Jeremy Dennis is not the guy you’d think would be revolutionizing the face of the East End art world. Not because, as an artist and an activist, he isn’t intensely, beautifully talented and persistent in his own right (he is, and then some). It’s just that when you look at the East End artscape, it’s Big Names and Big Money that, more often than not, make the waves.
Dennis, who was born and raised on the Shinnecock Reservation, is a man of many gifts. He is soft-spoken; quiet, even, but with an unmissable palpable energy. Sitting across from him when he talks, he has both a disarming shyness yet a certain solid self-possession of his mission that makes you want to be part of it. He makes you want to learn, to listen, to collaborate, to help, to celebrate the art of the indigenous people who have dwelled on the East End for 13,000 years, well before most of us, and embrace that of other voices that should and need to be heard.
In Ma’s House, Dennis, his family and his compatriots and supporters in this creative, groundbreaking endeavor have built a home for art where the once marginalized become the main event — not on special occasions, but always and as a norm. And there is truly no other place like it in the world.
the house that ma built
Dennis was born and raised in part in the multigenerational home of his grandparents Loretta and Peter Silva, the former a member of the Shinnecock Nation and the latter a World War II veteran and chief of the Hassanamisco Indian Reservation from his home state of Massachusetts. Built in the 1960s using materials reclaimed from an old church, the Southampton house was the heartbeat of the family and a big influence on the young artist. Until around his 13th birthday, Dennis, his mom — the artist Denise Silva-Dennis — his dad, Peter Dennis, and his older sister Kelly lived there until needed repairs on the old home made it seem better to move to a newer abode, which the family still resides in just down Old Mill Road on the Shinnecock Reservation.
But even in disrepair, Ma’s home remained a place Dennis and his family just couldn’t lose to the overgrowth and ages.
Meanwhile, he pursued a path to art, always with encouragement from his family. He attended the Ross School and, along the way, tried out different mediums: printmaking, sculpture, oil paint. At Stony Brook University, he took a more practical path as a computer science major, but while there was introduced to the magic of 35 mm black and white photography and developing his own film in the campus dark room.
“It’s alchemy and magic almost, because you not only have film that is really delicate and interesting in how you turn that into a print,” he says, “but then, just like, seeing your image come forward…”
At the same time, Dennis became interested in intaglio printing — a 15th century form of printmaking in which an image is created via etching or fine cuts onto the print surface — and another technique used closer to home, solar plate printing, in which he’d use a transparent image that was left in the sun. He began using these methods in layers, adding the modern tool of Photoshop to create digital motifs that allowed him to express a more complex version of his artistic vision, at times creating narrative scenes from the reservation and the world at large around him.
“I really like the role that artists are playing, just turning text or oral stories into an image. But I just wanted to do that for Native American perspectives with ours in the Northeast,” says Dennis. “Unfortunately, with Native people and culture, I think people think they know everything they need to know [from] school or in the newspaper or whatever. But I think there’s just so much nuance into how individualized every tribe is, and then how individualized every tribal member is. But somehow, in 2025, we still think we’re all like a monolith, and everyone does the same thing.”
As his work progressed, the importance of his voice and experiences gained attention, as with the groundbreaking series “Nothing Happened Here,” a series of images that take a sobering view of post-colonial disparities between Native Americans and generations of colonizers — and, perhaps, closer to home, life on the reservation and the hyper-moneyed world just outside its borders.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dennis had a residency lined up to work on his photographic art, but it was canceled for safety reasons. Living at home with his mom, dad and sister, an idea began to percolate. Why not turn his grandmother’s vacant house into a space for art, for knowledge, for connecting? He and his dad got to work side by side, refurbishing the family matriarch’s home into a livable, workable space with a studio area on the subfloor, a combined gallery and kitchen on the main floor, and a bedroom on the top floor.
