Craggy, car-free, cosmopolitan Hydra has always been an island of artists. Brice Marden, Juergen Teller, and Adam Cohen (son of Leonard) all have homes here. The Athens School of Fine Arts runs a summer residence program in a vast mansion that once belonged to a famous admiral. (It’s closed to the public, but if you can sneak in, you’ll find a wonderful collection of 19th-century nautical paintings.) Up-and-coming artists and heavyweight collectors head to Hydra every summer to check out the boundary-pushing exhibits at the Hydra Workshop, a former ship-repair yard on the waterfront; the Hydra School Projects, which shows established and emerging artists in the village high school; and the DESTE Foundation’s site-specific installations, located in an abandoned slaughterhouse.
