The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture: Stories of Race and American Sculpture

"This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name that will open at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in November 2024. Through offerings from ten scholars focusing on a selection of some eighty sculptures made between 1793 and 2023 in a wide range of media, The Shape of Power is a portal into nuanced and complex ideas about the enduring power of sculpture as a potent tool in the making and unmaking of race in the United States"-- Cover Contents Lenders to the Exhibition Director’s Foreword Introduction Part One: Interrogating Sculpture Histories “Fragile Fictions” and “Hard Truths” in American Sculpture The Power of Sculpture and Politics of Recognition, 1960s to Now Part Two: Reclaiming the Power of Sculpture American Modernism’s Slippery Slope: Classicism, Primitivism, Ethnography in Sculpture Sculpture as Mourning and Protest Strength and Resistance in Native American Women’s Sculpture Marion Perkins’s Skywatcher: A Post-atomic Memorial for a “New World to Be Born” The Chicana Reclamation of the Sleeping Figure: Yolanda López’s Mexican Chair and Judith F. Baca’s Pancho Rupture, Dismantle, Transfigure: Making Sculpture in the Age of US–American Empire Intertwined Histories and Present Realities: A Conversation of Possibilities Works in the Exhibition Bibliography Acknowledgments Index Image Credits Contributors It likely took a full two or three seconds on March 4, 1861, to capture the image of Abraham Lincoln’s first presidential inauguration, among the first such events to be photographed. A major new survey of American sculpture, exploring how it both reflects and redefines concepts of race and identity in the United States.