EXHIBITIONS Current & Upcoming

Exploring the spaces we inhabit, this exhibition encompasses more than 50 artworks from the Museum’s Collection that reflect the many meanings of home. The house is a site where daily life unfolds, work takes place, identities cohere and shift, memories form, and imagination takes flight. The art on view demonstrates the central role that domestic space plays in our lives and in art.

Raise the Roof: The Home in Art debuts significant recent additions to the Collection by contemporary artists including Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, Courtney M. Leonard, Kenji Nakahashi, Pat Ralph, Becky Suss, Adam Straus, Amanda Valdez, Claire Watson, and Stella Waitzkin. Never-before-exhibited photographs by Larry Fink and prints by Robert Dash are featured, as are artworks by Romare Bearden, Salvador Dali, Miriam Schapiro, and Esphyr Slobodkina, among others.

The Heckscher Museum of Art and Planting Fields Foundation are pleased to present the work of artist Courtney M. Leonard (b. Shinnecock, 1980), on Long Island this summer, through COURTNEY M. LEONARD: Logbook 2004–2023 at The Heckscher Museum and BREACH: Logbook 23 | ROOT at Planting Fields Foundation. Visit Heckscher.org and Plantingfields.org for more information about these two dynamic exhibitions, including new commissioned work by Leonard, and related programming at each location.

Leonard’s powerful work in ceramics, painting, video, and installation engages with Long Island’s colonial history; celebrates Indigenous knowledge and resilience; and addresses urgent ecological issues. The exhibition will debut Contact, 2,023…, a new work that The Heckscher Museum has commissioned from Leonard. The large-scale work will be a map of Long Island made up of thousands of individual porcelain thumbprints resembling shells. Leonard plans to glaze them in colors and patterns that reference both wampum and delftware. The exhibition will also feature loans from the artist and from public and private collections.

Drawn from the collections of The Heckscher Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, this exhibition presents approximately sixty works on paper by modern artists Arthur Dove (1880–1946) and Helen Torr (1886–1967). It explores the couple’s connection to nature, their experimentation with materials and techniques, and the impacts of Dove’s declining health on their art. 

Salt Life: Arthur Dove and Helen Torr marks the twentieth-fifth anniversary of The Heckscher Museum’s preservation of the Dove/Torr Cottage. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Dove and Torr lived on a sailboat on the Long Island Sound. In 1938, they purchased a 500-square-foot home in Centerport, NY. Torr declared, “We feel this is the loveliest situation we have ever had.” Dove agreed, “I love this swashbuckling around the salt water. . . . Everyone seems quite delighted with this place. It is beautiful.” Now known as the Dove/Torr Cottage, their home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a member of the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS) program of the National Trust. 

George Grosz (1893–1959) created the “Stick Men” series in Huntington, New York, where he lived from 1947 until shortly before his death. Featuring hollow figures in an apocalyptic landscape, this group of watercolors offers a searing indictment of humanity following World War II, the Holocaust, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grosz was an internationally renowned German-born artist who remained invested in political art following his immigration to the United States in 1933. In the “Stick Men” series, he wrestles with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and reaffirms the ability of painting to impact society. 

This focused exhibition will be the first dedicated to the “Stick Men” series since it debuted in New York City at the Associated American Artists galleries in 1948. Seventy-five years later, Grosz’s warning against fascism and global conflict is as relevant as ever.  

George Grosz: The Stick Men was organized by Das Kleine Grosz Museum in Berlin, where it was on view from May through October 2023. At The Heckscher Museum, the expanded exhibition will include additional works from our collection, including Grosz’s masterwork Eclipse of the Sun (1926). It will also feature loans from the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. An exhibition catalogue is available.