Fanning The Flames Of Freedom: New sculpture illuminates reflection on race, access

New sculpture illuminates reflection on race, access

Madison Square Park Conservency
Madison Square Park Conservency

Lady Liberty's torch lands on the Momentary campus on March 25. Well, artist Abigail DeVille's 2020 reimagining of it, anyway.

"Light of Freedom" is a 13-foot found object sculpture referencing the Statue of Liberty's iconic torch and bridging past and present ideas about freedom. DeVille was inspired to create the public work after seeing an image of the original arm and torch on display in New York City's Madison Square Park in the late 1800s.

The past is what inspired the form, but the present is what the piece is responding to. The blue flames -- the hottest fire -- of "Light of Freedom" materialize from a mass of mannequin arms tangled together, evoking imagery of Black Lives Matter protesters linking arms to assert change and rejection of the norm.

"Things have always been constructed and torn down," DeVille says in an interview with Art21. "This idea of freedom is under continual construction -- and reconstruction -- from generation to generation."

Those layers of the work challenge the viewer to see both history and the present from diverse perspectives. Are the arms linking together in collective power, or do they recall the first Africans brought to the country as they are barred from liberation? Does the scaffolding surrounding the work protect the torch and passersby, or is it a cage around this weighty symbol? Does the bell at the torch's center serve as another image of freedom, or does its rusted and immovable state speak to a past it no longer represents?

"I feel like these materials almost translate into being representations of what this work is talking about, and this idea of the top of the Statue of Liberty, and this torch, but the bell is also sort of rusted and worn out," explains Lauren Haynes, director of artist initiatives and curator, contemporary art, at the Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

"So this [theme] of how are these ideas still coming to bear today? Are they still present? Are they worn out? How does that really affect what we're thinking, and when we talk about freedom and how it relates to a lot of different people and different relationships as well?

"I think it's meant to reflect both sides of that," she goes on, "where there's, absolutely, despair, but you also see some moments of hope. And it maybe just depends on the day or the moment or how you're looking at a work or what else is going on, but I think it's meant really to have a bit of space for a variety of feelings and a variety of reads in that."

Artists like DeVille who have chosen to mine history in their practice can help us understand through their art that these questions around freedom, race and gender aren't just in the past, Haynes says.

"I think there's a lot of times as a country, as people, we sort of put things in the past and say, 'Oh, that was before. And now things are better,'" she suggests. "And I think this past year has showed more people that it's not, though many people have known for a while that it's not. So I feel like when artists are doing that, they're using history as a starting point to help further and push these conversations."

That point, as well as DeVille's critiques of systems of oppression and "freedom," are really driven home in DeVille's interview with Art21 with the quote she recites at the very beginning of the interview:

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lighting. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." -- Frederick Douglass, Aug. 4, 1857.

More News

FAQ

‘Light of Freedom’

By Abigail DeVille

WHEN — On display March 25- Sept. 26

WHERE — Courtyard off Gallery 1, the Momentary, 507 S.E. E St. in Bentonville

COST — Free

INFO — 367-7500, themomentary.org

Upcoming Events