Water Mill's farm calendar winds down over the next eight weeks. Hank's Pumpkintown closes after November 1. Green Thumb's posted season ends December 8. The Water Mill Museum has already closed for the year. From there through March, the hamlet's calendar runs on two art institutions. Between them they will show East End painting, from the Abstract Expressionists back to William Merritt Chase's Shinnecock years, plus a Fire Island artists' community that lasted six decades. The Parrish Art Museum's first exhibition doesn't close until February 14. The Watermill Center's runs to March 20, 2027.

The Last Weeks of the Growing Season

Here is how the farm and local-history calendar closes out:

• Water Mill Museum closed for the season October 11. It has one more public date. The annual meeting and quilt-raffle drawing is at the Museum Art Gallery on Tuesday, October 13, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., with refreshments.
• Hank's Pumpkintown at 240 Montauk Highway is open daily through November 1. Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekends and holidays and 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. Pumpkin picking and the maze run every day. Apple picking is Saturdays, Sundays and school holidays only.
• Green Thumb at 829 Montauk Highway posts daily hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through December 8 on its homepage. Its farm-stands page describes the main stand's season as May through November, so late-season hours are worth confirming with the farm.

The Green Thumb fields themselves are also mid-deal this fall. According to 27east, the four Halsey siblings agreed to sell Southampton Town the development rights to 15.3 acres off Deerfield Road for $6.5 million. That land sits a few hundred yards from the stand, across Montauk Highway, north of the LIRR tracks. The family carved out a portion for future house lots. The agreement is an "enhanced" development rights deal, a structure the town and the Peconic Land Trust created in 2015. It requires at least 80 percent of the land to grow food crops and to be actively farmed in perpetuity.

"We want to keep farming and we have some of the next generation that want to farm," William Halsey told 27east, adding that the property has been certified organic for more than 30 years.

The deal is not final. The Town Board's September 8 meeting record shows that the board held a public hearing on the 141 Deerfield Road proposal and then closed it. The record does not show the acquisition being approved, and we have not found any later action.

At the Parrish, the East End Is the Subject

The Parrish Art Museum at 279 Montauk Highway has three overlapping exhibitions this winter. Two of them are about this coastline.

Abstract Expressionism: The East End, 1940 to Today

The exhibition runs through February 14, 2027, and was organized by associate curator Kaitlin Halloran. The museum's argument is that the East End is where Abstract Expressionism took root. It dates that to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner's 1945 move to Springs. Willem and Elaine de Kooning followed with a stay at their Springs house in 1948, and James Brooks and Charlotte Park moved to the South Fork in 1949.

The "to Today" in the title matters. The artist list runs from Krasner, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler and Esteban Vicente to Pat Steir, Stanley Whitney, Mary Heilmann and Frank Wimberley. The show follows the East End's abstract painters into the present day. Dan's Papers describes it as a multi-room survey that also includes works by Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Milton Avery, with an in-gallery scavenger hunt. Halloran leads a curator tour on October 23 from 3 to 4 p.m.

William Merritt Chase and Walter Granville-Smith

This exhibition opens November 14, according to its exhibition page, and runs to March 21, 2027. An earlier Parrish calendar release listed November 16. It pairs two painters' responses to Long Island's land, social life and family life. It also traces how the East End shaped their work despite their very different training.

Chase is the local figure here. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that he directed the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art from 1891 to 1902. He taught two days a week and spent the rest of his summers painting in Shinnecock with his family. The Smithsonian American Art Museum records Granville-Smith as active in Bellport. Put the two shows together and the Parrish is telling the East End's art history twice this winter. Chase's Shinnecock school came about half a century before Pollock and Krasner reached Springs, and both stories hang in the same building.

FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall

The third show is a single painting, on view through January 25, 2027. The Affrilachian Mountains is a 2026 work by Chase Hall, made with acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas, with tools and found objects built into it. It is the eighth presentation in the Parrish and FLAG's FRESH PAINT series. The museum's September 23 release says the painting responds to the post-emancipation migration of African Americans to Appalachian coal country. Hall uses coffee as a material tied to colonialism, extraction and labor.

Down Towd Road, a Fire Island Forest

The Watermill Center at 39 Water Mill Towd Road was founded by Robert Wilson. The Center's staff page, updated October 1, names Charles Chemin as artistic director and Elise Herget as managing director.

Its winter exhibition, Oakleyville, was curated by Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Noah Khoshbin and runs through March 20, 2027. It looks at five artists who lived and worked between Manhattan and Oakleyville, a small community inside Fire Island's maritime holly forest. Oakleyville is unincorporated, doesn't appear on maps, and is reached mostly by boat. Starting in 1964, it became a hub for a network of queer Downtown New York artists. The show includes paintings, photographs and sculpture by Sheyla Baykal, Peter Hujar, Matthew Leifheit, Paul Thek and Ann Wilson, all made while the artists lived there.

The show is about one place, which fits the Parrish's winter. It also has a direct link to the building it hangs in. Thek left his estate to Wilson in 1988, and the Center now holds the most comprehensive collection of Thek's work and papers, with some of it on permanent display.

How a Winter Week Splits Between the Two

The two institutions keep different hours, and together they cover the week:

• Parrish galleries, shop and café are open Thursday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The museum grounds are open daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Adult admission is $20.
• Watermill Center open hours for Oakleyville are Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., free, through March 12, 2027, with registration through the Center. Curator-led tours can also be booked, and private viewings can be arranged by emailing [email protected].
• Watermill Center grounds, more than 10 acres, are open every day from dawn to dusk. The buildings, including restrooms, are not open on those visits.

That makes Wednesday the one day the Parrish galleries are dark and the Oakleyville exhibition is open. On Thursday and Friday, you can see the Oakleyville show in the late morning and still reach the Parrish galleries before they close at 5.

The Center describes its residency program as year-round. Artists share their work through open rehearsals, studio visits and talks. Its 2026 roster lists a residency from October 28 to November 20. The Center also runs a year-round talk series, Questions + Ideas, and Artists' Table, a brunch and dinner series with the resident artists.

The Dated Events, October Through March

1. October 13, 4 to 5:30 p.m.: Water Mill Museum annual meeting and quilt-raffle drawing.
2. October 16, from 5:30 p.m.: In Process open studios at the Watermill Center with current artists-in-residence. The listing gives both 7 and 7:30 p.m. as the end time.
3. October 23, 3 to 4 p.m.: Curator-led tour of the Abstract Expressionism show at the Parrish.
4. November 1: Last day of Hank's Pumpkintown's season.
5. November 7, 11 a.m. to noon: Book launch and talk with Will Ryman at the Parrish.
6. November 14: The Chase and Granville-Smith exhibition opens at the Parrish.
7. December 5, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.: Winter Welcome Day at the Parrish, free. Workshops, food trucks and a holiday market with more than 20 vendors run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and curator-led tours run from noon to 2 p.m.
8. December 8: Last day of Green Thumb's posted season.
9. January 25, 2027: FRESH PAINT: Chase Hall closes.
10. February 14, 2027: Abstract Expressionism: The East End closes.
11. March 20 and 21, 2027: Oakleyville closes at the Watermill Center, followed a day later by the Chase and Granville-Smith exhibition at the Parrish.

The Parrish's posted details for Winter Welcome Day were current as of September 21, so check the event page before you go.

At Breitenbach Advisory, we follow Water Mill's calendar all year, in the gallery season as much as the farm season. If you'd like a quiet conversation about this hamlet and the land the Parrish has on its walls this winter, Request Private Access.