As a sculptor, Emma Stebbins created some of the most interesting, important, profound neoclassical works that there are.

Emma Stebbins, the artist, came up with this concept for the angel and what this would look like.

She really just was a trailblazer in many ways, whether you're a woman, you're an artist, a queer person, an actress.

There's so many ways to kind of see yourself in this story.

She's not very well known, despite creating one of the biggest monuments in New York City and one of the most well-known monuments in New York City.

Where did she go?

How did her story get lost?

She has to be accounted now as a genuinely significant artist of the 19th century.

Emma Stebbins was a New Yorker.

She was born in the city in 1815.

We know that her family was interested in the arts, that they encouraged her talents.

Her story really picks up steam when she embarks from New York City to go on the Grand Tour with her mother and her younger sister, Caroline.

And the grand tour was kind of this once in a lifetime trip that upper class and then increasingly middle class Americans would go on, really to get culture, to go to the great cities in Europe, and eventually they land in Rome.

It wasn't until she was 40 years old that she left New York, went to Rome, and started to learn to make sculpture.

I think that's one of the things that is very interesting about her and also really inspiring.

She really kind of finds herself.

Her sister said that in Rome, the very atmosphere was creative.

So everything about Rome is conducive to Stebbins finding personal freedoms and professional freedoms.

She's going to the Vatican and the Capitoline.

This is where she's finding inspiration for her work as a neoclassical artist.

She's also closer to where Carrara Marble comes from in Carrara, Italy.

And then she meets Charlotte Cushman, the love of her life, her lifelong romantic partner.

It's really hard to overstate how important and famous and wealthy and significant that Charlotte Cushman was.

She was best known as a Shakespearean actress.

She played both male and female roles.

She performs for Abraham Lincoln.

We know that Stebbins and Cushman met in Rome pretty soon after Stebbins and her family arrived there in the fall of 1856.

And they started spending more time together and very quickly formed this lifelong attachment.

So in a letter to a friend, for example, Cushman once said, "Do you not know that I'm already married and I wear the band on the third finger of my left hand?"

Emma Stebbins and Charlotte Cushman lived together in Rome for about 14 years.

Their home was right at the top of the Spanish Steps.

They hosted kind of all the best parties.

And so these two women were not on the margins in any sense.

They were really kind of the beating heart of this community.

One of the most wonderful things that we know is that Emma Stebbins creates a bust of her wife.

It really captures her persona beautifully.

It's so detailed.

You see her hair and her bun and it captures her personality.

It also is such a courageous act as a female sculptor to create this bust of the love of her life and then send it out into the world.

By all accounts, Stebbins was very proper, very ladylike, a little bit shy and retiring.

Cushman's the opposite.

She's got a big personality and she really pushes Stebbins to put herself out there, to go after these big commissions, to ask for more money when she's selling her work, to meet patrons.

And so the two really support each other.

This artistic power couple of their time.

One of the first works Stebbins created is called The Lotus Eater, and this is a subject that comes from Homer's Odyssey.

When she sculpted The Lotus Eater, which is a full-length sculpture, it was the first male nude by a female American artist.

So in that sense, she's a trailblazer right away, almost from the very first work that she creates in Rome.

Stebbins also becomes one of the first sculptors of any gender to sculpt working-class American men in the clothing that they would have worn at the time.

And again, this is something nobody else was doing.

And so she's placing herself within this long thousands of years of history of sculpting the idealized human figure, but she's going in these new directions.

One of the goals of Emma Stebbins' Carving Out History, the exhibition that we did here at the Heckscher Museum, was to put Emma Stebbins back on the map.

When you start looking in these 19th century newspapers, she's there, you know, she's actually in the record.

She was famous during her lifetime.

She was acclaimed for her work.

She won these commissions.

Emma Stebbins' Carving Out History was the first museum exhibition on Emma Stebbins and really made a claim for her that she is one of the most important American sculptors of the 19th century.

The exhibition really looked at the full breadth of her work and placed it in the context of her day, but also pulled out these themes that resonate with our life and things we care about today.

Thanks for coming on this tour of Central Park.

This statue was commissioned to the artist Emma Stebbins.

So that made her the very first woman in New York City to be awarded a public art commission, which is a huge thing.

Yeah, we can give her a round of applause.

The Bethesda Fountain, I think, has got to be considered one of the most successful examples of public art from the mid-19th century.

Emma Stebbins created the Bethesda Fountain throughout a long process that probably started in about 1861 and goes all the way through until 1873 when the sculpture is finally placed in Central Park and unveiled to the public.

The Bethesda Terrace was intended to be the centerpiece of Central Park by the park's founders, Olmsted and Vaux.

And the fountain was also intended to be a centerpiece of the terrace.

She's really given a great amount of free reign as far as what the subject matter should be.

She really is the one who decides that it's going to be about the angel Bethesda, that it's going to celebrate bringing clean water to New York.

The Bethesda Fountain connects to the Croton Aqueduct, which is basically the plumbing system that brings clean water to New York City following a series of cholera outbreaks in the 1830s.

This is a very personal story for her because she lost family members to cholera, which is a disease that has its connection to non-clean water.

She was inspired by a story in the Gospel of John in which there's a pool that would be visited by an angel.

The angel would stir the waters and anyone who was sick and entered the pool would be cured.

So this idea of bringing healing waters to New York and then creating the Bethesda Fountain and the Angel of the Waters as this public art piece that would celebrate healing waters, it's this beautiful idea and it very much was her idea.

And so we happen to call this whole space Bethesda Terrace.

And so the naming of this very famous entire space is also thanks to Emma, which I think is really important.

I really love sharing the story of Emma Stebbins with the public.

I think it's remarkable that the only piece that was selected by the designers of the park themselves was created by a woman.

It just has its own, this other layer of energy and crowds that is just part of the charm and experience of being here.

One of the ways that most people know about the Bethesda Fountain is through Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Angels in America.

This is my favorite place in New York City, no, in the whole universe.

The parts of it I have seen.

On a day like today.

A sunny winter's day, warm and cold at once.

The title came to me from a dream that I had of an angel crashing through the bedroom ceiling of a dancer that I had known in graduate school who had just died of AIDS.

But the minute I had this phrase in my head, "Angels in America," I thought about the Angel of the Waters because she seemed to me to be a paradigmatic American angel.

Tony used the Bethesda Fountain in, I think, really two important ways.

One, the angel is used almost as a character throughout the play in this kind of fantastic, fierce way and complicated way.

And then in the end, the last scene takes place at the Bethesda Fountain.

And those images created this strong sense for us around that angel in the Bethesda Fountain.

- This angel, she's my favorite angel.

I like them best when they're statuary.

They commemorate death, but they suggest a world without dying.

There are some public artworks that are indelible and unforgettable and have a sort of permanent magnetic power.

There are some images that are replete in and of themselves.

They're essential images.

And I think she is one.

- When we go to see the sculpture, David, we know who sculpted it.

His name's Michelangelo.

When we go to see The Thinker, we know who the sculptor is.

His name's Rodin.

The Bethesda Fountain is actually visited by far more people each year than either of those sculptures, but people don't know Emma Stebbins' name.

One thing that we know about Emma Stebbins is that she did not plan to be anonymous.

She wanted people to know that she sculpted the Bethesda Fountain, Angel of the Waters, because she signed it and she had such pride in that work.

She's a treasure because she was a brilliant sculptor and we should all know who she is.

- Funding for this program was provided by the New York State Education Department.

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