EXHIBITIONS Current & Upcoming

For the first time, The Heckscher Museum of Art is exploring its collection through the lens of LGBTQ+ identities and histories. Spanning more than 150 years, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Victoria Munro, Executive Director of the Alice Austen House, is guest curator of the show.

Artists who lived and worked on Long Island will anchor All of Me with All of You: LGBTQ+ Art Out of the Collection. Six photographs taken on Fire Island by the collective PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French) express the artistic and personal freedoms that LGBTQ+ communities nurtured on Long Island in the first half of the twentieth century. Photographs by Huntington artist Joanne Mulberg capture the spirit of Fire Island in the 1970s and 1980s. Artworks by internationally significant figures including Marsden Hartley, Alfonso Ossorio, Betty Parsons, Alice Rahon, Robert Rauschenberg, and Emilio Sanchez are also featured, alongside new acquisitions by Amy Adler, Laylah Ali, Vanessa German, and Wardell Milan, among others.

This project is made possible with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. With this generous support, the Museum will engage youth and intergenerational community members in a robust year of exhibitions and public programming highlighting and celebrating works, histories, and legacies of LGBTQ+ artists in our permanent collection.

This exhibition is the first to recognize Emma Stebbins (1815–1882) as one of the most significant American sculptors of the nineteenth century. While her Bethesda Fountain in Central Park has been a global icon for 150 years, the full scope of Stebbins’s life and work is virtually unknown. From 1857 to 1870, she created innovative sculptures while living in Rome with her wife, renowned Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman, who championed her career. Stebbins modeled inventive and incisive interpretations of literary and biblical subjects, unprecedented allegories of American industry, and notable portraits of her friends and family. In 1863, with the order for the Bethesda Fountain, she became the first woman to earn a commission for a public sculpture from the city of New York. When Bostonians installed her statue of educator Horace Mann on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House in 1865, she became the first woman in the country to complete an outdoor bronze monument.

Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History brings together most of the artist’s rare extant work, including a portrait drawing and several sculptures that will be on public view for the first time in a century. In addition to fourteen sculptures, the exhibition features archival material including photographs that document lost marble sculptures and plaster studies that Stebbins never realized in stone or bronze. Stebbins completed the Bethesda Fountain to celebrate the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean drinking water to New York City. The inclusion of paintings and photographs by historic and contemporary artists including William Merritt Chase, Martha Edelheit, and Ricky Flores attest to its enduring relevance as a monument to health, healing, and peace.

The exhibition is curated by Karli Wurzelbacher, PhD, Chief Curator of The Heckscher Museum of Art, which stewards the largest collection of Stebbins’s work. An extensive scholarly publication with a foreword by Pulitzer- and Tony-award winning playwright Tony Kushner accompanies the exhibition.