Once upon a time, for an art history assignment, my class was assigned to go to The Art Institute of Chicago, pick a work of art out of one of its exhibits and write up a history of how the work of art came to be.
I wandered into the neo-classical section and was, for the most part, unimpressed, by the attempts at achieving art that were mere shadows to some of the 5th century BCE Greek art that it was attempting to emulate and then...I came across “The Freedman” by John Quincy Adams Ward.
A leader among the nation’s second generation of sculptors, John Quincy Adams Ward played a significant role in elevating the medium in the United States, calling for a new realism to address moral concerns. Inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s 1862–63 Emancipation Proclamation, The Freedman reflects not only Ward’s aspiration to create relevant statements on pressing issues of the day but also his abolitionist sentiments. Using antiquity as his inspiration, he depicted a seminude man seated on a tree stump who has just been liberated from the shackles that bound him to slavery. Ward broke artistic convention by showing the former enslaved person as master of his own destiny, not a man reliant on white men for freedom. The vestiges of chains, potent symbols of his bondage, dangle from both wrists, and his muscular body, turned to look over his shoulder, is contained within a formal, triangular composition. The Freedman was modeled from life and is generally considered among the first naturalistic sculptural representations of an African American. Shortly after The Freedman was first exhibited in 1863, art critic James Jackson Jarves effectively summarized the work’s power: “We have seen nothing in our sculpture more soul-lifting or more comprehensively eloquent. It tells in one word the whole sad story of slavery and the bright story of emancipation.”
Regrettably, I’ve lost the paper that I did about “The Freedman” but I do remember some of its details.
First of all, as I’ve said, I find most Neo-classical works in art and architecture to be simply ugly. “The Freedman”, on the other hand, reminded me of works like Myron’s Discobolus or “Boy with Thorn” so that I had to look at the sculpture three times in order to realize that the sculpture was of an African American recently freed from slavery.
It was my research that revealed that while American sculpture, for the most part, used Roman models, abolitionist sculptures deliberately chose Ancient Greek models to symbolize the freed Blackman. Furthermore, abolitionists led a movement in the 19th century of mass producing sculptures as miniatures, thus inaugurating a movement of middle-class homes that contained fine pieces of minature art.
I’m giving all of this detail about my encounter with a work of art simply to tell you of some of what I am bringing to the examination of an artistic controversy that has brewed in Philadelphia.
Christopher Kuo/The New York Times
A year ago, the city of Philadelphia invited an artist to design a statue of Harriet Tubman that would stand in front of City Hall to honor the abolitionist’s legacy and celebrate her connection to the city.
Then the complaints poured in.
Some incensed artists and community members argued that the city should have used a public selection process rather than awarding a commission, in part because the artist Philadelphia had selected was a white man.
The city ultimately responded by ending its partnership with the artist and issuing an open call for submissions. It received 50 applications and has recently unveiled five semifinalist designs, all created by Black artists.
The controversy over the Tubman statue is part of a broader conversation in the art world about to what extent racial identity should matter. This summer, the New Orleans Museum of Art was criticized for appointing a white woman as its curator of African art. In 2017, protesters called out the Whitney Museum of American Art for including in its biennial a painting by Dana Schutz, a white artist, that was based on the open-coffin photographs of Emmett Till, a Black teenager lynched by white men in 1955.
I get these controversies.
A white woman curating exhibits of African art in New Orleans? (For the record, I would not necessarily be against that.) I did find the Schutz work of Emmett Till to be offensive and I remain mystified as to why that work was chosen by the Whitney Museum.
Philadelphia’s process of selecting a sculptor for the commission of the Harriet Tubman statue does seem to be a little shady.
As for the sculpture by the now de-commissioned artist Wesley Wofford...I like it...a lot.
In fact, the Wofford sculpture of Tubman was my second favorite.
But as for the winner of the sculptures depicted in Luo’s article...I gotta choose Richard Blake’s depiction of a solemn Tubman with her head bowed and eyes closed as if in prayer yet with the sassy defiance of the contemporary “talk to the hand” gesture; pistol-packing (as Ms. Tubman was wont to do) even under the Liberty Bell while carrying one of the most iconic symbols in all of art: the lantern that harkens back, ultimately, to Diogenes the Cynic and self-proclaimed cosmopolitan; the lantern that Diogenes (allegedly) carried throughout Athens in the daylight looking for a honest man and never finding one.
Blake’s combination of homages to antiquity, modern times, to abolitionist art, and to Tubman herself (Tubman’s pistol at her side is as provocative a symbol as the lantern) makes his piece the easy choice...at least for me.