MADISON, Wis. – The Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus has done a remarkable job of tackling the problem of reappraisal of museum collections that are racist, Confederate or plagued by assumptions of domination.
The project became re: emancipation sprouted when nationally acclaimed artist Sanford Biggers was on Madison campus for the closing of his exhibit Boom in 2019. Over dinner, museum director Amy Gilman and Biggers discussed a problematic sculpture that’s been on display in the Chazen’s permanent collection since 1976. The museum didn’t know what to do with “Emancipation Group” (1873 ) by Thomas Ball. Biggers’ response was that it should be carefully considered rather than simply deleted. “We should always have a debate,” he said in a phone conversation. “It’s a pillar of democracy.”
Over the next two years, in consultation with Biggers and Mark Hines of the MASK Consortium, along with a team of scholars, curators and artists, the current exhibition re: emancipation was developed. It focuses on almost every inch of this sculpture.
Thomas Ball (1819-1911) was an American living in Florence, Italy when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. Soon after, he began working on a version of “Emancipation Group”. At least five half-size marble versions and two life-size bronze monuments were produced, one of which remains visible in Washington, DC. The other bronze monument was removed from display in Boston in 2020, after 12,000 people signed a petition in protest.
The four-foot-tall white marble sculpture at the Chazen shows a tall, lean Lincoln – aged and craggy – dressed as a statesman in a double-breasted overcoat with a bow tie, standing above a crouching black man and shirtless in a loincloth. Lincoln’s hand extends over the freed man’s head in a gesture of Christ-like blessing. The young black man looks outward. His arm shackles are broken. A chain rests near his feet. Lincoln holds the Emancipation Proclamation in his right hand. For more than a century, many onlookers have undoubtedly considered the sculpture honorable – a majestic tribute to a great man who abolished slavery in the Confederacy. It was the first major monument to abolition – a source of pride. But black viewers may not have seen it that way. At the time of the sculpture’s dedication in Washington, DC, Frederick Douglass replied, “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not lying on his knees like a four-legged animal, but raised to his feet. like a man.” This is ironic because although black individuals raised the money for this sculpture, they were not responsible for hiring the artist or overseeing the outcome.
The current movement to remove controversial monuments from public view has not always generated constructive ways to reframe these works as educational tools. Le Chazen takes an intersectional approach – layering the rhetoric of public museum timelines and graphics over museum historiography, enlivened in the final room by wall projections of contemporary artistic responses in dance, music and poetry.
The exhibit is accessed through a narrow data room that describes the global history of slavery. Digestible, luminous and refined graphics announce that “human life began on the African continent”. We learn that between 1770 and 1783 the enslaved population in the 13 colonies was 459,446. In 1860 it was 3,950,343, or more than 10% of the general population.
Rounding a corner in the main room, the focus shifts from the expansive stories to the materiality of the sculpture itself. The Chazen, via 3D printing via MASK Consortium, examines the iconography of its individual components: the scroll, the broken chain, the bleeding heart, and the black man’s facial features. By illuminating symbolism as a medium of storytelling, the museum investigates the distinct visual languages first generated in ancient Greece and Rome to commemorate greatness through the roots of democracy and the foundations of imperialism. The visitor is then confronted with the sculpture itself. The historic paintings that once surrounded the “Emancipation Group” in the permanent collection are repositioned here for context. The face of a white European merchant next to the sumptuous portrait of Lady Caroline Montagu, daughter of the governor of Jamaica, form a chorus of colonial domination dependent on slavery. Every museum is lined with these portraits of power – landowners, conquerors, industrialists, tyrants, builders, importers and boasters of slavery. But the Chazen goes one step further, infiltrating the room with visual echoes, like Kehinde Wiley’s massive “Portrait of Artist Carrie Mae Weems, Eris” (2017), which looks over her shoulder, across the play towards Lady Caroline. Here, the show becomes more of a call and response than a tutorial.
In the final room, a floor-to-ceiling projection of contemporary artists’ reactions to the content of the show floods the space with sound and movement, exploding into conversation, elation. It is a space, as Biggers puts it, “for proposals,” rather than answers. DJ Rich Medina, rapper Pharoahe Monch, jazz trumpeter Keyon Harrold, dance teacher Chris Walker, artists Lynore Routte and Wildcat Ebony Brown, and Madison faculty and students are included. Nearby, several capes and sculptures by Sanford Biggers of his Chimera the series occupy the room.
Biggers had no intention of contributing any artwork in direct response to Lincoln’s sculpture, until a compelling idea materialized. Put up at a reception in May, Biggers’ “Lifting the Veil” (2023), a marble sculpture of the same scale as the Ball monument, shows Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in conversation, with Douglass standing as he lifts a real quilted cloth, a veil of ignorance, from Lincoln, who is seated barefoot, and gazes at the proclamation in his hands. Biggers said he modeled his response on a historic sculpture by Booker T. Washington titled “Lift the veil of ignorance(1922) by Charles Keck, at Tuskegee University.
Biggers sees this project as “a new form of institutional critique”. In his sculpture, the power dynamic is reversed but not denied: Douglass and Lincoln had discussions about slavery. They are both players here. The story is reoriented in a tender way.
Gilman recognizes the complexity of this undertaking. She hopes the show will engage viewers intellectually and emotionally. “We don’t believe there is a precedent for this,” she noted, referring to the depth of analysis presented here. “What does it mean to be a museum?” is the overriding question being asked, she said, noting that the museum will relocate its permanent collection in 2025 and that the fate of the “Emancipation Group” has not been determined. She thinks it will return to the collection, but it will carry the evaluative lessons of this project.
re: emancipation continues at the Chazen Museum of Art (750 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin) through June 25. The exhibition was curated by Amy Gilman in consultation with artist Sanford Biggers and the MASK Consortium.
