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.

Viewfinders: Photographers Frame Nature considers artists’ rich and varied responses to the symbiotic relationship between nature and humans. The photographs on view explore the varying degrees to which nature has fueled human experience and imagination and contributed to environmental consciousness. They also offer a closer look at how human activity has shaped nature. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the present, the exhibition features black and white and color photographs, digital photographs, photomontages, and videos. The images depict places as far away as outer space, and as near as The Heckscher Museum’s own backyard.

Curated by Susan Van Scoy, Professor of Art History at St. Joseph’s University, Long Island.

This focused installation brings together the work of three Long Island artists who boldly paved their own creative paths. Mayhew (b. 1924), Parsons (1900-1982), and Wilson (1924-2015) each created abstract paintings inspired, in part, by their experiences of nature, specific landscapes, or weather. They all worked in New York City during the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant style. Artists of color and artists who were women were sidelined by many galleries and museums throughout the twentieth century. Mayhew and Wilson forged careers by teaching and by joining artist collectives (Spiral for Mayhew; Hansa Gallery for Wilson), while Parsons started her own influential commercial art gallery.

Now in its 27th year, this annual exhibition features extraordinary works of art created by Long Island high school students. Hundreds of students from approximately 80 high schools will submit artwork this year, with the final exhibition juried by Karli Wurzelbacher, Heckscher Museum Curator, and guest juror, artist Samantha Dominik.

Experience the exhibition in person beginning April 29 and virtually beginning May 6! All of the exhibition’s components, including artist statements written by each student and images of artwork from the Museum’s exhibitions that inspired students, will be available here on Saturday, May 6.

Follow #hmalibest and the Museum’s TikTok @heckschermuseum for artists of the day and more throughout the exhibition.

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.