Featuring highlights from Preservation Long Island’s collections, this exhibition dives into the facts (or lack thereof) behind popular myths and misconceptions about early American life often encountered at historic house museums.
Past Exhibits
Past Exhibition:
Past Exhibition:
Howard Sherwood: Preserving Long Island
Seventy years ago, SPLIA was founded. At its center was Howard C. Sherwood, a wealthy urban antiquarian who bequeathed to the Society his collection of American antiques and the 18th-century Sherwood-Jayne Farm.
Past Exhibition:
Collecting Long Island
In 1976, SPLIA curator, Dean Failey, mounted the first exhibition to explore Long Island’s rich decorative arts heritage. More than forty years later, its groundbreaking discoveries continue to inspire and inform. Collecting Long Island follows the continued efforts of collectors to expand our knowledge of Long Island’s complex material past.
Past Exhibition:
#MyLongIslandLandmarks
#MyLongIslandLandmarks was inspired by an Instagram hashtag. What resulted was a wonderful assemblage of well-known historic “landmarks” as well as Long Island places that, on the surface, may seem ordinary but become meaningful once their stories are known.
Past Exhibition:
Selling Long Island: Commercial Maps of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
This exhibition explored how the art of cartography was used during the 19th and 20th centuries to define the geography of Long Island as a place for investment, industry and commerce, home-building, and ultimately, substantial growth and profit.
Past Exhibition:
Antiques that Speak: Collecting Long Island in the 21st Century
Dedicated to the late Huyler Held, a Preservation Long Island past president, this exhibition featured many of our most significant acquisitions, ranging from eighteenth-century masterworks of Long Island decorative arts to 20th-century ephemera.