The Disappearance of Landscape: Oakleyville, 1964–2022 at The Watermill Center treats Fire Island less as a backdrop than as an active presence in the work of four artists who moved between Manhattan and the island’s isolated Oakleyville enclave. Opening August 29, 2026, and on view through March 20, 2027, the exhibition brings together paintings, photographs and sculptures by Sheyla Baykal, Peter Hujar, Matthew Leifheit and Paul Thek, tracing a lineage of queer artmaking shaped by a landscape as unstable as it is magnetic.
Oakleyville sits deep within Fire Island’s maritime holly forest, reachable mostly by boat and crossed on foot. That remoteness mattered. For artists drawn there from the 1960s onward, the place offered more than retreat from New York’s pressures; it became a site where climate, vegetation, isolation and tide helped determine what could be made and how it could be seen. The exhibition reads that relationship as symbiotic, with the environment exerting its own force on artistic process.
The curators, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Noah Khoshbin, frame the show around a larger question now impossible to ignore: what happens to an art history when the ground beneath it is eroding? Fire Island’s vulnerability to sea-level rise gives the project an added urgency, especially as Oakleyville’s holly forest is forecast among the first areas to disappear. In that context, the island becomes a record of cultural freedom and ecological fragility at once.
Thek’s presence gives the exhibition a particular charge at The Watermill Center, which holds the most comprehensive collection of his works and papers and stewards his legacy in close collaboration with his estate. His ties to Hujar and to the Fire Island circle are part of a broader story of artistic community built in temporary shelters, shared summers and hard-won distance from the city. Here, landscape is not scenery. It is witness, collaborator and, increasingly, the site of loss.
Image: Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, Oakleyville, Fire Island, 1966. Courtesy of The Watermill Center © Peter Hujar
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