Emma Stebbins

Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History

This exhibition is the first to recognize Emma Stebbins (1815–1882) as one of the most significant American sculptors of the nineteenth century. While the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park has been a global icon for 150 years, its creator is virtually unknown. Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History presents more accurate and expansive narratives of American culture in dialogue with today’s conversations about gender and sexuality, ecology and industry, and public art.

From 1857 to 1870, Stebbins created innovative sculptures while living in Rome, with her wife, actor Charlotte Cushman. This exhibition brings together the majority of her extant marble sculptures, which include unprecedented neoclassical imagery of laborers, inventive depictions of literary and biblical subjects, and moving portrait busts. Many of these fourteen artworks will be on public view for the first time in decades. The exhibition also features archival material, including period photographs that document lost marble sculptures and plaster studies that she never realized in stone or bronze.

The first woman to earn a public art commission for New York City, Stebbins completed the Bethesda Fountain to celebrate the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean drinking water to the metropolis. It remains a rare monument to health and healing. Contemporary work by artists including Martha Edelheit and Ricky Flores will attest to its enduring relevance. Stebbins sculpted two other statues that are part of our inherited memorial landscape: Horace Mann in Boston and Christopher Columbus in Brooklyn. Inspired by the circulation of her work via stereographs, the installation will employ projection and other media to bring Stebbins’ three public sculptures into the gallery space to consider who has the power to commission public art, who has the opportunity to create it, and what merits commemoration.