Art museum names Beth Horn to lead charge
Beth Horn’s professional career and volunteer service focus on enriching people’s lives through the arts as well as historic preservation and environmental conservation. Her early career spanned the visual and performing arts, including numerous theater productions on- and off-Broadway, documentary and cultural news programming for Thirteen/PBS-NY, and communications/marketing for the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Most recently, Horn served as the executive director of the Sands Point Preserve Conservancy, a nonprofit organization, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors each year.
“For almost six years, I was overseeing the entire 216-acre estate, all of the programming, fundraising and the capital work,” Horn said. “So in that sense, that role is quite similar to what is really needed here at the Nassau County Art Museum.”
Previously, she produced the Port Washington Public Library’s World Festival, at which representatives from 35 countries and their unique traditions were celebrated; the festival included an international art exhibition and programs for children, teens, and adults.
An active advocate for arts and science education, Horn created several school programs and other partnerships for children of all ages and different abilities. She has also supported a number of Long Island-based nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to educating our youth and protecting wildlife and the environment; she served as a trustee (treasurer and secretary) of the Science Museum of Long Island.
The Science Museum is a waterfront property, a beachfront environment with expansive hiking trails through natural forests.
“In many ways, Sands Point Preserve is a very similar type of property to the art museum’s and it is also another Gilded Age estate,” Horn said. “ I have the experience in not only maintaining that property, but developing the property in such a way that it really served the community during the pandemic, before and after, with cultural programs, nature, education, environmental education, and all those areas.”
The art museum is home to stunning exterior gardens, which are all native.
““That’s a big part of what I’ve been working on over the past years, native gardens, which support wildlife,” Horn said. “Taking the land back from invasives that destroy not only the plants and trees that grow but destroys the environment that birds and other wildlife depend on is important.
Horn also served as a trustee of the North Shore Audubon Society.
“There is a lot of excitement around what it means to convert a garden from a traditional garden with things [that we buy from a nursery], to a natural plant species that will attract the birds that we love to see in our gardens; there’s a whole chain effect.”
The art museum sits on a 145-acre estate.
“There are trails that wind through magnificent woods with extraordinary landscapes; you can climb and descend and see beautiful views,” Horn said. “There are magnificent sculptures permanently on display here with beautifully mowed lawns and you can walk and you can picnic or hike into the forest and just enjoy.”
The museum has received a lot of praise recently for its curated exhibits.
“This is a really magnificent space for art exhibitions, it’s just so full of potential,” Horn said. “There is so much in the works long before the public actually hears the first word about an exhibit.
The art exhibits are planned one to two years in advance with an exhibition and acquisitions committee, made up of a combination of trustees and art experts.
The museum’s newest exhibit, “Our Gilded Age”, opened two weeks ago and runs through March 10.
“It is a mixed media show with paintings, fashion, sculpture, furniture, and other kinds of items from the period,” Horn said. “It crosses over all of these different areas to explore the Gilded Age era, which is really a 30-year period from the 1870s to the early 1900s.”
The new exhibit also explores the “upstairs downstairs” worlds, a pejorative for explaining “upstairs” being the estate owners or aristocracy and the “downstairs” being the staff or working class.
“What’s really exciting is that this exhibition is in a mansion that is a Gilded Age mansion; it is the perfect setting,” Horn explained. “It’s important because this part of New York has a very interesting history among all of these Gilded Age mansions.”
Horn said her first couple of weeks have been wonderful.
“I have been so welcomed by a very talented staff and I’m really excited to be working with them and with the board of trustees,” Horn said. “The staff and volunteers all play an important role, but the [art museum] organization stands on its own legs, for its professionalism.”
A Duke University graduate, Beth holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University’s School of the Arts; she also studied 20th-Century British Literature at Oxford University in England.
Horn and her husband David reside in Port Washington, where they raised their sons, Alexander and Nicholas.
Nassau County Museum of Art is located at One Museum Drive in Roslyn Harbor. Visit www.nassaumuseum.org for details.
