The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture
Roberto Lugo, DNA Study Revisited, 2022, urethane resin life cast, foam, wire, and acrylic paint, 66 × 27 × 17 in. (167.6 × 68.6 × 43.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, 2024.19
SAAM’s groundbreaking exhibition, featuring 82 artworks created between 1792 and 2023, examines for the first time the ways in which sculpture has shaped and reflected attitudes and understandings about race in the United States.
Description
How does American sculpture intersect with the history of race in the United States?
The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture examines the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States. The exhibition brings together 82 sculptures created between 1792 and 2023 and ranging in size from palm-sized coins to monumental statues created from diverse media such as bronze, marble, shoes, paper, and hair. Made by 70 different artists, these sculptures are displayed to allow for juxtapositions of historical and contemporary works that invite dialogue and reflection on notions of power and identity. American sculpture in its many forms also has served as an expression of resistance, liberation, and a vital means for reclaiming identity.
The exhibition draws extensively on works from SAAM’s collection, which is the largest collection of American sculpture in the world.
The exhibition and related book, published in association with Princeton University Press, contributes new scholarship to the understudied field of American sculpture, which hasn’t been the subject of a major publication survey in more than 50 years.
The Shape of Power is organized by Karen Lemmey, the Lucy S. Rhame Curator of Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Tobias Wofford, associate professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University; and Grace Yasumura, assistant curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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Credit
The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Generous support is provided by: Ford Foundation, Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz Endowment, Henry Luce Foundation, The Lunder Foundation – Peter and Paula Lunder Family, Terra Foundation for American Art.
Major support is provided by Fisher Arts Impact Fund, Jack and Marjorie Rachlin Curatorial Endowment, and Smithsonian Scholarly Studies Awards. Additional support is provided by Elizabeth Broun Curatorial Endowment, The Henry Moore Foundation, Jacquelyn and William Sheehan, and C.K. Williams Foundation.
This exhibition received federal support from the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.
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