Last summer I kept getting emails about a new venue called Galerie Sardine . Who, I wondered, would want to name a gallery after a very small fish that travels in schools and is packed tightly in flat tins? The artist Joe Bradley and his irrepressible wife, Valentina Akerman, that’s who. “You can take it with you,” Akerman says, when I visit them in Bradley’s vast Long Island City studio. “It’s also not a fancy fish, and we like that.” Neither of them had ever run an art gallery before, but they took over a 1701 farmhouse on Main Street in Amagansett, at the eastern end of Long Island, and put on several shows that attracted throngs of local and far-flung art lovers, including the biggest fish in the art world, Larry Gagosian, whose summer house is in Amagansett.

“Joe and I have been

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