Superposition-Gallery-e1784559794216.jpg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”A wall-mounted sculptural assemblage features oversized white scissors and profile-shaped combs arranged over red and blue panels.” width=”970″ height=”707″ data-caption=’Damien Davis’s “Hedges and Edges: Barbershops, Community Gardens” opened on July 18 at the Southampton African American Museum, presented by Hamptons Black Art Council. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>CARLOS HERNANDEZ 2025</span>’>
Storm Ascher has a reputation for wearing multiple hats: gallerist, curator, artist and community organizer among them. She has long advocated for art’s power to transform communities and lives, and her primary tool has been Superposition Gallery, a nomadic contemporary art platform that stages exhibitions and projects in borrowed or temporary spaces. Its fluid structure allowed Ascher to provide visibility and opportunities across geographies and contexts to more than 100 artists, balancing emerging voices with established figures while reimagining how and where art can be experienced.
At the same time, she has forayed into context- and locality-specific cultural infrastructure creation with the Hamptons Black Arts Council (HBAC), which promotes and protects Black arts institutions, artists and cultural memory on Long Island’s East End. Through exhibitions, residencies, collection building and community partnerships, HBAC is developing the institutional framework needed to secure a lasting presence for Black artists in the Hamptons, while creating spaces of recognition and representation for the local Black community in an area increasingly associated with a predominantly white, wealthy and seasonal population.
This summer, Ascher and the Hamptons Black Arts Council are presenting a rich program that kicked off with the opening of two exhibitions: the group show “IT IS WRITTEN in the Sand” at the Eastville Heritage House Museum and Damien Davis’s solo exhibition “Hedges and Edges: Barbershops, Community Gardens” at the Southampton African American Museum (SAAM). There was also HBAC’s Artist’s Table at the Watermill Center (part of the organization’s annual three-day retreat), which included a presentation by artist Anthony Akinbola and a menu inspired by his artwork created by chef Roze Traore and raised funds for the organization’s expanding programs and permanent residency initiative.
When Observer spoke to Ascher, she described her work with the Hamptons Black Arts Council as an extension of the thinking behind Superposition Gallery. “We expand and contract with the space. We do not have a brick-and-mortar space; we always borrow,” she said. “I feel that in the Hamptons, this Black community has also borrowed space and been forcibly pushed out multiple times. But it cyclically comes back and revitalizes the community through art.”
The ignored and sometimes suppressed Black history of Long Island’s East End is, in fact, inseparable from the project. From the early 1700s through the 1800s, Ascher explained, formerly enslaved people started their own businesses there. The community included veterans of the First and Second World Wars, Seneca and other Indigenous people, mixed families and European immigrants who were not considered white at the time, including Irish and Jewish families. Ascher decided to focus on Sag Harbor’s Eastville neighborhood, home to the Eastville Community Historical Society Heritage House and the St. David AME Zion Church, founded in 1839. “Given my background, my experience of moving around constantly while growing up and my connection to multiple generations of oppression, it was important to me to focus on this area. It is almost like one of the first stops in the history of American racism.”
The church, Ascher clarified, was established near the intersection of Eastville Avenue and Liberty Street after Black congregants were denied seats in a nearby church; it became a stop on the Underground Railroad. Trapdoors are to this day embedded in the architecture, although they are now used for different purposes.
Across the street from the Heritage House is a Gulf gas station and a condemned house. “Everything around the museum appears to be in disarray, but part of the problem is that we have not been allowed to beautify it,” she said. “We are trying to improve as much as we can with the access we do have, particularly through my relationships with the executive directors of these two museums.”
This history remains vulnerable, according to Ascher, not only to neglect but also to the priorities of real estate development and local governance. “It is important to some people in the town that this history be preserved,” she said. “But there are also people who do not care about it.” The Hamptons Black Arts Council emerged from the resistance Ascher and her collaborators encountered while attempting to make basic improvements to the area surrounding the museum.
