Everyone Was Already Here
There are artists all over the North Fork. Painters, photographers, makers, sculptors, people doing serious work in studios and spare rooms and off the sides of kitchen tables. For a long time, most of them didn't know each other existed.
That's not an accident, it's an infrastructure problem. The South Fork has had a formal arts network for decades: over 20 organizations with shared programming, collective advocacy, and a unified public presence. The North Fork has the creatives. What it has long lacked is the connective tissue around them.
Kara Hoblin knew this from the beginning. She grew up on Long Island, the daughter of a Bolivian mother who was deeply creative and never had the space to pursue it — immigration and the weight of daily life have a way of putting those things passions aside. Kara didn't put it aside. Against all odds and advise, she studied photography, spent a semester in Florence, and built a practice as a full-time artist working in chalk, illustration, and visual storytelling. The idea for the Collective grew out of that practice: a chalk art series where she invited the community to erase her large-scale drawings together, a lesson in impermanence that turned out to also be a lesson in what happens when you bring people into the same space.
In 2017, the first physical space for the North Fork Art Collective opened in downtown Greenport with five local artists. At the same moment, Sound View was beginning a new era for creatives. We gave the Collective room to grow: hosting their makers market and collage mornings, larger gatherings the small collective space couldn't accommodate.
In 2019, Kara did her own residency at Sound View through Uncommon Art, which had formally launched the previous year. Checking in meant stepping out of the noise of daily life and into something more focused: time to work, space to think, the quality of attention that comes when someone has genuinely made room for you and your practice. It transported her, even though she lived down the street. She came back for a second residency in Jackson. Same feeling, different landscape.
The Collective found more permanent homes over the following years, and in December 2023 settled into the Fiedler Gallery building in the center of downtown Greenport. Today it represents over 146 local artists and is working toward nonprofit status, with a longer vision for an art center offering community space, studios, workshops, and classes. "Art is thought of as a luxury, a commodity," Kara has said, "but art is a necessity - not only for growth and culture but for preserving the heart of humanity, for inspiring generations, for reminding people that love and hope exist." In a town that still has its own character, the Collective is part of how it stays that way.
Eventually Kara started working for us - not because she was looking for a job, but because she had seen enough from the inside to believe that what we were building was real. She now leads Guest Culture and the Uncommon Art Residency, connecting guests to the places they're visiting through art, music, and the people who actually live and make things there.
If you find yourself in Greenport, stop by the North Fork Art Collective. You might find a painting by a local fisherman, a ceramic piece made in someone's garage, a photograph of the Sound in winter. You might be looking at a career artist who has been capturing the East End for over 60 years, or a photographer showing her work for the first time. And in the storefront, look for some handmade ornaments by Kara's mother - her daughter built this place partly so creativity like hers would always have somewhere to land. If you're lucky, you might find Kara there too, in the middle of the community she made from scratch.
Learn more about the North Fork Art Collective here