“As an individual artist, I was going to my own residencies since I’ve never really had a studio,” Dennis says. “It was the one way I would have space to work, and thinking space. I wanted to offer that to other artists of color, to come here and be inspired by Shinnecock.”
With a GoFundMe seeding the initial funding, Dennis and his dad gave Ma’s house a whole new chapter in its life.
cooking up ma’s kitchen
Taking a break during the rebuild in 2020, Dennis took time to attend to his art at a residency program at the Santa Fe Arts Institute. It was here he met fellow artist Brianna Hernandez. Although the places they grew up in were far apart — she from Texas and Wisconsin, he from Southampton — they bonded over their mutual dream of an artist residency program that focused on BIPOC artists and would give them time and space to create work and present it in whatever form felt most comfortable — a gallery show, a talk, a video, a slideshow, a performance. Dennis shared his vision for Ma’s House and asked if Hernandez would like to be part of it; she jumped at the chance.
At first, the work was pretty much volunteer, with Dennis, Hernandez and his family and fellow tribal members helping to get the idea off the ground. Then, in 2023, they got the boost they needed most.
“CRNY is this really amazing overarching program that Jeremy was giving feedback to for their original pilot research. It’s a statewide program with two different elements,” Hernandez says. “One was a universal basic income for artists in New York — a salary for just being an artist — and the other is the artist employment program that paired artists with organizations and gave them a bit more money under the assumption that they are contributing their creative work to a nonprofit. Ma’s house was a recipient of that grant.”
In fact, Ma’s House qualified for both. Hernandez, Dennis, and his cousin Hunter were all awarded individual universal income grants and Ma’s House became a partner in the artist employment program, adding deeper roots to the nonprofit’s mission. The program would provide key funding for stipends to artists attending the week- or two-week-long residency programs, covering things like travel to and from Southampton and groceries, as well as items particular to an artist’s work, like the cost of transporting materials and work to and from the house.
“Residencies are something that is often a good opportunity on your résumé, but if you can’t afford it, and you can’t take time away from work, then you can’t really push yourself forward in your career,” says Hernandez. “And so, being able to provide that to artists is really important to us.”
The only requirement of the artist-in-residence is the person does one community program to present their art, be it a talk, an open studio, a gallery show, a video or slideshow, a performance — whatever format works best to show and explain the work.
nation of truth
Inside the small, bright-red building, a multitude of other things take place at Ma’s House, too. There are the regular beading workshops led by Dennis’s mom, Denise, in the sub-level studio space. The growing library with its collection of Native American books on everything from history to art, much of which is in the process of being digitized thanks to another grant. The ongoing mapping project that Dennis won a grant for years ago to map and photograph important Native American archeological sites from Brooklyn to Montauk, many buried under the pretense of supposed progress.
“I always tell people it’s a family effort,” says Dennis. “And yeah, we have so many Tribal Artists within the community — I think with their contribution, like for example, this First Literature show, we have such great content.”
Currently, a must-see exhibit at Ma’s House is the collaborative First Literature Project from linguist Wenetu Wegquai Tarrant, a member of the Shinnecock Nation, and filmmaker Christian Scheider. The exhibit combines art with anthropology via a series of photographs and video interviews, as well as a riveting 3D storytelling sequence created to support the efforts of Native nations in holding fast to their languages and oral traditions.
“Every resident artist who comes through, they’re also part of the history and building up the space and what people recognize and remember,” says Dennis. “And then people who come and attend our events, from the Tribal community and the community at large, that’s also essential because if we had no one showing up, then the value wouldn’t be apparent.”
But they do. Dennis and Ma’s House have also been embraced by the greater Hamptons art community, with shows and collaborations with Guild Hall in East Hampton, the Parrish in Water Mill and The Church in Sag Harbor.
“It really is about cultural exchange and building bridges,” says Hernandez. “Having folks be welcomed in and learning about whoever’s coming into our space, and having them share it, having the community respond, it’s a really big part of the environment here. It’s really close to all of our hearts.”
