Collector Lisa Perry Hopes to Highlight Women Artists with New Space in East Hampton

Designer Lisa Perry’s love affair with art began with fashion, when she began collecting vintage clothing from the 1960s, designers like Pucci and Pierre Cardin. It ultimately led her and her husband, Richard, to amass a collection of Pop and Minimalist art that includes the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Bell, and Donald Judd.

After learning that a ’60s modernist home in East Hampton, New York, that once belonged to Richard Scull—the collector behind the infamous art-market-changing Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art in 1973—was on the market, a new passion emerged in Perry, under the banner of Onna House. “I decided that Onna House would be a project that could bring together everything I love: architecture, design, art, and helping women,” Perry told ARTnews one summer afternoon out East.

Located in a private residence and showing a collection distinct from Perry’s more well-known one, Onna House (the name coming from the Japanese word for woman), highlights art by women, placing painting and sculpture alongside weaving and pottery. With “a complete focus on women,” Perry has been actively seeking new artists to acquire for Onna House. Currently, it holds the work of Mitsuko Asakura, Julie Wolfe, Leah Kaplan, Kelly Behun, and Candace Hill-Montgomery.

Earlier this year, the venue, which is open by appointment, mounted its first exhibition, “The Lightness of Being,” with work by five ceramic artists: Kaplan, Sabra Moon Elliot, Yoona Hur, Katherine Glenday, and Yuko Nishikawa, whose hanging works made from recycled and pulped photograph paper in pink and orange were a standout. For Perry, the opening salvo was a dedication to her mother, who in the 1970s ran a ceramics-focused gallery outside Chicago.

Perry is still thinking through what she’ll present at Onna House next summer, but so far “it’s been a complete gift.”

A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “This Old House.”