Program: Professional Development
Audience: All educators and pre-service teachers
Dates: 12/4/2023
Starting Soon A Professional Learning program at the Nassau County Museum of Art for teachers to explore the exhibition Our Gilded Age, a period in U.S history (1870 - 1914), through a cross disciplinary look at the art, literature and architecture included in the show:
Our Gilded Age
Like the nation's economy, American art and literature flourished during the *Gilded Age. It was an exuberant age of excess with its own secret flaws, including widespread fraud. This exhibition examines the appearances and the realities of an era that mirrors our own in many ways. The art of John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Louis Comfort Tiffany and others adorned palatial residences designed by Stanford White and Ogden Codman, architect of our own quintessential Gilded Age mansion. Drawing heavily upon the local literary history of Long Island, including William Cullen Bryant, Mark Twain (who named the Gilded Age), Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton and others, the exhibition will include fashion, decorative arts including period silver and china, photographs, manuscripts, first editions and other historic memorabilia. As Twain wrote about the get-rich-quick schemes and bullish if irrational exuberance, "To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.”
Light refreshments will be served.
* In United States history, the Gilded Age was an era extending roughly from 1877 to 1900, which was sandwiched between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era. It was a time of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States. As American wages grew much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, and industrialization demanded an ever-increasing unskilled labor force, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants.