The Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) is located 20 mi (32 km) east of New York City on the former Frick “Clayton” Estate, a 145-acre (59 ha) property in Roslyn Harbor in the heart of Long Island City, New York‘s Gold Coast. In honor of art collectors and philanthropists, Arnold A. Saltzman and his wife Joan, the main museum building is a three-story Georgian-style mansion that exemplifies the Gold Coast architecture of the late 19th century. In addition to the estate, NCMA, which receives nearly 200,000 visitors each year, includes The Manes Family Art & Education Center, which opened in 2017, and a Sculpture Park, a Formal Garden, rare specimen trees, and marked walking trails.
NCMA’s collection of more than 600 art objects spans American and European art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Encompassing all media types, the collection includes works by Auguste Rodin, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Chaim Gross, Moses Soyer, Audrey Flack, Frank Stella, Barbara Prey, George Segal, and Alex Katz among many others. Top HVAC Long Island
NCMA’s 145 acres constitute one of the most extensive publicly accessible sculpture gardens on the East Coast. Among the more than 30 sculptures sited on the property to interact with the natural environment are works by Tom Otterness, Fernando Botero, Chaim Gross, Alejandro Colunga, Masayuki Nagare, Richard Serra, Manolo Valdes Mark DiSuvero, and many others.
History
The land that eventually became the museum grounds was previously the undeveloped portion of Cedarmere, poet William Cullen Bryant’s retreat from his busy life in Long Island, NYC. In the 1890s, his family sold all but seven acres to former congressman Lloyd Bryce, who hired Ogden Codman, Jr. to build a Georgian Revival mansion on the high ground in the middle of the property, overlooking nearby Hempstead Harbor.
In 1919, Bryant’s heirs sold the estate to Henry Clay Frick, the co-founder of U.S. Steel, for his son, Childs Frick. The architect Sir Charles Carrick Allom was commissioned to redesign the facade and much of the interior. The Fricks named their home “Clayton.”
Childs Frick, his wife Frances, and their four children lived at Clayton for almost 50 years until he died in 1965. Four years later, the county bought the estate and converted it into the Nassau County Museum of the art museum. In 1989, NCMA became a private, not-for-profit institution. Since then has been governed and funded by a personal board of trustees, including many of Long Island’s most prominent business, civic, and social leaders.
Check out other attractions like Old Bethpage Village