Vivien Green Fryd: Lifting the Veil of Race at the U.S. Capitol
[Vivien Green Fryd, Professor and Chair in the Department of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S. Capitol, 1815-1860 (1992, 2000) and Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper (2002). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Reenacting and Performing Sexual Trauma in Second-Wave Feminist American Art.]
During Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony as the 44th president of the United States, the first African American to be elected to this office proclaimed: "the time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness." As he said these words, President Obama stood in front of the U.S. Capitol Building and beneath its colossal bronze dome statue: Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom (fig. 1). This historic scene becomes all the more significant when we consider the history and meanings of the Statue of Freedom, one of the most visible icons in Washington, D.C.
Now assumed to be a symbol of national unity or an Indian Princess, Crawford's statue emerged out of the contest between the North and South. Between 1853 and 1857, Jefferson Davis used his position as the Secretary of War in charge of the construction and decoration of the Capitol extension to eliminate references to slavery in a public building that belonged to both regions. This slave owner, congressman, and senator from Mississippi who later became president of the Confederacy vehemently argued for the slave system and the extension of slavery into newly acquired lands. He also used his cabinet position to occlude references to slavery by accepting, rejecting, and recommending changes in the iconography of particular artworks. Crawford's intentions in the statue's iconography were co-opted by Davis, whose programming for the statue's meaning influenced the artist from the beginning. In fact, the Statue of Freedom, begun in 1855 after the highly controversial passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) and finished in 1863 during the Civil War, has as much to teach us about the intricacies of race and racism as it can about the politics of public art and slavery. Only after we know the statue's history and examine it in the context of antebellum literature and art can we truly understand it. By considering the statue alongside Herman Melville's novella, "Benito Cereno" (1855), Constantino Brumidi's dome fresco in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, and Thomas Nast's response to the Emancipation Proclamation in Harper's Weekly, we can recover Crawford's statue as an articulation and visualization of the politics of race, racism, and slavery within the public imagination and political realm of Washington, D.C....
Read entire article at Common-place
During Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony as the 44th president of the United States, the first African American to be elected to this office proclaimed: "the time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness." As he said these words, President Obama stood in front of the U.S. Capitol Building and beneath its colossal bronze dome statue: Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom (fig. 1). This historic scene becomes all the more significant when we consider the history and meanings of the Statue of Freedom, one of the most visible icons in Washington, D.C.
Now assumed to be a symbol of national unity or an Indian Princess, Crawford's statue emerged out of the contest between the North and South. Between 1853 and 1857, Jefferson Davis used his position as the Secretary of War in charge of the construction and decoration of the Capitol extension to eliminate references to slavery in a public building that belonged to both regions. This slave owner, congressman, and senator from Mississippi who later became president of the Confederacy vehemently argued for the slave system and the extension of slavery into newly acquired lands. He also used his cabinet position to occlude references to slavery by accepting, rejecting, and recommending changes in the iconography of particular artworks. Crawford's intentions in the statue's iconography were co-opted by Davis, whose programming for the statue's meaning influenced the artist from the beginning. In fact, the Statue of Freedom, begun in 1855 after the highly controversial passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) and finished in 1863 during the Civil War, has as much to teach us about the intricacies of race and racism as it can about the politics of public art and slavery. Only after we know the statue's history and examine it in the context of antebellum literature and art can we truly understand it. By considering the statue alongside Herman Melville's novella, "Benito Cereno" (1855), Constantino Brumidi's dome fresco in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, and Thomas Nast's response to the Emancipation Proclamation in Harper's Weekly, we can recover Crawford's statue as an articulation and visualization of the politics of race, racism, and slavery within the public imagination and political realm of Washington, D.C....