AFA 22nd Anniversary

22nd Anniversary 90 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com I n the spring of 2022, the Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages (LIM) will publish A Checklist of Long Island Artists of the Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries , a fully-illustrated, full-color 100-page selective and alphabetized checklist of more than 1,000 artists (painters, printmakers, and sculptors) who lived and/or worked on Long Island during the time frame covered by the volume. The project was initiated some thirty-five years ago by Long Island art collector and patron D. Frederick Baker and his late partner, the art historian Ronald G. Pisano. In an era prior to the ease of research done through the internet, Baker and Pisano began assembling a list of artists from across the region, marking down long-forgotten names and discovering unknown works of art, some of which they would also add to their own important collection of American art. Eventually, Baker and Pisano made significant and institution-changing generous donations of art to three separate organizations: The Long Island Museum, in Stony Brook, New York; the Heckscher Museum of Art, in Huntington, New York; and the Chazen Museum of Art, in Madison, Wisconsin. Their digging and list-making continued until Pisano’s untimely passing in 2000, which put the project on hold for close to two decades, until Baker approached LIM with the idea of publishing the list in 2019, and the museum began working with him to realize this dream. Baker’s Introduction clarifies the purpose and parameter of the publication. It is, he says, intended as “a quick reference source to identify many significant artists working during these years and, if possible, identify where and when they worked; it is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of every Long Island artist or every titled work produced during the timeframe covered. In some instances, there were artists who are so historically associated with the Island’s history (i.e. William Merritt Chase, William Sidney Mount, Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam) that even a partial list of titles and dates of paintings seemed unnecessary. In many cases, however, Long Island location titled and dated works were especially important in understanding the scope of art making on Long Island, even more so for those few artists whose birth and/or death dates could not be found in any of the standard reference books on American artists, or on the internet.” A published reference guide of this kind for Long Island is long overdue. While a good body of excellent narrative work exists on many aspects of Long Island’s regional art history, including, A Shared Aesthetic: Artists of Long Island’s North Fork (Fleming and Evans , 2008), Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Documenting Long Island Artists of the Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries Documenting Long Island Artists of the Nineteenth to the id-Twentieth Centuries Documenting Long Island Artists of the Ninete nth to the id-Twentieth Centuries ocumenting Long Island rtists of the inet enth to the id-T entiet Centuries by Joshua Ruff