She pointed out that Black families maintained second homes there during the Harlem Renaissance, well before the area gained its reputation as a playground for the white elite: “The idea that Black families could have that kind of luxury was then erased and pushed aside. The story became, ‘This is a white town.’ But no, those Black families are right there.”
Ascher came to the Hamptons as a teenager via an internship at the Watermill Center, after artists she met while studying at UC Santa Barbara introduced her to the area. At first, its preserved white-picket-fence aesthetic felt unsettling and even historically threatening. Over time, however, she came to understand the East End as both a place of exclusion and a restorative environment with that longer, often obscured history of Black leisure, property ownership and cultural life.
Leveraging relationships with the Eastville Community Historical Society and SAAM, Ascher has focused on reactivating and strengthening institutions already rooted in the community. She says her collaboration with Eastville Community Historical Society executive director and chief curator Georgette Grier-Key and Brenda Simmons, founder and executive director of the Southampton African American Museum, deepened that engagement and strengthened her desire to make a lasting impact. Grier-Key and Simmons also helped shape HBAC’s housing initiative, which aims to establish an artist residency that supports not only visiting artists but also a broader ecosystem of Black scholars, professionals and collectors.
“When we think about who is actually still there to preserve and focus on this history, that is where the housing initiative came from,” Ascher said. “The idea is to create a residency program so that, if artists are living there, other Black scholars and professionals will also feel encouraged to keep their real estate and continue reinvesting in the area.”
Artists cannot do everything themselves, she acknowledged, but they are often at the forefront of building communities: “We consistently price artists out of the districts they create because people want to be cool and live near them, and then they price out the very people they were trying to get close to. That is why we would never want to acquire a space simply for the sake of having one. We want to add to spaces that already exist.”
The Southampton African American Museum and the Eastville Community Historical Society have both existed in one form or another for more than a century. Still, neither was particularly active before this collaboration. “These institutions do not necessarily have registrars, gallery workers or staff retention. That becomes very difficult when the status and future of the organization are themselves uncertain,” Ascher noted.
Following renovations supported by a Mellon grant, SAAM (which occupies a historic barbershop that served Black men in Southampton) began developing a contemporary collection in 2024. The collection now includes approximately nine works displayed in the Heritage House and the church. The Damien Davis exhibition resonates directly with the history of SAAM, as his new body of work draws on the barbershop as both a social space and a system of visual logic. Across a series of laser-cut acrylic compositions held together with stainless steel hardware, silhouettes of heads, tools and gestures are broken apart, repeated and reorganized. Grooming becomes a form of structure through which identity, belonging and community are continually shaped by small, deliberate adjustments.
The Hamptons Black Arts Council is still in the early stages of learning how to fundraise and build sustainable support for its ambitious programming, but it has launched a $6 million fundraising initiative and organized an annual Juneteenth retreat that has provided an opportunity to issue broader calls to action. “Everyone was there because we needed to raise money [for the residency],” Ascher said, “and the event demonstrated how meaningful it is when artists can actually stay together in the area.” (For the past two years, visiting artists have been housed through the Watermill Center’s residency program, which is serving as a partner until HBAC can secure a property of its own.)
The council’s work continues beyond the summer season. Exhibitions remain open through the winter, and new funding has made it possible to maintain regular gallery hours rather than opening the museums only when Ascher or one of their few staff members is present. The community response has been enthusiastic, according to Ascher. She’s found that many Black visitors to the space spend time in the Hamptons but rarely speak about it. “Once they realize there are more people like them there, they are more willing to say, ‘Oh yes, I’m here too.’ People have really started coming out of the woodwork,” she joked.
It’s easy to see why Ascher resists describing herself as a dealer. A painter and sculptor by training, she sees her activities as a form of cultural production concerned with societal structures and informed by cultural anthropology, and her five-year plan is ambitious. She hopes to establish a house capable of accommodating at least five artists in rotation who will be connected with arts organizations including The Church, the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall. She is also exploring a potential collaboration with Art21, on whose board she serves, via film and other formats that could connect the overlapping communities with which she is involved. Her broader ambition is to build a movement and situate it in art history and academic discourse.
