Lifting the Spirit at Duck Creek

It was one of those music moments. You know the kind: The atmosphere shifts. A few notes, and suddenly you feel it in your body. Something. Inexplicable.

How does music do that?

It happened a few weeks ago: a few miles from home; an orchestra; sitting in a lawn chair, looking up at the wind swirling in the trees, the birds circling. Could they feel it, I wondered?

I needed it. A tender moment — a sign that the human spirit is beautiful.

It was a temporary reprieve from all the shit that’s taking place in my name: masked government men (and a few women) snatching people from their homes and workplaces, separated from their families, sent to detention centers. “Disappeared” is what it’s called in the darkest chapters of human history. Think: Argentina, Chile, Africa — and now the United States.

Yes, in my name, because, in case you missed it, it’s our government — ours — even if we are horrified and enraged. And powerless to stop it.

But for a few moments a few Saturdays ago, a handful of us were given the rapturous evidence of humanity’s beauty. The imagination is a powerful and mysterious thing: It can deliver evil, and it delivers a version of heaven.

The music was a gift from The Arts Center at Duck Creek, because, like everything there, it was free. Well, “free”: Someone was paying for the 18 musicians, the conductor/composer and the singer to travel from New York City and perform for almost 90 minutes, but it wasn’t the audience.

Sitting there with my head swirling in the clouds and jazz swirling in my soul, my mind went to … whom do I thank for this?

Duck Creek is a sweet story, how a group of committed people, mostly neighbors, sensed over the course of several years what was possible at that property, coming together to create a stunning community space for music and the visual arts at the cradle of the South Fork arts scene, Springs. And, importantly, offered to us all at no charge. Ever. As a point of principle.

It’s hard to picture it these days, amid the towering trees and woods, but throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, what is now known as Duck Creek was the 130-acre Edwards farm, where that family raised oxen and horses and grew wheat and food crops. It extended north to beyond Gann Road and down Three Mile Harbor across Duck Creek (now home to a marina south of the farmhouse), toward the end of Breeze Hill Road.

A few years after World War II, so the story goes, the artist Lee Krasner nudged her friend the abstract painter John Little to buy what remained of the farm and its neglected house. Little moved a 19th century barn from James Lane in East Hampton Village onto the property to serve as his studio.

Those years until Little’s death in 1984 were the apex of the abstract expressionist movement in Springs, and the Little farm became a gathering place for his artist friends Krasner, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, among others.

Little’s family eventually sold the property to the fashion designer Helmut Lang, but it remained largely untouched, until the town of East Hampton purchased the property in 2005, using the Community Preservation Fund. The town had no clear plan for the property and the place sat strangely empty and unused for almost a decade, until Amagansett artist Sydney Albertini came looking for a site to present her Parrish Road Show exhibit. The old barn, then stuffed with furniture and with no finished floor, was tidied up for Sydney’s successful 2013 show — and a seed of an idea was born.

A group of local people, led largely by Jess Frost, Loring Bolger, Zach Cohen, Ira Barockas and Pamela Bicket, saw an opportunity to use the property for ad hoc arts programming. They formed a working group and in 2014 organized an exhibit and community celebration of local sculptor Bill King and his work. (Bill and his wife, Connie Fox, were still alive then to relish it all; Bill would die a year later, and Connie in 2023.)

The group pushed on and, in 2015, the light and installation artist Christine Sciulli filled the blacked-out barn for a mesmerizing show of projected lights on silk-like material (the fire marshal ended up shutting it down after several weeks).

But the potential of the place as a community arts magnet had become clear. The town began restoring the buildings with the help of Peconic Historic Preservation, and the original group began raising money and forming the organization that would eventually become The Arts Center at Duck Creek.

It was around then when Jess Frost began to assume the lead. She’d landed in her family’s summer home in East Hampton after a career working for art dealers in New York City, and by 2015 she was an assistant curator at Guild Hall. But, disillusioned with the art world, she was ready to move out west and have a different life.

“I was ready to leave,” she told me recently. “I had decided that if I wanted to continue to live in East Hampton, I needed to build something that makes me want to live here.”

Which she did. She is now Duck Creek’s executive director.

Using her connections and know-how, the newly minted nonprofit received early support from the Willem de Kooning and Hilo foundations. State and county funding, community members (from Montauk to Southampton) and family funds have followed.

In 2018, the nonprofit entered into a burdensome agreement with the town, basically a “license” to use the property, that would scare off any financially ambitious arts organization. But Frost and the Duck Creek board turned the restrictions into a sort of mantra and mission: Duck Creek can’t sell anything, can’t rent out the space for events, can’t charge admission. The upside is that the license costs $100 a year.

“This space is amazing, and the license basically means the town is giving us $500,000 in yearly rent,” Frost said. “You can look at the restrictions as frustrating, but we’ve turned it into the ethos of the organization: We are all about access to the arts.

“Access to the arts here has been fairly elitist. It has to be, because you need commercially viable work to cover overhead.”

Not that Duck Creek doesn’t exhibit commercially viable work, but its focus is about artists who aren’t necessarily in the spotlight, with an emphasis on local artists.

Early on, the artist and environmentalist Springs luminary Cile Downs had one of the final shows of her life at Duck Creek in 2018, followed by shows by young Bonac photo documentarian Tara Israel, and Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis. Fittingly, the center exhibited John Little’s own huge, bright abstract paintings.

Currently, the center is showing local sculptor Fitzhugh Karol, sculptor Daisuke Kiyomiya and Sagaponack artist Bruce Sherman.

The music lineup this summer has been nothing short of mind-blowing. That series is curated by Peter Watrous, a guitarist and former Times music critic with deep musical connections, and it shows.

Which brings us back to the Mexican composer Inez Velasco and her 18-piece jazz band, and her friend the singer Juana Luna. They lifted me and everyone else there — took us for a ride — into the wonders of our imaginations. Bummer if you missed it.

But Duck Creek has the three aforementioned exhibits going through the fall and two more music shows on September 6 and 20. Come see. Bring a lawn chair and a sweater.

But no payment required.