Courtesy Chazen Museum of Art
A bronze sculpture surrounded by mirrors.
The sculpture is surrounded by mirrors in part of the gallery.
In fall 2019, Amy Gilman, director of the UW-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, was chatting with international artist Sanford Biggers the night before the closing performance of an exhibition of his work here in Madison. She introduced him to a piece in the Chazen’s collection she thought he would find interesting, called “Emancipation Group.”
This marble sculpture was created in 1873 by Thomas Ball. It depicts Abraham Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation with one hand, while his other hand hovers over a kneeling freedman who is wearing nothing but a cloth around his waist, with chains lying broken on the ground.
Speaking at the unveiling of the large-scale version of the statue in Washington, D.C., in 1876, Frederick Douglass said, “When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors…we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”
Yet days later he wrote in a letter, “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man. There is room in Lincoln park for another monument, and I throw out this suggestion to the end that it may be taken up and acted upon.”
Sure enough, Biggers was interested in the sculpture. He contacted Gilman in late 2020 to see if she was still interested in an exhibit responding to “Emancipation Group.”
Gilman was still interested, envisioning a way to use “one object in our collection as a way of creating a conversation about race and [its] history in the United States,” she says.
The result, the exhibit “re:mancipation,” which opened Feb. 6, is a collaboration between the Chazen, Biggers and other artists, and the MASK Consortium, a coalition of museums and educational institutions.
“We believe that we are doing something with this project that is unprecedented — and I don’t use that word lightly,” Gilman says, noting that we are in “a moment in which museums, art museums especially, need to be thinking differently about how we interpret and bring objects in our collection to the public. We need to do some experimenting.”
Eric Baillies
Persons looking at a timeline in an art gallery.
The timeline feature ushers visitors into the exhibit.
A timeline guides visitors into the exhibit, detailing the history of slavery in the United States and providing context for the artistic discussion they are about to witness. Then viewers enter what Gilman describes as “a more complicated space” where they can explore the sculpture in less linear fashion.
“re:mancipation" uses three versions of “Emancipation Group,” the one from the Chazen’s collection and two on loan from other museums. One cast in bronze is surrounded by mirrors; another is the center of an iconographic breakdown of the component parts of the statue — this one is entitled “Freedom’s Memorial” despite being nearly identical to the others. The statue from Chazen’s collection is positioned between two large portraits which face each other in conversation.
In addition the exhibit includes multiple screens showing videos or 3-D images of the statue’s more typical home in the museum. The back wall is covered in projections of videos of artists from an immense diversity of disciplines in their own conversations and confrontations with “Emancipation Group.” These include jazz musician Keyon Harrold responding with his trumpet, artist Lynore Routte using recycled cloth to build a quilt cape, and poet/performer Quanda Johnson reading a spoken word poem.
Gilman praises the range of collaborative partners participating in “the conversation about the work.”
This collaborative spirit has been central to the exhibit. Gilman says she’s “ostensibly the curator” but feels her job has mostly been “to ensure the robustness of the conversation between all the collaborators,” a departure from the typical curator duties. She adds that this was central to setting “re:mancipation” apart. “I didn’t know we were going to end up with an exhibition that looks like this,” Gilman says, gesturing to the room. “I wouldn’t have come up with this on my own — it’s only through a process like this that you come up with something truly innovative in this way,” she says.
New technology has been incorporated in a way that Gilman believes has not been done before. The museum worked with UW-Madison’s engineering makerspace, a campus shop and building facility, to create 3-D-printed models of the statue’s core components, using them to highlight and break down the iconography. “We couldn’t have done it 10 years ago,” Gilman says. She says that this project has been about “asking ‘what can the technology do to actually bring people closer to this object?’” These 3-D printed figures include individual models of the statue’s depictions of Lincoln, the freedman, the Emancipation Proclamation, the pedestal and more which Gilman hopes help visitors “see [these components] outside of the context of the sculpture.”
Rethinking technology, says Gilman, “will change the way we do our work in the museum.”
Organizers hope to make a documentary of the story of the exhibit’s formation.
“I’ve worked in museums for a long time and they are not that transparent about how they get to the point where they reveal things to the public. They open, they look beautiful, yet nobody sees the background,” says Gilman. “We hope that by recording all the Zoom calls we’ve been doing over the last two years and by having people filming whenever we’re meeting or whenever the artists are here that this will become something that people can use as a touchstone…long after the exhibition is no longer here.”
“re:mancipation” runs through June 25. The unveiling of a new sculpture by Biggers in response to “Emancipation Group” will take place before May, but the date for this is not yet set as the sculpture is still in progress. The Chazen has also made a virtual tour of the exhibit available online.
“It’s possible people will find this exhibition very emotional,” says Gilman. “My hope is that people may arrive with their own expectations and experiences about what an art exhibition is going to be like and that they will allow themselves to take a journey [and] find the threads that are interesting to them. I hope this exhibit creates a moment where people can see a familiar work in a new way — and that it becomes new for them in a way that will change them.”
