Car Culture: Art and the Automobile explores artistic response to the automobile, which has transformed life in the 20th century more significantly than any other single factor, irrevocably changing the appearance of our environment and our experience of it.  While some artists focus on images of the car itself, inspired by its alluring modernity or its status as an icon or expression of personal identity, others create art work from car parts such as scrap metal and tires.  Later artists comment on the automobile’s ubiquitous presence in the landscape, seen in the roadside environment, the phenomenon of the road trip, and ultimately the damage caused to our environment.  The photographers, painters, and sculptors included in this exhibition examine an aspect of our lives that is usually taken for granted.

Funding provided in part by Suffolk County. Car Culture: Art and the Automobile is made possible by The Shoreland Foundation. Additional exhibition support is provided by Mercedes-Benz of Huntington, Pien and Hans Bosch, and through leadership gifts to Museum’s August Heckscher Society.

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Hal B. Fullerton (1857-1935) was a self-taught photographer whose works document life on Long Island in the early years of the 20th century.  As a special agent and agriculturalist for the Long Island Rail Road, Fullerton’s photographs were reproduced in promotional material that encouraged tourism and farming on the Island.  Born in Ohio, Fullerton worked in New York before moving to Long Island, settling first in Brooklyn, and then progressively east to Queens, Huntington, East Setauket, and finally Middle Island.  In Suffolk County, Fullerton and his wife established experimental farms for the L.I.R.R., contributing to the area’s agricultural development.  His photographs capture the picturesque, agrarian charm of the Island, while also revealing aesthetic conventions seen in contemporary painting of the period. 

From the Collection of the Suffolk County Historical Society.

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This rotating exhibition of highlights from the Permanent Collection features a broad range of works by European and American artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Of special interest is a selection that focuses on various modes of transportation, coinciding with the Museum’s Car Culture exhibition, and photographs by Joe Constantino, a Long Island photographer who explores traditional subjects using experimental techniques such as infrared photography and solarization.  Also on view is an elegant portrait of the Museum’s founder with select European paintings from his collection that reveal 19th-century interest in exotic subject matter, as well as the Museum‘s most renowned painting, Eclipse of the Sun, a scathing indictment of Weimar Germany by the German émigré artist George Grosz, who lived in Huntington during the 1950s.