Artists Claude Lawrence and Leslee Stradford Take the Hamptons

Artist and saxophonist Claude Lawrence is not the same person he was before he met his partner, the artist Leslee Stradford. “She’s my cure,” he said while sitting in the backyard of their home in Sag Harbor, New York. “Before I met her, I was sad, and she wiped that all away.”

The two produce works that could not be more different. Lawrence is a committed abstractionist. His pieces are full of blocks of color that are in some pieces so deeply reinforced as to look carved. In other works, these blocks are looser, and the paint is, too, giving pieces like Stomp Art (Gets Your Attention, Leaves an Impression), from 2023, a watery flow.

Stradford, for her part, is more varied, making figurative and abstract paintings as well as digital collages that draw from archival photographs and family albums that she has re-tined and spliced together.

Despite the contrasts in their styles, the art scene of the Hamptons has come to embrace them both together. Last year, they were both artists-in-residence at the Church, an arts center founded by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik, and both will be included in the Parrish Art Museum’s summer exhibitions. Meanwhile, earlier this month, Lawrence was the subject of a show at David Lewis gallery’s East Hampton outpost.

“Lawrence isn’t a part of the professionalized art world, he doesn’t come with an artist statement,” said Lewis. “The art speaks for itself.”

E. T. Williams Jr. and his wife, Lyn, are long time residents of the East End and dedicated collectors, especially of self-taught Black artists like Thornton Dial, who Lewis showed at his East Hampton gallery last summer, and Lawrence. In 2013, the couple bought 400 of his paintings and began donating them to museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York.

The Williams’ support over the years has culminated in a high point in Lawrence’s career just as Stradford also finds an audience for her work in the Hamptons scene. But they’ll soon be leaving for the next adventure: they’ve just bought a chateau in France, to which they’ll soon abscond.

This abundance is not quite what they expected from life. Lawrence and Stradford both grew up in Chicago. While Lawrence was raised by an impoverished family living in public housing, Stradford was brought up in a more prosperous home that included female relations with great artistic talent. Despite their differing circumstances, both bore witness to the violence of racial segregation.

Like many Black artists before him, Lawrence left to Europe. In his case he left the day Martin Luther King was murdered. “I just fled,” he said. “Again and again.”

After his stint in Paris, Lawrence found himself drifting, moving across Europe and returning intermittently to the States, then spending four years in Mexico. What precipitated all that movement? “Mental illness,” he bluntly said, then laughed.

During a brief stint in the Hamptons during the mid-’90s, after a fortune teller encouraged him to paint full-time, he picked up the craft. He would bike over everyday from Bridgehampton to a little shack in Sag Harbor that he kept as a studio.

Technically, it wasn’t the first time he picked up a paintbrush. As an adolescent, he was accepted to a vocational high school that offered a program in commercial art, which gave him some training, but after two years, his grades suffered, and he moved on to music. But in Sag Harbor, he taught himself to make art as he wanted to, using the same principle that had gotten him so much success as a musician: “Attack, start.”

Soon enough, the drifting bug bit again and he left to Philadelphia to take a job as a house painter. He left a shack full of paintings behind with a friend who said he’d try to sell them. Sell they did, eventually catching the eye of the Williams’ and some major institutions. Yet the David Lewis show, “Free Jazz,” marks the 80-year-old artist’s gallery debut.

Meanwhile, Stradford was trying to find her own way as an artist, switching from teaching and university administration to a new career. She’d attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, both as an undergraduate and an MFA student, but it wasn’t until 2018, when she retired, that she began working full-time on her art, which delves into her family history.

Stradford is descended from victims of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, in which white people rioted, destroying Black homes and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is known colloquially as Black Wall Street, due to the fact that Black businessmen had managed to accrue a great deal of wealth in the area. One of these men was Stradford’s great-grandfather, J.B. Stradford, whose hotel was said to be the largest Black-owned one in the country. It made J.B. Stradford one of the richest Black men in the country. Though the riot was instigated by angry white supremacists, he was named as a key instigator and imprisoned. He was able to escape with his life, but to do so, he had to leave his fortune behind.

“I remember the day my grandmother sat me and my sister down—I was four and she was six,” said Stradford. “She said, ‘You girls have to know what’s going on.’”

Stradford’s grandmother would tell her what historians now know to be true but hadn’t always admitted: white people started the Tulsa Massacre, and specifically that her great-grandfather hadn’t instigated anything. They had wanted his wealth and to dispossess the Black community, and they were successful. Though Stradford’s great-grandfather was able to flee, the trauma he experienced has carried on through his family. It’s a trauma and a history that Stradford tries to exorcise through her digital collages, which feature family portraits.

For Lawrence and Stradford, the racial violence they have faced in their past is bad enough, but the constant backlash of white rage seems like it won’t end, at least not in their lifetime.

“For Claude, as a Black man, it’s very difficult to navigate what you have to deal with,” said Stradford. “And now they’re banning books? Don’t want certain information taught?”

Suffice to say, France is looking pretty good. The couple will spend the Fourth of July in the American embassy in Paris, where four of Lawrence’s paintings are hanging. By September, they’ll be in their new home full-time. But there’s time yet to enjoy summer in the Hamptons.