Celebrate Mother’s Day at the Vanderbilt Museum
Celebrate Mom at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14. Families can visit the Museum’s new exhibition, Wrought Taxonomies. Bring Mom to stroll the gardens and rolling lawns and see if you can find all 32 outdoor sculptures by artist Wendy Klemperer. Also, be sure not to miss her ink drawings in the Lancaster Gallery.
Museum members receive free admission. Not a member and looking for a Mother’s Day gift? Purchase a Family level membership on Mother’s Day and receive a free upgrade to an Associate level membership—by tagging the Vanderbilt by May 15 on social media and sharing your Mother’s Day experience at the Museum.
Recipients of the free upgrade will enjoy exclusive discounts, an invitation to receptions, and free admission to more than 1,000 museums in North America. Please note: this free upgrade is valid ONLY for Family memberships purchased during this Mother’s Day promotion!
Your purchase supports this local treasure and is 100 % tax-deductible.
The Wendy Klemperer sculpture exhibition is supported in part by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
Wrought Taxonomies: Museum’s First Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition
Wendy Klemperer
On Earth Day—Saturday, April 22—the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will debut Wendy Klemperer: Wrought Taxonomies, the first exhibition of outdoor sculpture at the historic summer estate of William Kissam Vanderbilt II.
Wendy Klemperer’s sculptures—a haunting assemblage of animal forms that span imaginary, endangered, familiar, and exotic species—celebrate natural history and the nonhuman world through evocative interactions with the surrounding environment.
Using materials salvaged from scrapyards, she composes ecological narratives that respond to the history and collections of Suffolk County’s first public park and museum. Her brilliant use of gestural lines captures the spectator’s attention and invites museumgoers to reflect on the relationship between an interest in animal life and the incessant push of human industry.
Wrought Taxonomies is the inaugural exhibition in the Vanderbilt Museum’s outdoor sculpture program and the institution’s second exhibition of contemporary art focused on the relationship between culture and animals.
The Vanderbilt Museum occupies the former Gold Coast estate of William Kissam Vanderbilt II, the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt and a pioneer of American motorsport. Located in Centerport on the north shore of Long Island, it is renowned for its extensive marine and natural history collections, Spanish revival architecture, and picturesque parklands.
All sculptures are viewable with general admission to the Museum grounds. Educational programs and workshops associated with themes and content of Wendy Klemperer: Wrought Taxonomies will be offered throughout the exhibition. A special thanks is due to the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, whose generous support made Wrought Taxonomies possible.
Arrizza Under the Stars: Live in the Planetarium
The Vanderbilt Museum will present Arrizza Under the Stars, a new, exclusive planetarium live performance by the Long Island artist and musician Yannaki Arrizza, on Saturday, May 20, at 6:00 pm in the Reichert Planetarium.
Based on his recent 2022 album release Astronomia, the music includes brilliant electronic soundscapes that combine digital and analog synthesizer sounds along with modern textures provided by the latest digital-audio technologies. Astronomia is reminiscent of the soundtrack for the popular Netflix original Stranger Things, combined with deeper experimentations in electronic and ambient realms similar to the popular synth sounds of the 1970s and early 1980s often heard in science-fiction films of the time – hopeful, mysterious, moody, and thought-provoking.
Arrizza’s music is a perfect complement to the spacey, visual landscapes the planetarium can provide with its cutting-edge fulldome video technology. Audiences can expect to be transported into immersive worlds and interstellar mediums that transcend space and time and where the only limit is the imagination. This live performance includes artistic landscapes, original fulldome 3D artwork, projections of star fields and deep-space objects, and includes colorful laser lights through a haze of fog.
This one-time performance is exclusive and can be seen only at the Reichert Planetarium. CDs and merchandise will be available for purchase.
Purchase Tickets
Dave Bush, Director of the Reichert Planetarium, said, “We are thrilled to be working with Yannaki. He is such a motivated and talented musician. His new album, Astronomia, is a perfect match for the planetarium. It has been so much fun creating and combining the images and lasers to go along with such an incredible piece of musical work. I have personally become a fan! The audience is in for an amazing experience.”
