Ranked among the nation’s most important suburban art museums, Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) is located 20 miles east of New York City on the former Frick Estate, a spectacular 145-acre property in the heart of Long Island’s fabled Gold Coast. The museum building, named in honor of art collectors and philanthropists Arnold & Joan Saltzman, is a three-story Georgian mansion that exemplifies the Gold Coast architecture of the late 19th century. In addition to the mansion, NCMA, which receives nearly 200,000 visitors each year, includes the Tee Ridder Miniatures Museum, the Sculpture Park, the Formal Garden, the pinetum and the Art Studio where an extensive array beginning to advanced art classes are held for adults and children.

Once administered by Nassau County’s Office of Cultural Development, NCMA became a private not-for-profit institution in 1989 and is now governed and funded by a private board of trustees which includes many of Long Island’s most prominent business, civic and social leaders.

EXHIBITIONS
NCMA annually presents four major new exhibitions, each of which is original to the museum and is organized by the museum’s own curatorial staff. Always adventurous in scope, NCMA exhibitions have reached across a broad spectrum of artistic concerns—from European and American art movements (Surrealism, September 2000 & May 2007); Reflections of Opulence, May, 2001, A Century of Prints, March 2003, La Belle Epoque, June 2003, European Art Between the Wars, May 2004, Picasso, February 2005, Picasso and the School of Paris. Novermber 2006, Pop and Op, February 2008), to epochs of American history (The Revolutionary War, January 2000, Window on the West, February 2002, The World of Theodore Roosevelt, November 2002, The WPA Era, August 2004 and The American Spirit: Paintings by Mort Künstler, August 2006) to the influences of one art form on another (Dance, Dance, Dance, June 2000, Explosive Photography/Photorealism, January 2004 and Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Art, Theater and Dance, November 2007), to the impact of Long Island artists on contemporary art (The Hamptons Since Pollock, April 2000) and to the influence of a dynamic world leader on the arts (Napoleon And His Age, January 2001). In addition to these major exhibitions, NCMA mounts smaller original exhibitions in the Library Gallery, the Second Floor galleries and regularly showcases work by some of today’s most intriguing artists in the Contemporary Gallery.

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PERMANENT COLLECTION
NCMA’s collection of more than 600 art objects spans American and European art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Encompassing all types of media, the collection includes works by Rodin, Braque, Vuillard, Bonnard, Lichtenstein, Rivers, Rauschenberg, Chaim Gross, Moses Soyer, Audrey Flack, Frank Stella, George Segal and Alex Katz among many others. Particularly notable are the museum’s holdings of works by Latin American artists of the 20th- and 21st-centuries. Among those represented in this collection are Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Fernando Botero, Alejandro Colunga, Luiz Cruz Azeceta, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell and Efrain Almeida.

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SCULPTURE PARK
The 145 acres of the former Frick Estate constitute one of the largest publicly accessible sculpture gardens on the East Coast. Among the more than 50 sculptures sited on the property to interact with the natural environment are works by Lichtenstein, Otterness, Calder, Botero, Tom Otterness, Rodin, Chaim Gross, Smith, Nagare, Barnett Newman, Richard Serra and others.

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EDUCATION
Accredited by the New York State Board of Regents as a museum and educational institution, NCMA serves more than 18,000 Long Island school children and their teachers who visit the museum each year for exhibition tours and art-related activities. The Education Department additionally sponsors extensive art studio workshops for children and adults at all artistic skill levels. It also provides individual school lectures, teacher training programs, and Saturday morning programs integrating art and performance. NCMA’s professional staff is augmented by more than 200 volunteers and 90 docents who provide informative exhibition tours for the public and who extend the museum's reach by offering programs in community-based venues such as libraries and senior citizen centers.

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TEE RIDDER MINIATURES MUSEUM
Founded in 1995, NCMA's Tee Ridder Miniatures Museum is one of the nation’s few museums devoted to the whimsy and elegance of miniature rooms and objects. It was named for Madeleine “Tee” Ridder (1926-91), a prominent patron and creator of miniature arts. A recent major reorganization has resulted in more family-friendly activities while Tee Ridder continues to serve the interests and needs of miniaturist artists.

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FORMAL GARDENS
Commissioned in 1925 by Frances Frick, an avid horticulturist and garden club member, the Frick Estate’s Formal Gardens have been restored to the original design of the famed landscape architect, Marian Cruger Coffin. Coffin considered these Formal Gardens to be among her finest creations.

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HISTORY
In 1919, Henry Clay Frick, the co-founder of U.S. Steel, purchased the property once owned by the poet and preservationist, William Cullen Bryant, for his son, Childs Frick. The architect Sir Charles Carrick Allow was commissioned to redesign the facade and much of the interior of the home which the Fricks named Clayton. The younger Frick and his wife Frances lived at Clayton for almost 50 years. Following Childs Frick’s death in 1965, the estate was purchased by Nassau County which then converted it to a museum, called the Nassau County Museum of Art.

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Nassau County Museum of Art is located at One Museum Drive (just off Northern Boulevard, Route 25A, two traffic lights west of Glen Cove Rd.) in Roslyn Harbor. Hours are 11 am to 4:45 pm Tuesday through Sunday. Admission to the main building, the Arnold & Joan Saltzman Fine Art Building, is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors (62+) and $4 for children; admissions include admission to the Tee Ridder Miniatures Museum. Weekends only there is a $2 parking fee. Free docent-led tours of the main exhibition are offered at 2 pm each day. Meet in the lobby, no reservations are needed. The Museum Shop and Red Room Gallery are open all museum hours. Call (516) 484-9337 for current exhibitions, events, days/times and directions or log onto nassaumuseum.com.

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Nassau County Museum of Art is chartered under the laws of New York State as a not-for-profit private educational institution and museum. It is operated by a privately elected board of trustees which is responsible for its governance. The museum is funded through income derived from admissions, parking, membership, special events and private and corporate donations as well as federal and state grants.