Ranked among the nation’s most important suburban art museums, Nassau County Museum of Art is located 20 miles east of New York City on the former Frick Estate, a spectacular 145-acre property in Roslyn Harbor in the heart of Long Island’s fabled Gold Coast. The main museum building, named in honor of art collectors and philanthropists Arnold & Joan Saltzman, is a three-story Georgian mansion that exemplifies Gold Coast architecture of the late 19th century. In addition to the mansion, Nassau County Museum of Art, which receives nearly 200,000 visitors each year, includes the Art Space for Children, the Sculpture Park, the Formal Garden, rare specimen trees, marked walking trails and the Art School where an extensive array of beginning to advanced art classes are held for adults and children. The museum annually presents major rotating exhibitions, many of which are original to the museum and are organized by the museum’s own curatorial staff. Always adventurous in scope, exhibitions have reached across a broad spectrum of artistic eras and concerns. The permanent 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.

Nassau County Museum of Art is chartered under the laws of New York State as a not-for-profit private educational institution and museum. A privately elected board of trustees 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.

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 Nassau County Museum of Art. Once administered by Nassau County’s Office of Cultural Development, the museum became a private not-for-profit institution in 1989 and since has been governed and funded by a private board of trustees which includes many of Long Island’s most prominent business, civic and social leaders.