Art Exhibition: Benjamin Franklin by Max Valentine Mills

September 20 – October 10, 2026. Stephanie McCaine produced the musical 1776 at the Historical Hall the last 2 weeks of June in honor of the Semiquincentennial.  The production was championed by The Bedford Historical Society and the Friends of John Jay Homestead with the support of Katonah Classic Stage. Max Valentine-Mills, a recent Purchase College graduate who also appeared in the production as the ‘Artist and Leather Apron’ created a series of seven paintings during the performances. In the opening scene of 1776, Franklin is sitting for a portrait, and Max extended that theatrical moment by continuing to paint our Franklin and other members of the cast throughout the run. The resulting works became a visual counterpart to the production itself. As the team did not want to present 1776 as a museum piece, these paintings do not offer fixed, formal, commemorative portraits of the Founder. They are loose, layered, and visibly in process, capturing actors in motion as they inhabited these historical figures in real time. Presented together, the paintings extend the production’s act of excavation. They invite questions about who is pictured in the American story, how familiar historical figures change when their words are spoken through a broader range of bodies and voices, and whether the founding should be understood as a completed monument or as an ongoing, unfinished argument. The series is therefore more than documentation of the production: it is a body of artwork created from within the performance that continues the conversation the production began.