Lecture: Sculpting the Past: Art, Identity, and Commemoration

Kelley H. Di Dio, Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont, discusses the issues around public commemoration of the past, with a particular focus on the Southern United States. Her talk forms part of the Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. Lectureships in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation.

About the Exhibition: Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy (organized by The New York Historical) explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics, and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition features fragments of a statue of King George III torn down by American Revolutionaries, a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical’s collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered, and removed. For more information, click here. 

Image: Robert E. Lee Head in process of being melted down, from the statue group originally on Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA. Credit: Eze Amos/For Swords into Plowshares

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