The Long Island Museum celebrates our island’s agricultural and maritime history in...

The Long Island Museum celebrates our island’s agricultural and maritime history in new exhibit

by -
0 1463
Harry Roseland’s ‘Pea Pickers,’ Long Island, 1888, is on view at the exhibit. Photo from LIM

Through July 30, The Long Island Museum in Stony Brook will showcase Long Island’s rich, bountiful resoursces in an exhibit titled Edible Eden: The Art of Long Island’s Forests, Fields and Waters in the Art Museum.

Celebrating the rich agricultural and maritime history of this region, the exhibition includes approximately 20 works by artists who depicted Long Island in the nineteenth century, continually focusing on the island as an edible Eden: its carefully tended fields, its bountiful orchards, its healthy livestock and its diverse wildlife both in the forest and nearby coastal waters. Each was attainable in great quantity — seemingly limited only by how hard one was willing to work.

The Mount family, Charles Yardely Turner, Harry Roseland, Frederick William Kost, Gaines Ruger Donoho and other artists serve as guides to the cornucopia of foods that Long Islanders grew, raised, hunted and gathered. Collectively, these works of art are also a testament to rural Americans’ resourcefulness and success at working the land and water.

Edible Eden is sponsored by Astoria Bank, Bank of America, New York Community Bank Foundation, Robert W. Baird Incorporated/Baird Foundation Inc., and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

In conjunction with the exhibit, Susan Evans McClure, director of food history programs at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, will discuss how and why food can be used as a tool for connecting people with the complexities of American history on Sunday, April 23 at 2 p.m. The program is free with regular museum admission.

The Long Island Museum is located at 1200 Route 25A in Stony Brook. For further information, visit www.longislandmuseum.org or call 631-751-0066.

SIMILAR ARTICLES