The artist Emma Stebbins (1815-82) ought to be extra well-known than she is. In any case, she created an iconic monument—the angel-topped Bethesda Fountain in New York’s Central Park. However with the opening of the brand new exhibition Carving Out Historical past on the Heckscher Museum of Artwork in Huntington, New York—and a 256-page guide detailing the artist’s life and work—her title is about to turn out to be better-known.
The Heckscher curator Karli Wurzelbacher and her workers—along with outdoors students, artists and critics—have spent greater than 5 years planning a complete present establishing Stebbins among the many canon of greats in Nineteenth-century Neo-Classical sculpture. Displaying 14 marble sculptures collected from around the globe, Carving Out Historical past is the first-ever exhibition devoted solely to Stebbins’s oeuvre.
The Heckscher was not solely the primary museum to amass Stebbins’s work however, for a lot of a long time, the one one to take action. Wurzelbacher, intrigued by this truth, wrote an article in 2021 that led to a descendant of the artist contacting the museum, saying there was a number of artwork Stebbins made that the world had not but seen. An exhibition devoted to the prolific creator’s physique of labor, together with particulars of her life, started to take form. Wurzelbacher travelled to Oregon, Rome, Belfast and elsewhere to gather valuable items from Stebbins’s profession for the present.
Stebbins’s sculptures discover the subjects of gender and sexuality, ecology and trade, public well being and therapeutic, clear water and the atmosphere. “Stebbins was this under-known, unsettled determine, however the work itself was so linked to the modern issues of life,” Wurzelbacher says. “She undoubtedly defied norms, however she and [her wife, Charlotte] Cushman weren’t outsiders or outliers [where they lived in Rome]. They had been on the coronary heart of the expatriate [community], the final word insiders. The principles had been so completely different, and so they had been working inside them and stretching conventions, socially and inside Neo-Classical artwork.”
Emma Stebbins’s Charlotte Cushman (1870) Courtesy the Heckscher Museum of Artwork
Stebbins remodeled working-class topics into miraculous marble sculptures—a medium traditionally reserved for gods, mythological figures and the elite. Her consideration to element is exemplified by her distinctive selections, awakening in spectators a way of group and what we owe to one another.
“Artists virtually at all times depict the wings of angels,” the playwright Tony Kushner writes within the exhibition catalogue for Carving Out Historical past, “with the forefront of the wing and first feathers pointing vertically. The wings of Stebbins’s angel [on the Bethesda Fountain] are horizontal. They lead the attention not upwards however outwards, not heavenwards however stage with our earthbound environment. These wings are usually not annunciatory or admonitory exclamation marks, telling us to drop to our knees earlier than a sovereign energy. The Bethesda angel’s horizontal wings gesture laterally in the direction of expanded imaginative and prescient; they’re a welcoming embrace.”
The Bethesda Fountain (1873) was meant to symbolise the “blessed reward of pure and healthful water” after a cholera outbreak in 1832, which had led to the premature deaths of members of the Stebbins household. Along with evoking conversations about public well being, the fountain has usually been a web site of group refuge in counterculture and youth actions. It has taken on particular that means for LGBTQ+ communities particularly—partially, by means of Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, which options the fountain prominently in its storytelling.
Carving Out Historical past takes care to explicitly title and present the intricacies of Stebbins’s social community with different girls, artists and buddies—together with the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and Anne Whitney—who grew to become her chosen household and made her profession doable. Stebbins and Cushman, a Shakespearean actress, incessantly hosted salons and prioritised networking at their dwelling in Rome. The relationships Stebbins maintained there “formed her life and work, particularly throughout her energetic years as one of many first era of ladies who went overseas to pursue sculpture professionally”, notes the exhibition catalogue.
Emma Stebbins’s The Lotus Eater (1863) Courtesy the Heckscher Museum of Artwork
Although Stebbins finally needed to cease working as a way to care for her spouse, who suffered from breast most cancers, she achieved a lot in her years as an artist. Her sculpture The Lotus Eater (1863) was the primary male nude made by a feminine American artist. Later, Stebbins grew to become the primary girl to earn a public sculpture fee from the Metropolis of New York for the Bethesda Fountain. A number of of her works would go on to stay within the houses of outstanding queer {couples}.
Carving Out Historical past options just a few sculptures that haven’t been seen in additional than a century (and had been considered misplaced), alongside archival paperwork and pictures. The present additionally contains works by modern artists like Martha Edelheit, Patricia Cronin and Ricky Flores—whose 1983 {photograph} reveals the Bethesda Fountain on the coronary heart of the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade.
A lot of Stebbins’s sculptures have been newly conserved and photographed for the primary time in preparation for the exhibition. With its archival supplies, Carving Out Historical past provides an unprecedented alternative to know Stebbins’s vary, motivations and influence.
“The that means of her work has been renewed and expanded throughout this complete 150 years,” Wurzelbacher says. “It’s exceptional to see it come to life on this method.”
Emma Stebbins: Carving Out Historical past, Heckscher Museum of Artwork, Huntington, New York, 28 September-15 March 2026
