Mandy Henson Selected for Heckscher Museum of Art’s Just Powers: Long Island Biennial 2026

Mandy Henson is honored to announce her inclusion in Just Powers: Long Island Biennial 2026, now on view at the Heckscher Museum of Art from May 16 through September 13, 2026. Now in its ninth iteration, the Long Island Biennial is one of the region’s most significant juried museum exhibitions, bringing together 73 works by 69 contemporary artists selected from nearly 600 submissions across Nassau and Suffolk Counties. 

This year’s Biennial takes as its conceptual touchstones both the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the centennial of George Grosz’s politically charged masterpiece Eclipse of the Sun, inviting artists to examine questions of power, national ideals, public consequence, and the evolving condition of democracy. Eclipse of the Sun

Henson’s accepted work, Cannon Fodder, is a wood-fired ceramic torso from her ongoing Armor Series. Built in dark earthen tones and marked by an accumulation of rounded protrusions suggestive of impact, the sculpture transforms the language of armor from protection into testimony. Rather than shielding the body, its burdened surface records the toll exacted on those who stand in defense of civic ideals.

Presented within the context of Just Powers, Cannon Fodder reads as a quiet monument to the casualties—seen and unseen—embedded in the effort to preserve democratic life. The work reflects on the fallen not through spectacle, but through endurance: the body after pressure, after collision, after the promises of national freedom have met their human cost.

An image of Cannon Fodder by Mandy Henson is featured below.