Sylvester Manor has announced that Sculpture @ Sylvester Manor will return for its second annual summer exhibition, Paradise Lost, an outdoor presentation of sculpture and installation art. Featuring 22 East End artists, the exhibition opens June 14 and runs through Sept. 14, 2025.
Building on the inaugural 2024 exhibition — which drew over 2,500 visitors — Sculpture @ Sylvester Manor has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), recognizing the project’s cultural significance, its illumination of the entwined Indigenous, European, and West African histories rooted in this landscape, and its continued resonance with artistic imagination today.
“We’re thrilled to be able to announce the second sculpture exhibition at Sylvester Manor,” said Stephen Searl, Executive Director of Sylvester Manor.
“The exhibition will again be free and open to the public, drawing people from around the region to experience art and culture in the context of this nationally significant and culturally important historic site.”
Curated by Tom Cugliani, a veteran of the contemporary art world, the 2025 exhibition draws inspiration from John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost,” a retelling of the biblical Fall of Man. Placing the poem in the context of the political, social, economic and religious upheaval of the mid-17th century, Mr. Cugliani said, “The nature of the turbulent events that brought Nathaniel Sylvester to Shelter Island in 1651 continue to figure powerfully in the moment we are living in today.”
