Identities of Southampton

1999 | Southampton, New York

PROJECT PARTNERS:

Parrish Art Museum
Southampton School District

Experiencing Southampton through the eyes of ten young residents

IN THE BEGINNING

Cook began by visiting Southampton in the summer to get some background on the community, followed by Southampton students visiting his studio in New York to get some background on him in turn, and to see a presentation of his work. Students were then asked to go through an interview process to apply to work collaboratively with Cook, resulting in the selection of ten students. The students were very different from one to the next, portraying different combinations of class, culture, geography, and ethnicity in Southampton.

IN SOUTHAMPTON

Cook later returned to Southampton to live for two and a half weeks, spending at least a full day with each of the ten students. The companionship was an attempt to deeply experience the community of Southampton through ten young people’s perspectives. The days started as early as meeting Dyani at 6:00am to ride the bus to her fashion design classes at BOCES, and as late as dinners with Franchon and John’s family, talking into the night. Cook went to student classes, to games, to places to hang out, and to social gatherings—on one school snow day, he joined students for sledding.

This time allowed Cook to connect deeply with each student one at a time, learning about their community through their eyes and words, and seeing how different experiences across the group manifested in the students’ lifestyles, personalities, and values. Cook observed how each student, and the many other individuals he met by way of spending time with them, described Southampton and showcased its strengths and weaknesses as a community. He began imagining how to distill his experiences into a visual form.

The experiences from these weeks also inspired a set of seventeen questions to which each student responded, letting them express their identities and address issues of race, gender, citizenship, education, and class in Southampton. Cook took photographic portraits of each student before returning to New York City to make objects.

LOCATION

Cook worked with the students and staff of the Parrish Museum (then located in Southampton) to choose installation locations that were geographically as diverse as the students in the project. The sites informed the scale of the portraits and who would go where. Some locations recognized the institutions with whom Cook worked, some highlighted community landmarks or borders, and all were attempts to put images and views of the young residents of the greater Southampton community into the neighborhoods where they lived.

CREATION

Interested in involving the students as much as possible in the themes and creation of each piece, Cook had the students draw themselves for the paintings. To achieve this, he first made his own drawings of the students on clear polyester sheets, based on the original photo portraits he’d taken. The students then returned to Cook’s studio and drew themselves from projections of those drawings. From the students’ drawings, Cook made ten paintings.

THE WORKS

The final works are collaborations of expression between the students and Cook, addressing issues and experiences encountered both through student suggestion and Cook’s own observation. The paintings are gestures to empower the ten young people and their community. The students’ answers to the seventeen questions serve as references to compare, contrast, and contemplate in our universal quest for enlightenment as a community, society, and world.