Parrish Art Museum. The Parrish Art Museum is an art museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron Architects and located in Water Mill, New York, whereto it moved in 2012 from Southampton Village. The museum focuses extensively on work by artists from the artist colony of the South Shore and North Shore. The Parrish Art Museum was founded in 1897. It has grown into a major art museum with a permanent collection of more than 3,000 works of art from the nineteenth century to the present, including works by such contemporary painters and sculptors such as John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Donald Sultan, Elizabeth Peyton, as well as by masters Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. The Parrish houses among the world's most important collections of works by the preeminent American Impressionist William Merritt Chase and by the groundbreaking post-war American realist painter Fairfield Porter. The museum's current director is Terrie Sultan, who has written several publications related to noted artists. The Museum was founded in 1897 by Samuel Longstreth Parrish, a successful attorney and Quaker who began collecting art in the early 1880s and who established the museum to house his collection of Italian Renaissance painting and copies of classical and Renaissance sculpture. Designed by noted architect Grosvenor Atterbury and constructed in 1897 in downtown Southampton at 25 Jobs Lane, the Museum was incorporated the following year as the Art Museum of Southampton. One of the impetus for founding the museum in an artist colony where William Merritt Chase founded the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art. The original building was expanded twice, in 1902 and 1913. After his death in 1932, the collection and building were bequeathed to the Village of Southampton but, without Parrish's guiding vision, the Museum ceased to thrive. It wasn't until the 1950s, under the direction of the newly elected president of the board of trustees, Rebecca Bolling Littlejohn, that the Museum enjoyed its own renaissance. Recognizing the importance of this country's contribution to the arts, Mrs. Littlejohn launched a campaign to strengthen the Museum's holdings of American art, with special attention to artists associated with eastern Long Island such as Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam, and Thomas Doughty. Upon her death, the Museum became the beneficiary of more than 300 paintings, drawings, and watercolors from her personal collection, which included work by Martin Johnson Heade, Asher B. Durand, John H. Twachtman, John Sloan, and a remarkable collection of thirty-one paintings by American Impressionist William Merritt Chase. In 1981, further depth was added to the collection when nearly 200 works of art by the prominent American painter, critic, and longtime Southampton resident Fairfield Porter were donated by his wife Anne and by the artist's estate. Building from the strength of these collections, the Museum now traces the evolution of American art from its roots in an emerging landscape tradition through the liberating influences of European modernism and the development of the New York School to the stylistic diversity of contemporary art, focusing its exhibitions and acquisitions on American painting of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to artists who have lived and worked on Long Island's East End and their influence on the national and international art world. Once home to Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Roy Lichtenstein, among many others, today's residents, full-time or seasonal, include Chuck Close, Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, Eric Fischl, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Donald Sultan. The museum had long had a significant amount of its collection in storage. It 2000 it acquired the neighboring Rogers Memorial Library for an annex after the library moved to a new building on the edge of town. The library was acquired for $1.1 million from more than $3 million donated by Carroll Petrie for the acquisition and renovations. The buildings were still considered too small for the collection. In 2012 as part of the move to Water Mill the library was sold for $2.875 to Ajax Holding LLC., which has plans to convert the building commercial space and to also restore it. The original Parrish structure is to undergo renovations designed by architect David Rockwell to become the new Southampton Center. The museum encountered opposition to its plans to modernize and enlarge its historic Jobs Lane complex. Recognizing the need to grow and to provide for a modern facility with appropriate climate control, the Board of Trustees decided to embark on a new project to design and construct a purpose-built building.