06/19/2026
In honor of Juneteenth, we are spotlighting Heckscher Collection artists Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, Romare Bearden, and Howardena Pindell! 🖤🤎❤️💚💛
These works will be on view in the upcoming exhibition Eclipse of the Sun Now, opening September 26. To amplify the enduring message of George Grosz’s painting Eclipse of the Sun, this museum-wide exhibit explores politically engaged art created over the last century. Selected from the collections of the Heckscher and the Art Bridges Foundation, it features more than 50 works by leading artists of our time.
Alison Saar is a biracial artist who explores Black womanhood in her work. In Reapers, she reimagines the character of Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as multiple women hiding in a cotton field awaiting their chance to fight for their freedom. They wield the tools associated with the main crops cultivated by enslaved laborers in North and South America: sugarcane, to***co, indigo, rice, and cotton. Saar printed this image on a found sugar sack that she dyed blue, further connecting to the materiality of enslavement.
Mickalene Thomas’s dynamic and vibrant works elevate Black women, portraying them in positions of power and confidence, while deeply engaging with themes of femininity and q***r identity. Her work stands as a bold rejection of stereotypes, inviting viewers to confront their own perceptions while celebrating the strength, beauty, and complexity of Black and q***r women and their artistic output.
Reunion by Romare Bearden depicts the reunion of two figures on a porch. Bearden grew up in NYC during the culturally vibrant Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. This series reflects his experience of the Great Migration in which millions of African Americans left their homes in the rural South to move north and west in search of economic opportunity and in an attempt to escape racism and segregation.
In Howardena Pindell’s Relationships (Kandinsky #1), the burning of oil fields during the Gulf War threatens a landscape. Yet, the painting spells out an international message of love: the words for love radiate in many languages. The shapes and lines evoke the art of Wassily Kandinsky, while the three-dimensional bundles and nails reference African sculpture.
[ 🎨: Alison Saar, Reapers, 2021, Linoleum cut on hand-dyed found sugar sacks. Museum Purchase. © Alison Saar; Mickalene Thomas, Portrait of Maya #10, 2024, UV pigment print on paper; Romare Bearden, Reunion from the series Ritual Bayou, c. 1972, Editioned collage, color photo-lithograph mounted on finished plywood. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Samuel S. Mandel; Howardena Pindell, Relationships (Kandinsky #1), 1996, Mixed media]
