Last week Littleton Alston’s writer sculpture Willa Cather was unveiled at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC, where the likeness of a pro-slavery supporter once stood. Alston is the first black artist to be featured in the National Hall of Statuary Collectionselected from over 70 artists who competed to design and build the statue of Cather, the 12th woman to be represented in the collection.
An associate professor of sculpture at Creighton University, Alston originally grew up in the nation’s capital, where he said he spent his childhood roaming the city’s neighborhoods and exploring the “larger-than-life monuments” with his siblings on bicycles. He said these public works of art instilled in him “a sense of grandeur”.
“It gave me hope that I, a poor DC kid, could one day become a sculptor,” he said. Inspired, Alston continued his art studies in high school at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and later at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has lived in Omaha, Nebraska, for over 40 years.
“All of my sculptures are strongly connected and show my 20-year movement towards figure and story as a central theme,” Alston said. “Willa Cather is under-recognized as a literary giant on par with our nation’s greatest authors like Hemingway and Twain.”
“Willa Cather is my greatest achievement in my sculpting career,” Alston added.
Born in December 1873, Cather wrote 12 novels, six collections of short stories, two editions of a book of poetry, and many other non-fiction works during her lifetime. Although she is originally from Virginia and has spent much of her adult life in New York, she is widely associated with Nebraska, where she moved with her family when she was nine years old. Much of his acclaimed literary work is heavily focused on frontier life, such as his novels O Pioneers! (1913), The song of the lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). In 1923, she won a Pulitzer for one of usa novel that took place during World War I and was partially inspired by the death of a cousin.
Although Cather’s books have been widely celebrated, they have also been criticized for their stereotypical and sometimes racist depictions of blacks and Indigenous peoples, such as the dehumanization of Blind d’Arnault In My Antonia.
In 2018, the Nebraska Legislative Assembly passed Bill 807who approved the motion to install statues of Willa Cather and Ponca Chief Standing Bear in the National Hall to replace state sculptures of controversial Arbor Day founder Julius Sterling Morton and former US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, which had been in the collection since 1937. Morton, who was widely celebrated in Nebraska for his contributions to federal politics and agriculture, has come under historic scrutiny in recent years for his strong supporter of slavery. The bronze statue of Ponca Chief Standing Bearinstalled in 2019, was sculpted by Boise artist Benjamin Victor, who also created the agronomist statues Norman Borlaug and North Paiute Activist Sarah Winnemucca for collection.
While sculpting Cather, Alston fully immersed himself in the search for his life and work, which included listening to audio recordings of his acclaimed books and embarking on several trips to Red Cloud, where the family of Cather settled down when she was a child. In her statue, Alston depicts Cather at 40, the age she was when she began her career as a novelist, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and caught in a frozen stride across a windy meadow. Standing 10 feet tall and weighing nearly 1,200 pounds, the sculpture shows Cather holding a cane in her right hand, and a pen and a stack of papers in her left – a reference to her journalistic and literary career.
Alston also nods to Nebraska in the statue, including the goldenrod, the state flower, at her feet, and a half-buried wagon wheel behind her in reference to Cather’s novels which set highlight the pioneering past of the state and describe the struggles. the settlers encountered on their journeys west.
Located in the United States Capitol building, the National Statuary Hall Collection houses 100 statues, two representing each state in the United States. Each statuary pair is considered a gift from the state. Currently, 38 statues are located in the Hall of National Statuary, while the rest of the works are scattered throughout the Capitol building.
Cather’s statue is expected to eventually be moved to the Capitol’s underground Visitor Center, located on the east side of the building, where it will overlook the Emancipation Hall.
“I connected to her life, her being a writer and an artist,” Alston said in a PBS interview, recalling when he applied for the Capitol Commission. “And when I won, it went around in circles – putting a piece in the US Capitol, a place I had been [to] as a child, no idea what a sculptor was. It just moved me to tears.
