At Play: Artists & Entertainment

The Nassau County Museum of Art's exhibition, At Play: Artists & Entertainment, traces how artists across generations have turned to leisure, spectacle, and performance as subject matter. Spanning the glamour of the Belle Époque through to contemporary practice, the show brings together dance halls, racetracks, beaches, circuses, and concert stages as recurring backdrops for artistic invention. Works by Carole Feuerman, Pablo Picasso, Reginald Marsh, Everett Shinn, and Max Beckmann appear alongside pieces by Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Andy Warhol, whose portraits of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean sit comfortably among posters Marc Chagall designed for opera productions of The Magic Flute and Carmen. What emerges is less a survey of pastimes than a portrait of how play itself, whether at the racetrack or in the front row of a theater, has long offered artists a shorthand for capturing the spirit of their era.