East Hampton’s Guild Hall has very unusual DNA.
Originally created as a civic institution bookended by a museum and a theater, it was the belief of East Hampton resident, philanthropist and founder Mary Woodhouse and her husband, Lorenzo, that exposure to the arts, whether through drama or exhibitions, would make people better citizens.
Open since 1931, early Guild Hall trustees were mostly members of the social elite, usually conservative and with token representation from the year-round community. That quickly changed as intentions shifted to make the locale not only a welcoming place for community members who appreciated the arts, but a gathering place for the artists themselves.
“[Mary Woodhouse] believed that we’d be better neighbors, we’d be better critical thinkers, we’d be more engaged in civic life if we experienced art together,” says Guild Hall executive director Andrea Grover. “I’ve found it hard to find an organization exactly like ours anywhere.”
Caring for the community
Erected during the Great Depression and at the tail-end of Prohibition, Guild Hall was built with no major endowment or comprehensive plan for running it.
“It’s almost as if you couldn’t recreate the circumstances in which it was founded,” Grover says. “There was a kind of, I think, economy of means when the building was built,” with the executive director estimating the hall was run by volunteers, committees and community members for at least the first 30 years of its existence.
The inspiration for Guild Hall’s name came from British guildhalls originally built by professional associations but ultimately used for cultural and civic purposes. In 1930, Woodhouse anonymously dedicated land and the initial financial gift toward the building of Guild Hall, with the vision to highlight the importance of the arts — but also, Grover theorizes, to be built for her daughter Marjorie, for whom the nearby Woodhouse Playhouse was originally built in 1916, the year of Marjorie’s 16th birthday.
“Marjorie was a very creative individual, and I think that it was an extension of their relationship,” Grover says of the mother-daughter duo. After Marjorie died in a car accident in 1933, Grover believes the community rallied around a melancholy Woodhouse, securing additional funding through a local campaign in which everyone from artists and writers to small-business owners contributed $10 each to complete construction.
This sort of grassroots initiative has remained a driving force of Guild Hall’s modus operandi, and the visceral community connectedness demonstrated in the 1930s has made an impact on Amy Steinhaus Kirwin, Guild Hall’s chief creative officer. A Los Angeles transplant, Kirwin believes the fact that the community was so invested during Guild Hall’s early days is what has allowed the organization to achieve not only great success but great respect and adoration.
“I’ve always found things interesting that I discover along the way about how a small community works,” Kirwin says. “But this one, this in particular, always sort of surprised and delighted me, to see how engaged and impacted people are by what we do. We’re in touch with our community because we want to make sure that we do things that are not only interesting, but also mindful and that serve the community. That’s important to us.”
Omnivores of arts and culture
Since almost the beginning, Guild Hall has continually been a place for not only blending traditional, classical work with the more experimental and avant-garde, but a consistent haven for showcasing art made both by famous, world-renowned artists and contemporary, unknown creatives.
As one of the nation’s first multidisciplinary cultural institutions, it holds a permanent collection of 2,400 works, with exhibitions including pieces from countless internationally celebrated artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Audrey Flack and Eric Fischl. Additionally, the hall has hosted hundreds of performances from world-class stars of stage and screen like Helen Hayes, Carrie Fisher, Bob Fosse, Olivia de Havilland and Eli Wallach. It has helped establish and nurture the reputations of legendary literary figures, too, like Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.
Presenting more than 200 programs and hosting about 60,000 visitors each year, Guild Hall has been leading the East End’s charge on keeping a humanist approach to accessing art and the people who make it. Its galleries, which cover 3,050 square feet, can hold up to eight exhibitions, while its 3,000-square-foot theater produces well over 100 programs a year, ranging from theatrical plays and literary readings to concerts and film screenings.
“It’s kind of non-hierarchical and also very, very diverse,” Grover says of Guild Hall’s programming. “We like to say we’re like omnivores of art and culture.”
While maintaining a unique combination of programs in both the establishment’s museum and theater arenas — an accredited museum from the American Association of Museums since 1973, a prestigious distinction held by only about a thousand others nationwide — Guild Hall is also chartered as an educational institution through the State of New York. The Guild Hall Teen Arts Council is the region’s first paid teen arts program, and the on-site Boots Lamb Education Center (revitalized technologically during the cultural center’s extensive two-plus-year renovations) offers flexible space for meetings, classes, rehearsals, workshops and project work.
“We always call them the three pillars of Guild Hall: visual arts, performing arts and arts education,” Grover says. “What Guild Hall has done for these many decades is combine the arts so interdisciplinarity, or cross disciplinary. Bringing the disciplines together has been the focus of our program for at least the last five years.” Historically, that’s meant a crisscross pollination of the arts, such as artists producing set designs for a theater piece, the Teen Arts Council working hands-on with exhibiting artists, or poets performing in the galleries.
More and more, part of offering innovative and engaging programming is, for Kirwin, about trying to take inspiration from one area to the next so that there’s a cohesion.
“I think that also helps when it comes to marketing the institution, because there’s a very clear message and a clear intention,” she says, “partly because we all work so closely together, from a programming perspective and from a community engagement perspective — so, between visual arts, performing arts, learning community engagement, we’re always in conversation with each other. There’s a very clear and open dialog about what’s going on, so we can make things cohesive. There’s a lot of different things going on, for sure, but there’s a very clear intention.”
A Reno with Reach
Beginning in 2021, Guild Hall underwent a facility-wide, nearly $30 million capital improvements project, which included restoring the cultural institution’s beloved circus-tent-themed theater as well as renovating gallery spaces, education rooms, outdoor gardens and gathering spaces, offices, and art-handling facilities, resulting in a near-total upgrade of the building’s 24,000-square-foot building and 46,000-square-foot property. Additionally, the reno included an overhaul of the HVAC systems, a partial new roof and state-of-the-art acoustic improvements.
The project was overseen by historic architecture leader Peter Pennoyer Architects and executed by local construction company Ben Krupinski Builder. Other integral members of the design and construction team included theatrical consultants Apeiro Design, Long Island-based security system supplier and technological concierge Bri-Tech, renowned New York-based Hollander Design and Landscape Architects, and Connecticut sound and acoustics firm Akustiks.
“It’s like a magic trick because it looks and feels like it has the same character that it’s had, and it has the same scale that it’s had, but it now functions as a new construction,” Grover says. “Guild Hall has personality. We are not anonymous. It’s all of us, it’s everybody who’s on stage; everyone who comes here is part of that personality. And it should feel like that when you come in.”
Construction began in summer 2022 and the galleries, grounds, classroom and offices reopened in July 2023. In addition to state-of-the-art technology and acoustic improvements, like a remote-control camera system for live streaming and a dynamic audio lift system, the theater’s iconic circus-tent ceiling motif and ballroom chandeliers remain but with a newer, more comfortable seating arrangement via enhanced sightlines through an increased floor rake. The theater reopened in 2024. Boasting 299 seats, it has been renamed the Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan Theater, as the pair’s landmark gift enabled the space’s comprehensive transformation.
Other improvements include larger full-glass wooden-framed doors to allow more light to stream in and to be more spatially accommodating, revitalizing the lobby, installing a coffee bar and designing entrances to be inclusively accessible.
This year marks the first time in five years that Guild Hall will be fully back in action, ready to fire on all cylinders. Now that the construction dust has been settled and swept, the top of Grover’s hit list for this season, she says, is a simple but all-encompassing act: “We’re excited to take it out for a spin!”
