We navigate a world brimming with sculpture, from the relief works in our pockets to the equestrian monuments that tower over our public spaces. The contours of my commute to work at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC are shaped by the gleaming surfaces of bronze and marble sculpture. Exiting the train at Union Station, I walk under the watchful gaze of monumental marble statues of Roman legionnaires and ancient Greek gods and goddesses, past a bronze portrait of the labor organizer and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, and in the shadow of an enormous marble portrait of Christopher Columbus, whose contentious legacy of enslaving Native people is evoked by the crouching semi-nude Indigenous figures that surround him on either side. I suspect many have similar stories of how we have become accustomed to living alongside sculpture. Curiously though, sculpture鈥檚 omnipresence in the most quotidian aspects of our lives has helped this medium fade into the background, making it all too easy for us to ignore its outsized presence in our homes and civic spaces.
In recent years, however, sculpture has increasingly become a site of struggle. In the wake of George Floyd鈥檚 murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020 and the uprisings for Black lives and racial justice that followed in cities across the country and around the world, monuments became the locus around which communities gathered for urgent and overdue conversations about the who and how we remember our past. As monuments representing painful histories are dislodged from their pedestals, it is impossible to obfuscate the relationship between sculpture, race, and power in the United States.
Yet, the impassioned public conversations around monuments are only the most recent example of the intertwined, co-constitutive history of race and American sculpture. The exhibition, The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture and its accompanying catalogue, takes the debates around monuments as a portal into rich and nuanced conversations about the sculpture’s active role in the social construction of race in the United States. It is an exhibition that features more than eighty sculptures. Made by seventy different artists, these works date from 1792 to the present. Alongside the sustained discussion of race and power, The Shape of Power also invites readers to critically interrogate the definition of sculpture. For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries objects had to be casted or carved in bronze or stone to be read as sculpture, suppressing an astounding diversity of material and technical approaches to the medium. The exhibition and the catalogue ask us to consider how assumptions segregated both objects and makers around existing social and cultural hierarchies of race, gender, class and ability.
The Shape of Power charts the way sculpture has given physical form to oppressive ideologies that have shaped the way generations have learned to understand race. We might think of the ways sculpture was used by anthropologists as an effective vehicle to visualize fictitious ideas of racial difference. In 1930 the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago commissioned Malvina Hoffman to create a series of sculptures for The Races of Mankind (1933). The exhibition, on view for decades, was grounded in the false theory that people could be classified into biologically distinct races and included dozens of life-size works representing 鈥渞acial types鈥� of the world. While the work was guided by anthropologists, Hoffman鈥檚 project is a flawed construction due to the racial biases embedded in its premise. More than one hundred life-size figures were on display for over three decades. It was visited by more than ten million people. Millions more encountered the sculptures as illustrations on the borders of world maps, which appeared in schoolrooms and other educational settings for many years. Others experienced works from this series as small-scale collectible reproductions, such as Solomon Islander Climbing a Palm Tree (Malvina Hoffman, 1934) in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Yet the exhibition and the catalogue also demonstrate this same medium鈥檚 subversive and emancipatory capacity. The way sculpture has been taken up by artists for generations to resist, contest, and refute racist ideas, protest racial violence, and reclaim identities and histories. In 2016, longtime collaborators Jenea Sanchez and Gabriela Mu帽oz created their monumental work Labor from bricks hand produced by members of the grassroots collective DouglaPrieta Trabajan in Agua Prieta (Sonora, Mexico). To celebrate the labor, resilience, and community of the women who belong to the collective, their portraits were screen-printed on the bricks. This work was originally a thirty-foot-long wall. The section included in the exhibition here features the portraits of two makers, Maty (this side) and Do帽a Higinia (opposite side). Labor was created amid calls for the expansion of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. While this vision invoked fear, family separations, and incarceration, Sanchez and Munoz鈥檚 wall is about protection, community building, and solidarity. The artists鈥� work embodies the ethos of the DouglaPrieta Trabajan collective. As Dona Higinia reflects, being a part of the collective has meant 鈥渓earning, dreaming, friendships, collaboration, and teamwork…DouglaPrieta Trabajan (DPT) is a beautiful program that helps not only me but many people who want to learn. It is very beautiful to see the sowing and harvesting of its fruits; to see how with your own hands you can do much more than you think is possible.鈥�
Unlike many monuments, which center on the stories of the powerful, Sanchez and Munoz’s work opens spaces where we can begin to glimpse a people鈥檚 history, as Howard Zinn might say, of race in the United States. Their work, along with many others in The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, illuminate how ordinary people can create communities of interracial, class solidarity, networks of resistance to racialized violence, and hope for better worlds yet to come.
Grace Yasumura is assistant curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.