Reframe, Recast, Rewrite: Sculpture and the Historical Narrative

In his work Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), Alan Michelson (Mohawk) projects videos onto a replica of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s iconic neoclassical bust of George Washington to question how sculpture participates in fortifying cultural icons. Dustin Kline’s coordination with Black Lives Matter to reclaim the Robert E. Lee Monument also transformed the work from looming figure to projection screen, from an unfiltered symbol of the Confederacy to one on which a more inclusive history was being played out. Alternatively, Elizabeth James-Perry (Wampanoag) and Ekua Holmes’s garden in response to Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit at the MFA-Boston placed the presumed permanence and immobility of bronze in stark relief with other ways of marking space. As communities and institutions continue to grapple with the power of sculpture in both public and private spaces, this panel invites conversation around how installation has helped rewrite a history of sculpture. How are artists, institutions, and communities mobilizing installation to adapt histories around sculpture across the globe? What strategies are being developed and executed to challenge how we think of sculpture as a permanent art? Can these animations or extensions help shape scholarship and revise our expectations of sculptural studies going forward? We invite papers by historians, critics, educators, and artists who are thinking through this tension between past assertions of sculpture’s permanence and the dynamism of installation across time and space to reshape both academic and public discourses around sculpture’s many histories.