Golden statue of a woman, getting ready to strike with a bow and arrow.
Special Installation

The American Wing at 100

About the Audio Guide

Behind every artwork in the American Wing are often surprising stories of identity, time, and place. Hear historians, artists, poets, and community leaders from diverse backgrounds offer perspectives on various works. Narrated by Danielle Parker.

Learn more about the contributors.

Cover Image for 4001. Thomas Jefferson, Charles l. Hogeboom, (by 1884)

4001. Thomas Jefferson, Charles l. Hogeboom, (by 1884)

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NARRATOR: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin appear in these late nineteenth-century plaster reliefs as we are typically used to seeing them—as heroic figures.

Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

JANE KAMENSKY:We see in both the Franklin and the Jefferson images a kind of serenity. A serenity that almost resists life.These are figures beyond mortality.

NARRATOR: These sculptures suggest an America eager to reunite with a common, more harmonious origin story in the years after the Civil War. The Colonial Revival cultural phenomenon, which valued the founding narratives of the United States, was one such avenue to shared history and memory.

JANE KAMENSKY: I think the Colonial Revival Movement in arts, literature, the decorative arts, is part of an effort at national healing, in the wake of a civil war, and also an effort to tell a common American story in a period of massive social and demographic disruption.

The words that Jefferson wrote in the Declaration ofIndependence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, meaning all humanity, were created equal, these were words that women seeking suffrage embraced in the 19th-century, they were words that Frederick Douglass wrestled with, they were words that Gandhi took up, that have literally made their way around the globe. At the same time, Jefferson was an enslaver of hundreds of human beings; 600 or so over the course of his lifetime. So, there’s a tremendous contradiction baked into the history of this most brilliant and polymathic of American founders. That contradiction was known at the time was known especially by Jefferson, who knew that slavery was wrong. In our memorializations of the founders, we stopped wrestling with those contradictions and started remembering marble men, right?

An important thing to remember about America’s founders is that they did not view themselves as marble men. They viewed themselves as fallible human beings, as indeed they were.

    Playlist

  1. 4001. Thomas Jefferson, Charles l. Hogeboom, (by 1884)
  2. 4002. John Trumbull, George Washington and William Lee, 1780 | Now on view in Gallery 755
  3. 4003. Teapot, John Bartram (ca. 1765-69)
  4. 4004. Shoulder Belt for a Powder Horn (early 19th c.)
  5. 4005. Storage jar, Dave (David Drake) (1858)
  6. 4006. Tall clock with musical movement, Daniel Burnap (1790-95)
  7. 4007. Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. de Forest, Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1922)
  8. 4008. Niagara, Frederic Edwin Church (ca. 1858) | Not on view
  9. 4009. Face jug, unrecorded Edgefield district potter (ca. 1867-85)
  10. 4010. Paddle, Haudenosaunee (1850-75)
  11. 4011.Presentation Vases, Thomas Fletcher & Sidney Gardiner (1824 & 1825)
  12. 4012. Pagoda and case (ca. 1784-92)
  13. 4017. Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley (ca. 1788)
  14. 4018. Silver Medal of the U.S. Government [peace medal] (1793)
  15. 4019. Hiawatha and Minnehaha, Edmonia Lewis (1868)
  16. 4020. Billy Lee: Portrait in Tar, Titus Kaphar (2016)
  17. 4021. Study For Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The Genius of America Encouraging the emancipation of Blacks, Samuel Jennings (ca. 1791-92)
  18. 4022. Attributed to Jacques Amans, Bélizaire and the Frey Children, ca. 1837
  19. 4023. Alexander Proctor, Buffalo, 1912
  20. 4024. Leslie Garland Bolling, Cooking on Saturday, 1936
  21. 4026. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836
  22. 4027. Harriet Hosmer, Daphne, 1853
  23. 4028. Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851
  24. 4029. Hiram Powers, California, 1850-55
  25. 4030. Julie Hart Beers, Ducks in the Woods, 1875
  26. 4031. Winslow Homer, Dressing for the Carnival, 1877
  27. 4032. John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, 1863
  28. 4033. William Michael Harnett, Still Life-Violin and Music, 1888
  29. 4034. Fidelia Bridges, Still Life, 1870
  30. 4035. Grace Carpenter Hudson, Kodina, 1906
  31. 4036. Charles Ethan Porter, United (Cracked Watermelon), ca. 1890
  32. 4037. Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, Reworked by 1906
  33. 4038.Thomas Wilmer Dewing, La Pêche (Fishing), 1901-1904
  34. 4039. Edwin Austin Abbey, “King Lear,” Act 1, Scene 1, 1898
  35. 4040. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Victory, 1892-1903
  36. 4041. Theresa Bernstein, Music Lovers, 1915

Contributors



Renée Barry
Independent Critical Environmental Researcher

Xiye Bastida Climate Activist

Christopher Benfey Cultural Critic

Dawoud Bey Artist

Vincent Brown Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

dann j. Broyld Associate Professor of African American History, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Colin Calloway Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies, Dartmouth College

Patricia Cronin Artist and Distinguished Professor of Art, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Nika Elder Associate Professor of Art History, American University

Sherrie Smith Ferri (Dry Creek Pomo/Bodega Miwok) Tribal Historic Preservation Officer; Former Director and Curator, Grace Hudson Museum

Michael Galban Director, Seneca Art & Culture Center, Ganondagan State Historic Site

Christine Garnier Assistant Professor of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara

Carolyn Guzski Associate Professor of Musicology, SUNY-Buffalo State University

Hugh Hayden Artist

Daniel Immerwahr Berger Evans Professor in Humanities, Northwestern University

Jane Kamensky President and CEO, Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Titus Kaphar Painter, Sculptor, and Filmmaker

Lauranett Lee Public Historian, Richmond, Virginia

Glenn Ligon Artist

Katherine Manthorne Professor Emerita of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center

Johanna Obenda Cultural Practitioner and Curatorial Specialist

Najee Omar Poet, Performer, and Organizer

Varsha Panjwani NYU London lecturer and creator-host of “Women and Shakespeare” podcast

Anna Plesset Artist

Kathleen Pyne Professor Emerita of Art History, University of Notre Dame

Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation) Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Class of 1940 Bicentennial Associate Professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

Scott Manning Stevens (Akwesasne Mohawk) Associate Professor and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Syracuse University

Karen Strickland Genealogist and Public Historian, Richland County Public Library, Columbia, South Carolina

Lemir Teron Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Environment, and Equity, Howard University

Pat Thomas Zoologist

Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe) PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University