Casting Identities:
Race, American Sculpture and Daniel Chester French

New online exhibition explores both historical and contemporary conversations
about identity articulated through the sculptures.

A new online exhibition published in June 2023 by Emily Burns, PhD, shares the outcomes of this past year’s research initiative on Daniel Chester French’s sculptures. The exhibition traces race and stereotype in sculpture, with special focus on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Lincoln Memorial sculpture, and Four Continents. The exhibition also explores both historical and contemporary conversations about identity articulated through the sculptures, and talks about how digital humanities enable new stories to expand our thinking about a prolific American artist’s cultural conversations with his own society and ours.  

This collaborative online exhibition—built from contributions developed and written by Emily Burns, two graduate students undertaking PhDs in the Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma, and two other art historians—takes up ideas of fluid meanings to engage with sculptures by Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), who produced large scale public sculpture throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Best known for his looming white marble sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in Washington DC’s Lincoln Memorial, French’s long career saw the production of portraits, memorials, and allegorical representations which were primarily installed in the northeast United States.

·         For the work of this New England artist from a privileged background who mainly produced commissions for elite, white clients, how do we understand constructions of race and identity as they operate in and communicate through his sculptures in their period?

·         How did French and his clients benefit from the cultural work his objects performed; in other words, what were the stakes of these representations?

·         Did French's contemporaries ever object to his depictions?

·         What is the legacy of the ideas these sculptures promoted in today’s view?

·         What messages do they send to a wider public in today’s conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion? 

Emily Burns is the Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West and an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma.

This exhibition is a project of “For the People, By the People: Transforming National Trust Historic Sites through the Humanities” and has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom.