Sylvester Manor: Sculpture Exhibition — [R]evolution — Art, History & Landscape / June 13th – October 4th

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SCULPTURE @ SYLVESTER MANOR 2026

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EXHIBITION: [R]evolution

June 13 to October 4, 2026

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Sylvester Manor is pleased to announce [R]evolution, the third annual exhibition of Sculpture @ Sylvester Manor. Featuring a curated array of outdoor sculptures and site-specific installations, this seasonal exhibition runs from June 13th to October 4th, 2026. It will provide a resonant, dynamic dialogue around art, history, and landscape on the historic grounds of Sylvester Manor, where recorded history dates to 1651. As reported in the New York Times, “Sculpture @ Sylvester Manor is a surprising and whimsical exhibit, which was created by the curator Tom Cugliani and features a new group of East End artists whose works inhabit and reference the land.”

[R]evolution invites artists to interpret the themes of revolution and evolution expressed in both Tom Paine’s Common Sense and Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, with the added dimension of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. [R]evolution will feature 19 artists, all with ties to the East End of Long Island.

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Celebrated for her series of public art projects: Monuments, Maren Hassinger will collaborate with the students from the Shelter Island Union Free School to continue the series. This site-specific piece, composed of native brush material sourced from the property, will extend along the serpentine waterfront of Gardiners Creek – the site of embarkations and arrivals to Shelter Island across centuries. Hassinger’s work will evoke the layers of history that have been erased or forgotten, buried under the socio-economic sequences of native culture, followed by colonialism and the modern empire of North America.

Invasive Beauty, Old Growth, an installation of brightly colored powder-coated steel rods by John Wittenberg, will extend from the floor of the old growth forest to invade the nearby boggy vernal pond. Planted alongside native ferns and swamp grasses, the forms provoke a contrast between the organic and the synthetic. Wittenberg’s intervention is at once aesthetically minimalist while also vibrantly Baroque in visual impact.

John Cino’s Woodland Warp Sylvester Manor engages the trees of the old growth forest as a loom, from which he will weave an effervescent web of intersecting neon yellow nylon threads. It compartmentalizes the environment into shifting perspectives, corridors, and enclosures that continuously reorient the human body in the landscape, overturning the strictly linear progress of movement in space.

Reviewed in the East End Beacon, Sculpture @ Sylvester Manor is “…a masterful installation accompanied by an app that provides a self-guided tour of the mysteries that unfold as you journey through a portion of the 236-acre property.” The walking tour app provides links to the artist’s social media platforms and critical notes by Tom Cugliani, the founder and curator. Each year, the exhibition is built around an organizing theme which a new group of artists can respond to.

Sculpture @ Sylvester Manor is free and open to the public.

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Participating Artists:

Catherine Brigham and students of the Shelter Island Union Free School District, John Cino, Oksana Danzinger, Matthew Thomas Dutton, Francine Fleischer, Jessamyn Go, Maren Hassinger, Justin Kenney, Gioia Kuss, Karine Laval, Pia Leighton, Curtis Mitchell, Oscar Molina, Lindsay Morris, Jill Musnicki, Nicole Rosenthal, Bonnie Rychlak, Tonito Valderrama, John Wittenberg.

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Sylvester Manor: Home for millennia to indigenous Manhansett People, Sylvester Manor is the most intact remnant of a former slaveholding plantation north of Virginia. The 236-acre site passed through 11 generations of Sylvester descendants, from 1652 until 2014, when heirs gifted it to the nonprofit Sylvester Manor organization. Now a historic district of national significance on the New York and National Registers of Historic Places, over the past 374 years, Sylvester Manor has been a provisioning plantation, an Enlightenment-era farm, and a pioneering food industrialist’s summer estate. Today it includes the 1737 Manor House, a restored 19th-century windmill, an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground, a working farm, and extensive archives and historical collections with educational and cultural arts programs open to all.

For more information, visit www.sylvestermanor.org.

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