Storm Ascher has a reputation for wearing many hats: gallerist, curator, artist and community organizer among them. She has long championed the power of art to transform communities and lives, and her primary vehicle has been superposition Gallery, a nomadic contemporary art platform that organizes exhibitions and projects in borrowed or temporary spaces. Its fluid structure allowed Ascher to offer visibility and opportunity across geographies and contexts to more than 100 artists, balancing emerging voices with established figures while rethinking how and where art can be experienced.
At the same time, she has engaged in the creation of context- and locality-specific cultural infrastructure with the Hamptons Black Arts Council (HBAC), which promotes and protects Black art institutions, artists, and cultural memory on the East End of Long Island. Through exhibitions, residencies, collection building, and community partnerships, HBAC is developing the institutional framework necessary to ensure a sustainable presence for Black artists in the Hamptons, while creating spaces of recognition and representation for the local Black community in an area increasingly associated with a predominantly white, affluent, and seasonal population.
This summer, Ascher and the Black Arts Council of the Hamptons are presenting a rich program that kicks off with the opening of two exhibitions: the group show IT’S WRITTEN IN THE SAND at the Eastville Heritage House Museum and Damien Davis“Hedges and Edges: Barbershops, Community Gardens” solo exhibition at the Southampton African American Museum (SAAM). There was also the HBAC Artist’s Table at the Watermill Center (part of the organization’s annual three-day retreat), which included a presentation by the artist Anthony Akinbola and a menu inspired by his artwork created by chef Roze Traore and raised funds for the organization’s expanding programs and permanent residency initiative.
When the Observer spoke with Ascher, she described her work with the Hamptons Black Arts Council as an extension of the thinking behind the Superposition Gallery. “We expand and contract space. We don’t have a brick and mortar space, we always borrow,” she said. “I think in the Hamptons, this black community has borrowed space and been forced out a few times. But it comes back in cycles and revitalizes the community through art.”
The ignored and sometimes suppressed black history of Long Island’s East End is, in fact, inseparable from the project. From the early 1700s to the 1800s, Ascher explained, formerly enslaved people started their own businesses there. The community included veterans of World War I and II, Seneca and other indigenous people, mixed-race families, and European immigrants who were not considered white at the time, including Irish and Jewish families. Ascher decided to focus on Sag Harbor’s Eastville neighborhood, home of the Eastville Community Historical Society Heritage House and Zion’s St. David AME Church, founded in 1839. “Given my background, my experience of being constantly on the move growing up, and my connection to multiple generations of oppression, it was important for me to focus on this first-ever area of American history.
The church, Ascher explained, was established near the intersection of Eastville Avenue and Liberty Street after black congregants were denied seats at a nearby church; a stop was made on the Underground Railroad. Timber doors are still embedded in architecture to this day, although they are now used for different purposes.
Across the street from the Heritage House is a Gulf gas station and a condemned house. “Everything around the museum seems to be in disarray, but part of the problem is that we haven’t been allowed to spruce it up,” she said. “We’re trying to improve as much as we can with the access we have, especially through my relationship with the executive directors of these two museums.”
This history remains vulnerable, according to Ascher, not only to neglect, but also to the priorities of real estate development and local government. “It’s important to some people in the city that this history is preserved,” she said. “But there are also people who don’t care about that.” The Black Arts Council of the Hamptons grew out of the resistance Ascher and her collaborators encountered as they tried to make fundamental improvements to the area around the museum.
She pointed out that black families maintained second homes there for a long time The Harlem Renaissancelong before the area gained its reputation as a playground for the white elite: “The idea that black families could have that kind of luxury was brushed aside. The story became, ‘This is a white town.’ But no, those black families are there.”
Ascher came to the Hamptons as a teenager through an internship at the Watermill Center, after artists she met while studying at UC Santa Barbara introduced her to the area. At first, its white-picket-guarded aesthetic felt disconcerting and even historically threatening. Over time, however, she came to understand the East End as a place of exception and a restorative environment with that longer, often obscured history of black leisure, property ownership, and cultural life.
Using relationships with the Eastville Community Historical Society and SAAM, Ascher has focused on reactivating and strengthening institutions already rooted in the community. She says her collaboration with the executive director and chief curator of the Eastville Community Historical Society Georgette Grier-Key AND Brenda Simmonsfounder and executive director of the African American Museum of Southampton, deepened that commitment and strengthened her desire to make a lasting impact. Grier-Key and Simmons also helped shape HBAC’s housing initiative, which aims to create an artist residency that supports not only visiting artists, but also a broader ecosystem of Black scholars, professionals, and collectors.
“When we think about who’s still there to preserve and focus on this history, that’s where the housing initiative came in,” Ascher said. “The idea is to create a residency program so that, if the artists live there, scholars and other black professionals will also feel encouraged to keep their real estate and continue to reinvest in the area.”
Artists can’t do everything by themselves, she acknowledged, but they are often at the forefront of building communities: “We constantly appreciate artists from the circles they create, because people want to be quiet and live near them, and then they appreciate the people they were trying to reach. That’s why we would never want to buy a space just for the sake of having a space that we already want to add to.”
The African American Museum of Southampton and the Eastville Community Historical Society have been around in one form or another for over a century. However, neither was particularly active before this collaboration. “These institutions don’t necessarily have registrars, gallery workers or staff retention. This becomes very difficult when the status and future of the organization is itself uncertain,” Ascher noted.
Following renovations supported by a Mellon grant, SAAM (which occupies a historic black-serving barber shop in Southampton) began developing a contemporary collection in 2024. The collection now includes approximately nine works on display in the Heritage House and church. Damien Davis’ exhibition resonates directly with the history of SAAM, as his new body of work is based on the barbershop as a social space and as a system of visual logic. In a series of laser-cut acrylic compositions held together by stainless steel hardware, the silhouettes of heads, tools and gestures are separated, repeated and rearranged. Care becomes a form of structure through which identity, belonging, and community are continually shaped by small, deliberate adjustments.
The Hamptons Black Arts Council is still in the early stages of learning how to raise funds and build sustainable support for its ambitious programming, but it has launched a $6 million fundraising initiative and hosted an annual June retreat that has provided an opportunity to issue broader calls to action. “Everyone was there because we needed to raise money (for the residency),” Ascher said, “and the event showed how meaningful it is when artists can stay together in the area.” (For the past two years, visiting artists have been housed through the Watermill Center’s residency program, which is serving as a partner until HBAC secures a property of its own.)
The council’s work continues beyond the summer season. Exhibits remain open through the winter, and new funding has made it possible to maintain regular gallery hours rather than open museums only when Ascher or one of their few staff members is present. The community’s response has been enthusiastic, according to Ascher. She has discovered that many black space visitors spend time in the Hamptons but rarely talk about it. “Once they realize there are more people like them out there, they’re more willing to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m here too.’ People are really starting to come out of the woodwork,” she joked.
It is easy to see why Ascher resists describing himself as a merchant. A painter and sculptor by training, she sees her activities as a form of cultural production linked to social structures and informed by cultural anthropology, and her five-year plan is ambitious. She hopes to create a home capable of accommodating at least five rotating artists who will connect with arts organizations including The Church, Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall. She is also exploring a possible collaboration with Art21, on whose board she serves, through film and other formats that could connect the overlapping communities she is involved with. Her broader ambition is to build a movement and place it in art history and academic discourse.
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