Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History
September 28, 2025 - March 15, 2026
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.
This exhibition was made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Major support provided by exhibition campaign co-chairs Richard T. Cunniff, Jr. and Robin T. Hadley, and leadership gifts from Priscilla and Robert Hughes and Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein.
Additional support provided by The Deborah Buck Foundation, The Stebbins Fund in memory of James F. Stebbins and Jane Stebbins Greenleaf, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Every Page Foundation, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Public support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Town of Huntington, New York. Community engagement and public programming support were provided by a distinguished Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