Yannaki Arrizza is from a diverse, multi-ethnic background in which art and music were abundant. He is a self-taught Latin/New Age/World guitarist and multi-instrumental artist based in Long Island, N.Y. He learned his craft during his formative years as a musician. His first love was the guitar, which grew out of listening to a variety of Latin American, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern music. He later built upon a repertoire of Spanish guitar combined with the sounds of New Age and Electronic music.
Eventually, Arrizza began to experiment with keyboards and synthesizers. With influences ranging from Yanni, Jean Michel Jarre, Kitaro, and Tangerine Dream, he created a unique combination of Spanish guitar and electronic instrumentations that would dominate his future releases. His synth-oriented music is described as chill Electronica with New Age instrumentation and sensibility combined with the otherworldly sounds and textures of science fiction.
“The Astronomia album was born out of my deep heartfelt love of space, a dedication to the sheer grandeur and beauty of the sacred cosmos. I am so excited to perform at the Reichert Planetarium and it is my wish is to share the experience with you all. The combination of my spacey, otherworldly selections and the cutting-edge fulldome video technology the planetarium provides will create an exclusive one-of-a-kind spectacle. It will dazzle the senses and create an excitement and wonder that will bring joy to one’s heart.”
– Yannaki Arrizza
Annual Summer Shakespeare Festival Opens May 5
The Carriage House Players will open the Vanderbilt Museum’s 34th annual Summer Shakespeare Festival on Friday, May 5, at 8:00 pm. The season’s four productions will take place on the stage in the Mansion’s Beautiful Spanish Revival Courtyard.
Tickets: adults, $20 | seniors & children under 12, $15
Purchase Tickets
Playbill:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
May 5, 12, 13 and 26 at 8:00 pm
May 7, 14, and 21 at 7:00 pm
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
June 4-30
Wed and Fri at 8:00 pm, Sun at 7:00 pm
Macbeth
July 7 – August 6
Wed and Fri at 8:00 pm, Sun at 7:00 pm
Love’s Labor’s Lost
August 11- Sept 8
Wed and Fri at 8:00 pm, Sun at 7:00 pm
Bring Your Watercolors: Tour and Paint in the Hall of Fishes
Join us in the Hall of Fishes marine museum for a watercolor workshop for adults on Saturday, May 20, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. For ages 16 and up. Experience is not necessary. Paper and watercolor pencils will be provided. $20 | $18 non-members
A museum educator will discuss William K. Vanderbilt II’s global marine expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s and the work of his curator and artist William Belanske, who accompanied Vanderbilt and made small, intricately detailed paintings of many freshly collected marine specimens. Participants will sketch and paint from the collection.
Register
Local Author Linda Trott Dickman to Read Her Book at Museum Event
The Vanderbilt Museum will present Picture Books & Poetry with Linda Trott Dickman on Sunday, May 21, at 6:00 pm in the Reichert Planetarium Theater. The event is for families with young children. Wear your favorite pajamas and settle in to hear lyrical stories about dreams.
Dickman, who has lived most of her life in East Northport, is an award-winning poet whose work has been anthologized locally and internationally. She is the author of four chapbooks and a poetry prompt book for children of all ages. The coordinator of poetry for the Northport Arts Coalition, she also works with poets of all ages at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association and at local museums and leads a poetry workshop at Samantha’s Li’l Bit O’ Heaven coffee house. Dickman is a retired elementary school librarian.
Tickets: $10 | $8 for members
Purchase Tickets
Coastal Playland: Developing the Long Island Sound
On Thursday, May 18, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will host Kara Murphy Schlichting, a noted historian of New York City’s environmental history, for an evening lecture on the history of the Long Island Sound as a place for urban recreation and leisure.
Schlichting’s lecture will draw heavily from her 2019 book New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago). In New York Recentered, Schlichting turns dominant narratives about New York City’s urban expansion on their head, focusing not on Robert Moses and grand-scheme planning but on the lesser-known local businesses, developers, and government officials whose efforts profoundly shaped coastal communities throughout the metropolitan region.
Schlichting will explore how, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere” came to be dominated by public parks, beaches, and resorts for an emergent middle-class. It is a fascinating story that covers the rise of the Long Island State Parks Commission and the dissolution of the Gold Coast’s more dramatic estates.
