The Heckscher Museum’s exhibition Connie Fox: The Sammy’s Beach Series is the first comprehensive presentation of this exciting body of work to take place on Long Island. The exhibition brings together a dozen abstract paintings and a group of related drawings in charcoal, ink, and acrylic on paper that Fox created in response to Sammy’s Beach. (Right, Connie Fox, Sammy’s Beach IV, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, Lent by the Artist.)

Fox began visiting the tidal bay beach, located between Gardiner’s Bay and Three Mile Harbor in the town of East Hampton, soon after moving to Long Island in the late 1970s. Over a period of thirty years, she walked, sat and swam at the beach. Created between 2007 and 2014, the series is a remarkable recent achievement by an artist whose work spans seven decades.

Connie Fox: The Sammy’s Beach Series explores the connection between Fox’s abstractions and her experiences of the beach, and considers the shifting vocabulary of shapes, lines, colors, and textures that unites the varied series. Fox explains that the paintings are an homage to Sammy’s Beach, not representational landscapes.

 "The challenging compositions, robust paint handling, and sheer size of the works in the Sammy's Beach series thrill me. It is fascinating to consider how Fox's lived and remembered experiences of the beach have seeped into her abstractions,” said Karli Wurzelbacher, Curator.  “Each canvas is distinct, but

commonalities including the presence of the grid and tangles of dense lines carry throughout the series."  

Born in Fowler, Colorado in 1925, Fox earned an M.F.A from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she met artist Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989). She counted her as a mentor and sometime companion on her visits to Sammy’s Beach. After relocating to East Hampton, Fox married sculptor William King (1925-2015).