big Momma's House project in Fort Worth, November 2016. My visit was timed to Huckaby's residency. I had plenty of occasions to relax with Huckaby and examine his work over the next 48 hours, and engage in conversation over meals and coffee with Byrne and the other two housemates that weekend. Photographer and painter Katherine McMahon arrived as an artist in residence for the winter of 2018 and never left; she now divides her time between den mother/ director of programming and her day job in New York as creative director of Artnews. Also visiting that weekend was painter John Mitchell, a fellow classmate of Huckaby from their MFA days at Yale. Hamptons Art Escapades We bonded and had adventures — a stroll on Sammy's Beach, home to the summertime tradition of Beach Painting Club; coffee and pastries at Springs General Store, where Pollock famously traded a canvas for groceries; and a visit to the Pollock- Krasner House and Study Center, which is surprisingly prim in a late Victorian way. We looked at the modest studio building from outside (tours were limited that afternoon) where paintings that changed the course of modern art were birthed. The first day wrapped with hamburgers at a spot in Sag Harbor, where our group rigorously debated the merits of the greatest artists in history. While the Hamptons is home to a number of artists, nothing prepared me for a trek to the nearby Green River Cemetery, where many of the immortals from American art reside in perpetuity — the serene graveyard mixes markers for modest middle-class residents of the area alongside titans Pollock (under a towering boulder), his wife Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning (Willem is buried elsewhere, refusing to spend eternity alongside lesser artists), Stuart Davis, Stan VanDerBeek, Hannah Wilke, Ad Reinhardt, and Max Ernst's son, the painter Jimmy Ernst, to name a few. Bridgehampton was also in our sights. Sunday afternoon, Byrne, Huckaby, and I road-tripped to The Dan Flavin Art Institute, where a firehouse turned church now bears rotating exhibitions for the late minimalist art master. Two other stops were Parrish Art Museum (the Keith Sonnier retrospective offered revelations about another artist who explored light) and the intimate and homey Guild Hall that possesses a charming appeal with its focus on Hamptons artists such as under-known ab-ex painter Syd Solomon, who was on view. The day was topped off by drinks with a painter in the art-history books, Joe Zucker, who received us in the minimalist home and studio he shares with wife Britta Le Va, a photographer, designer, and one- time Egyptologist. Studio Confidential Back at the de Kooning house, there was time to bask in Huckaby's latest paintings. Having arrived with a pickup truck and a trailer filled with raw canvases weeks earlier, the artist was ready to dig in. During his residency, he told us he stayed up many nights to complete quilt-inspired and portrait canvases destined for a future exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The museum's curator, Dorothy Moss, had come to visit, too, shortly before I had arrived, to see Huckaby's work in studio as preparation for the painter's inclusion in a group show in 2021 at the Smithsonian- affiliated museum in Washington, D.C. It was thrilling to observe a series of Huckaby's oversized portraits in progress. In the same space 40 years earlier, Elaine de Kooning had also crafted portrait canvases in a mash-up of her own idiosyncratic style: gestural realism, highly charged with the language of abstract expressionism. She painted likenesses of Brazilian soccer great Pelé in the A-frame room, as well as her final series, "Bacchus" and "Cave Walls." The late artist — who has recently been the (continued on page 93) Sedrick Huckaby, artist in residence, Elaine de Kooning House, October 2018 Huckaby's canvases line a studio wall. Kambel Smith, Jerry Saltz, Katherine McMahon, Chris Byrne, at the Outsider Art Fair, New York, 2019 Elaine de Kooning's ladder still stands in the studio she built, used now by a new generation of artists. YVONNE TNT/BFA.COM