The lecture will take place at 7:00 pm in the Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium.
Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
Purchase Tickets
Kara Murphy Schlichting is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY. She earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Her work in late-19th and 20th-century American History sits at the intersection of urban, environmental, and political history, with a particular focus on property regimes and regional planning in greater New York City. Schlichting has published in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Planning History. Her book New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore was published in 2019 with the University of Chicago Press’s History of Urban America Series. She is a co-editor of the H-Environment Roundtable Reviews.
Maggie’s Mission Gala Set for Vanderbilt Museum
Maggie’s Mission will hold its annual Glow for Gold Angelversary Gala at the Vanderbilt Museum on Friday, June 2, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm. The annual event honors and celebrates Long Island teenager Maggie Schmidt’s love of life and children. Maggie’s Mission raises funds to help find cures for pediatric cancers and to help families with children affected.
The evening will include a Maggie’s Bucket List parachute jump into the event, presented by longtime Maggie’s Mission supporter New York Community Bank, a division of Flagstar Bank, N.A.
This year’s gala will kick off with an item from Maggie’s bucket list – a skydive Jump with Mike Elliot, a retired U.S. Army Golden Knight. (The Knights are the Army’s official aerial parachute demonstration team.) Elliot, who took the late President George H. W. Bush on three tandem jumps, will accompany Maggie’s mom, Donna, for a jump right into the gala. The jump will honor Maggie’s wish to Skydive. Maggie’s bucket list was found in a notebook shortly after she passed away from malignant rhabdoid tumors, a rare and aggressive cancer with a very poor prognosis.
The event’s “glow” theme is borrowed from Maggie’s Sweet 16 party which was, at her request, a “glow” party. It was Maggie’s last healthy and happy birthday. The evening will feature music, dinner, dancing, an open bar, exclusive silent auction items, and raffles.
All year, and especially in June, Maggie’s Mission goes gold (the official color that represents pediatric cancers) to help researchers at MSK Kids from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center develop new treatments and new hope for children with cancer. For more information, visit maggiesmission.org.
Native Plant Workshop: Hummingbird Stations
Dropseed Native Landscapes will offer a hands-on gardening workshop, Hummingbird Stations, at the Vanderbilt Museum on Sunday, May 21. Participants will be introduced to ecologically sound gardening practices that are important to bird and animal species.
Anthony Marinello of Dropseed Native Landscapes and the Long Island Native Plant Initiative will explore the local varieties of flowering shrubs and perennials that can be added to any garden to attract migrating nectar-feeders like Ruby-throated and Rufous Hummingbirds.
Individuals who attend Hummingbird Stations will get an in-depth introduction to ecologically sound gardening practices and the importance of native plant communities to our region. Long Island enjoys several unique biomes, including the only tall-grass prairie east of the Alleghany Mountains, as well as large tracts of marine grassland along its shore. These plant communities play an integral role in the lives of many native animal species, from invertebrates to mammals, by providing support for the entire food chain.
Purchase Tickets
Hummingbird Stations will focus on the contributions of native plants to avian biodiversity, specifically the five documented species of hummingbird recorded in New York, which arrive in Suffolk County towards the end of May. Dropseed Native Landscapes will explain the many steps we can take to ensure that the presence of these charismatic birds can be enjoyed for generations to come.
In addition to the educational program, workshop attendees reserve the right to purchase specialized native plant kits to be brought home on the day of the program. These kits will include plant varieties discussed in the workshop, as well as other native species to facilitate the transformation of your garden into an ecological oasis. All varieties discussed and distributed as part of “Hummingbird Station” will come in the form of plugs, which are already sprouted seedlings that are ready to be transplanted into your flower beds and begin the work of attracting hummingbirds.
Location: The “Hummingbird Station” workshop will take place on the grounds of the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s Superintendent’s Cottage, which is located across the street from the main campus. Handicapped parking will be available for program participants.
Inquiries about the program or the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s commitment to horticultural education should be directed to info@vanderbiltmuseum.org. Other questions or requests, particularly those concerning plants native to the Long Island region and ecologically sound gardening, should be sent to anthony@dropseednativelandscapesli.com.
