Long Island Moderns: from Arcadia to Suburbia provides a new cultural narrative of Long Island in the 20th century through an examination of its architectural and artistic emergence during that
period. Beginning in the late 1920s, architects like Albert Frey, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wallace Harrison built homes for themselves and influential clients, who sought to bring high culture
to their Long Island estates and retreats. As a result, beginning in the mid-1940s, Long Island became home to works by Masters of Modernism like Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer, while new
communities like Levittown changed the landscape. In later years, Paul Rudolf and Charles Moore among others pushed Modernism in new directions. Throughout the period important artists such as
Lee Krasner, Fernand Leger, Irving Penn and Cindy Sherman lived and worked on the island, cementing the region as a center of the Modernist art movement.
