Discover our Affiliate sites! These member sites all preserve and steward places of artistic legacy while engaging with public audiences. Distinct from our other members, these sites may not operate as traditional house museums or be regularly open for public visitation. Many are also in earlier stages of evolution as public sites. Explore ways you can learn about their stories and their work.
In 2022 Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios launched its new Affiliate category to complement its longstanding Membership group of sites. The creation of Affiliates represents a commitment by the program and the National Trust, to create new pathways for organizations and individuals stewarding preserved artist properties — that may not meet the criteria under existing membership—to engage in meaningful dialogue with their professional peers. You can read more about the launch here.
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Home-Studio
and Artist’s Residence
Aminah Robinson (1940 – 2015)
“One need not have expensive tools and materials to be creative—all that is needed is an awareness of one’s environment and the beauties that are there; from this comes the process of creativity and —out of this, comes life.”
Aminah Robinson, from an August 3, 1975 journal entry
When Aminah Robinson died in 2015, her paintings, drawings, monumental RagGonNon, life-size sculptures, stacks of watercolors and woodcut prints, collections of books and dolls, tools, traded art, and the art she received from family and friends filled every room of her home. Supplies consisting of buttons, beads, ties, clothespins, music boxes, coins, leather, fabric, and paints remained, ready for her next mixed media project. Her carved furniture, painted doors, autographed walls, and mosaic floor turned ordinary rooms into charmed settings, and each room, including the basement and backyard studio, her “Doll House,” was sacred artmaking space. To visit Robinson’s home studio is to appreciate the fullness of her life, the omnipresence of her work, and the inspiration of her space. Because her home studio supports artists in residence, every effort was made to preserve her bountiful spirit, maintain some of her collections, and create a comfortable living and working environment within it.
The Aminah Robinson Home and Studio is open for tours by appointment, and for workshops with Resident and Fellow artists by invitation. Take a digital tour of the studio here.
791 Sunbury Road
Columbus, OH 43219
614-221-6801
Arts Center at Duck Creek
John Little (1907 – 1984)
“Abstract art is a formal concept. The artist employs nature as inspiration to stimulate his creative impulse. Through simplification and stylization, nature is reduced to the strictest pictorial elements in the terms of form and space.”
John Little, 1947
John Little studied at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, the Art Students League, and the Hans Hofmann School of Art. After a successful career as a fabric designer and service as an aerial photographer in World War II, he turned to fine art in the 1940s. In 1948 he purchased Duck Creek Farm in East Hampton, Long Island, and moved there full time three years later. Among his neighbors were his close friends Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. In addition to colorful gestural abstract paintings, he is known for constructions made of material scavenged from local beaches, the subject of a 1955 film, “John Little: Images from the Sea,” by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg. A solo exhibition of his work was presented in his former barn studio at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in 2021.
The Arts Center is open to the public with free programming.
127 Squaw Road East
East Hampton, NY 11937
631-604-8464
Elaine de Kooning House and Studio
Elaine de Kooning (1918 – 1989)
John Chamberlain (1927 – 2011)
“I’m more interested in character. Character comes out of work.
Style is applied or imposed on it.”
Elaine de Kooning, Everett McNear, Rose Slivka, Arts Club of Chicago,1983
The Elaine de Kooning House and Studio is comprised of two distinct masses: the two-story, roughly two-bay by three-bay, front-gabled house (1968) and the one-and-a-half-story roughly two-bay by five-bay, cross- gabled studio (1978). The two sections are connected by a one- story, L-shaped hyphen. The studio has large angled plate glass and metal windows extending on its north elevation as well as a small bedroom and living area on the first floor, a second-story loft, and a wide, open working space with paint-spattered plywood floors.
Tours of the House and Studio are available by appointment. Visit the website for reservations.
55 Alewive Brook Road,
East Hampton, NY 11937
631-604-5882
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio at the New York Studio School
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875 – 1942)
“Art is an ascending of descending scale; the spirit of its joy reaches us in unexpected ways.
It travels on slender threads, but it is within the reach of all who care enough to want to see and understand.”
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
Guided tours include, in addition to the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio, visits to MacDougal Alley and other major spaces at New York Studio School, including the Clay Room, the sculpture studio where Whitney worked on many of her large-scale public commissions. Many features original to the 1930s Whitney Museum of American Art period are still intact.
The Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio offers guided tours of the site, a National Historic Landmark. You can also visit the latest exhibition in the main gallery.
8 West 8th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-673-6466
Jonathan Fisher House
Jonathan Fisher (1768 – 1847)
“A day of care & business—Mr. Holt, Steven & Mr. Smith worked A. M. on frame. Worked myself stripping old house & drawing nails. About 100 hand collected & assisted me in raising my house, with plank sides, which went up well, & no person was materially hurt. After raising partook of a bountiful supper & after supper had pleasant singing. Blessed be God for the variety & abundance of his mercies.”
Jonathan Fisher, June 21, 1814
The Fisher House is open for tours seasonally, July through mid-October. Visitors will see Jonathan Fisher’s beautiful 1814 timber-frame home that he designed and built himself, which houses remarkable survivals from Federal-era New England, including Fisher’s paintings, drawings, watercolors, and woodblock prints; furniture he built and finished for his family and others; a superb collection of homemade surveying instruments; a large camera obscura that he designed and built himself to aid in drawing; his extensive library of books and his book-binding tools; and more. The property is also home to a 200+ year-old pear tree planted by Fisher, and a reconstructed apple orchard based on his original map, as well as a barn with an exhibit of his woodworking tools. A modern museum wing houses rotating exhibits about Fisher and his family’s life and times.
Open for tours from July through mid-October.
44 Mines Road
Blue Hill, ME 04614
207-374-2459
LongHouse Reserve
Jack Lenor Larsen (1927 – 2020)
“Be relevant, not reverent. Keep changing.”
Jack Lenore Larsen
LongHouse Reserve is Jack Lenor Larsen‘s 16-acre garden with established lawns, ornamental borders, plant collections and 60 pieces of sculpture, including works by Dale Chihuly, Buckminster Fuller, Yoko Ono, Willem de Kooning, and Sol LeWitt, in dialog with the gardens. Throughout the seasons, the gardens hold many surprises, including the dazzling display of daffodils in April, the striking azaleas of the Red Garden in May, roses in June, followed in the summer and fall by the foliage and blossoms of many other trees including majestic Redwoods, shrubs, and perennials, each providing texture and dimension to the LH landscape.
LongHouse is open for tours of its gardens on weekends from January to March, and Wednesday through Sunday from April to December.
133 Hands Creek Road,
East Hampton, NY 11937
631-329-3568