Summer Science Fun for Children, Grades K-5
Fascinating, fun summer learning for grades K-5! Vanderbilt Museum science educators will offer Junior Explorer and Astronomer workshops for children in two, week-long sessions in July and August. Sail the seas, dive the oceans, make unique art. Advance registration is required.
Summer Science Fun
July 10-14 or August 14-18
9 am – 12 pm
$200 non-members | $180 members
Interested in membership? Learn more here.
Become a Member
Space is limited and spots fill quickly! Advance registration is required.
For more information and to register, please contact dawn@vanderbilltmuseum.org.
Junior Explorer Workshop Grades K-3
Explore the world at the Vanderbilt Museum!
Join us for a week of creative science and history workshops. We’ll sail the seas, dive the deepest oceans, soar among the tallest trees, and make unique art inspired by nature and the collections.
Registration is open for children entering Kindergarten through 3rd grade.
Register JULY Jr Explorer Workshop Register AUGUST Jr Explorer Workshop
Junior Astronomer Workshop Grades 3-5
The Reichert Planetarium presents an exciting program for young astronomers!
Junior Astronomers have the opportunity to learn about multiple astronomy topics including our solar system, how to use a telescope, and how to identify constellations they can see from their own backyard. This program focuses on hands-on learning with STEAM activities and crafts supplemented by immersive live and pre-recorded fulldome presentations in our Planetarium theater.
Registration is open for children entering 3rd through 5th grade.
Register JULY Jr Astronomer Workshop Register AUGUST Jr Astronomer Workshop
The July and August sessions of each workshop will feature the same activities.
For this reason, we recommend against registering a child for the same workshop twice.
Meditate Under the Stars in Reichert Planetarium
Jenn Eagen of Pop Up Prana Yoga has scheduled another session of Meditation Under the Stars at the Vanderbilt Reichert Planetarium on Sunday, May 14, from 6:00 to 7:00 pm.
Allow yourself to be carried into other energy systems during our guided meditation,” said Eagen. “Our 60-minute meditation will be complemented with sound healing music, a crystal singing bowl, and an ocean drum. We will lead you into a profound and memorable meditative state, complemented by a vibro-acoustic sound-healing playlist.
Purchase Tickets
Pop Up Prana Yoga: Planetarium Sessions
Pop Up Prana Yoga will offer back-to-back sessions of Yin & Restore Yoga on Sunday, May 28, at 5:30 and 7:00 pm in the Reichert Planetarium. The evening will “incorporate stillness and empowerment into your practice under the planetarium’s digital sky.”
Guest instructor Nick Vishanka will offer back-to-back, 60-minute yin and restore yoga sessions. This class will include a fusion of yin, restorative postures and mindful movement blended with relaxing asanas, and will conclude with a guided yoga nidra.
Space is limited, and early registration is recommended.
Purchase Tickets
Paved with Love: A Gift That Lasts Forever
Looking for a fresh, unique, everlasting gift for a loved one?
Purchase and engrave a brick that will become a permanent part of the Vanderbilt Museum.
Your donation will help the Vanderbilt to bring outstanding science, history, and art education to more than 25,000 students annually.
Your brick will be installed and displayed installed in your favorite brick walkway around the Vanderbilt Mansion and Terrace, or on the 43-acre grounds of the beautiful waterfront Estate.
Purchase a Brick
For more information, email: madison@vanderbiltmuseum.org
New Show at Reichert Planetarium: ‘We Are Guardians’
The Reichert Planetarium will premiere a new show, We Are Guardians, on Saturday, April 22, at 3:00 pm. Take a journey into, under, and around the many ecosystems across our planet. Ages 8 and up.
Purchase Tickets
We are all connected. Come and find out how.
Join us on a journey into, under, and around the many ecosystems across our planet. Discover how each component fits together, and how the health of each part is vital to the health of Planet Earth. Find out how, with the help of satellites and scientific study, we can understand the links between human activities and climate change, and what we can do to work together to improve the health of our shared home.
This visually stunning show is an immersive science film that features beautiful animation and creative storytelling that viewers of all ages can enjoy together.
