White Room Gallery Maps a Summer of Art and Tennis in East Hampton
East Hampton’s summer rhythm is shaping the White Room Gallery’s third season in the village, where co-founders and co-directors Andrea McCafferty and Kat O’Neill are pairing a broad contemporary program with a distinctly Hamptons sensibility. This year’s lineup includes the group exhibition “Open Ended” and, in August, “The Art of Tennis,” a show timed to the U.S. Open and built around the sport’s cultural afterlife as much as its competition.
McCafferty and O’Neill said the gallery’s location has influenced both the pace and the structure of their programming. The space, they noted, is large enough to hold multiple artists in separate but connected settings, with movable walls that allow each presentation to unfold on its own terms while still reading as part of a larger whole. The gallery has also become a place where emerging artists can find an audience. One artist they recently signed had been making work for 40 years without a platform, and told them the gallery changed his life.
That mix of discovery and range runs through “Open Ended,” which the co-directors described as a curatorial exercise in flexibility, spontaneity, and multiple approaches to creativity. The exhibition brings together photography, abstract painting, figurative work, sculpture, and playful, image-driven canvases. Among the artists referenced in the show are Greg Lotus, Russell Young, Bob Marley, Frank Sinatra, Pablo Picasso, Banksy, Lichtenstein, Nelson De La Nuez, and Craig Alan, reflecting the gallery’s willingness to move between contemporary practice and secondary-market names.
“The Art of Tennis” takes a more focused route. Ted Dimond is the featured artist, and the exhibition will include portraits of Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Björn Borg, Coco Gauff, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Joao Fonseca. The show is intended as a tribute to tennis in the Hamptons as well as to the sport’s broader mythology, with proceeds supporting charities and a fundraiser for the McEnroe foundation also in development.
For White Room Gallery, the summer season is less about a single theme than about building a conversation between audiences, artists, and the place itself. In East Hampton, that conversation now stretches from the village street to the U.S. Open and back again.
