Storm Ascher has a reputation for wearing multiple hats: gallery owner, curator, artist, and community organizer among them. She has long championed the power of art to transform communities and lives, and her primary vehicle has been Superposition Gallery, a nomadic contemporary art platform that organizes exhibitions and projects in borrowed or temporary spaces. Its flexible structure has allowed Usher to provide visibility and opportunities across geographies and contexts to more than 100 artists, balancing emerging voices and established personalities while reimagining how and where art can be experienced.
At the same time, she has been engaged in creating context-specific and local cultural infrastructure with the Hamptons Black Arts Council (HBAC), which promotes and protects Black arts institutions, artists, and cultural memory on the East End of Long Island. Through exhibitions, residencies, collection building, and community partnerships, HBAC works to develop the institutional framework necessary to secure a permanent presence for Black artists in the Hamptons, while creating spaces of recognition and representation for the local Black community in a region increasingly associated with a predominantly white, affluent, and seasonal population.
This summer, Usher and the Hamptons Black Arts Council present a rich program that begins with the opening of two exhibitions: the group show “It’s Written in the Sand” at the Heritage House Museum in Eastvale and Damian Davis’s solo exhibition “Hedges and Edges: Barbershops, Community Gardens” at the Southampton African American Museum (SAAM). There was also an HBAC Artists’ Table at the Watermill Center (part of the organization’s annual three-day retreat), which included a presentation by artist Anthony Akinbola, a menu inspired by his artwork created by Chef Rose Traoré, and raised funds for the organization’s expanded programs and permanent residence initiative.
When the Observer spoke to Asher, she described her work with the Black Arts Council of the Hamptons as an extension of the thinking behind Superposition Gallery. “We’re expanding and contracting with space. We don’t have brick-and-mortar space; we’re always borrowing,” she said. “I feel like this black community in the Hamptons has also borrowed space and been forcibly evicted several times. But it comes back periodically and revitalizes the community through art.”
The sometimes ignored or suppressed black history on the east end of Long Island is actually an integral part of the project. From the early 1700s through the 1800s, former slaves started their own businesses there, Asher explained. The community included veterans of World Wars I and II, Seneca and other indigenous people, mixed families and European immigrants who were not considered white at the time, including Irish and Jewish families. Asher decided to focus on the Eastville neighborhood of Sag Harbor, home to the Eastville Historical Society’s Heritage House and St. David AME Zion Church, founded in 1839. “Given my background, my experience of constantly moving around growing up and being connected to multiple generations of oppression, it was important for me to focus on this area. It’s almost like one of the first stops in the history of American racism.”
Asher explained that the church was established near the intersection of Eastville Avenue and Liberty Street after black worshipers were denied seats in a nearby church; It became a stop on the subway. Trapdoors remain an integral part of architecture to this day, although they are now used for different purposes.
Across the street from the Heritage House is a Gulf gas station and a convict house. “Everything around the museum seems to be a mess, but part of the problem is that we were not allowed to spruce it up,” she said. “We’re trying to optimize as much as we can with the access that we have, especially through my relationships with the executives of these two museums.”
According to Asher, this history remains vulnerable not only to neglect, but also to the priorities of real estate development and local governance. “It’s important to some people in the city to preserve this history,” she said. “But there are also people who don’t care about that.” The Hamptons Black Arts Council emerged from the resistance Asher and her collaborators encountered as they attempted to make basic improvements to the area surrounding the museum.
She noted that black families maintained second homes there during the Harlem Renaissance, long 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 there.”
Asher came to the Hamptons as a teenager through an internship at the Watermill Center, after artists she met while studying at UC Santa Barbara introduced her to the area. At first, the preserved white picket fence aesthetic seemed unsettling and even historically threatening. However, over time, I came to understand the East End as a place of exclusion and a restorative environment with that much longer and often ambiguous history of black leisure, property ownership, and cultural life.
Leveraging relationships with the Eastville Historical Community Association and SAAM, Asher focused on revitalizing and strengthening institutions already rooted in the community. She says her collaborations with Eastville Historical Society Executive Director and Chief Curator Georgette Greer 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 form HBAC’s Housing Initiative, which aims to create an arts 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 that history, that’s where the housing initiative came from,” Asher said. “The idea is to create a residency program so that, if artists live there, other black scholars and professionals will also feel encouraged to keep their properties and continue reinvesting in the area.”
She acknowledged that artists can’t do everything themselves, but they are often at the forefront of building communities: “We’re constantly pricing artists out of the areas they create because people want to be cool and live close to them, and then they price out the same people they were trying to get closer to. That’s why we would never want a space just to have one. We want to add to the spaces that already exist.”
The Southampton African American Museum and Eastville Community Historical Society has existed in one form or another for more than a century. However, neither of them had been particularly active before this collaboration. “These organizations do not necessarily have registrars, gallery workers or staff. This becomes very difficult when the status and future of the organization is uncertain,” Asher noted.
Following renovations supported by a Mellon grant, SAAM (which operates a historic barber shop serving black men in Southampton) began developing a contemporary collection in 2024. The collection now includes approximately nine works on display in the Heritage House and church. Damian Davies’ exhibition aligns directly with SAAM’s history, as his new body of work draws on the barbershop as a social space and system of visual logic. Through a series of laser-cut acrylic installations mounted with stainless steel hardware, the silhouettes of heads, instruments, and gestures are deconstructed, duplicated, and realigned. Grooming becomes a form of structure through which identity, belonging, and community are continually shaped through small, intentional adjustments.
The Hamptons Black Arts Council is still in the early stages of learning how to fundraise and build sustained support for its ambitious programs, 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]“The event showed how important it is for artists to be able to stay together in the region,” Asher said. (For the past two years, visiting artists have been housed through the Watermill Center’s residency program, which acts as a partner until HBAC can secure a property of its own.)
The Council’s work continues until after the summer. The galleries remain open through the winter, and new funding has made it possible to maintain regular opening hours for the galleries rather than opening the museums only when Asher or one of her few staff is present. The community response has been enthusiastic, according to Asher. I found that many black visitors to the place spend time in the Hamptons but rarely talk about it. “Once they realize there are more people like them out there, they’re more willing to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m here too.’” “People are really starting to come out of the woodwork,” she joked.
It’s easy to see why Asher resists calling herself a trader. 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 create a house capable of accommodating at least five artists on a rotating basis who will be connected to arts organizations including a church, the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall. She is also exploring the possibility of collaborating with Art21, on whose board she serves, through films and other formats that can connect the overlapping communities in which she is involved. Its broader ambition is to build a movement and situate it within art history and academic discourse.
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