Lifting the Veil: a Conversation on Race and the Museum Now
Bridget R. Cooks joins Janine Yorimoto Boldt & UW students in vital dialogue around Sanford Biggers’s sculpture Lifting the Veil.
Registration required.
Join us in the Chazen Mezzanine!
Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D. (Professor of Art History and African American Studies at UC Irvine and author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011) joins Janine Yorimoto Boldt, Ph.D. (Associate Curator of American Art at the Chazen Museum) and UW students to facilitate a vital dialogue around Sanford Biggers’s sculpture Lifting the Veil on our reckoning with the institution and its objects.
About Lifting the Veil:
As a child, Sanford Biggers’s father exposed him to “Lifting the Veil of Ignorance” (1922), a bronze monument to Booker T. Washington by artist Charles Keck. Biggers’s sculpture Lifting the Veil incorporates, critiques, and re-imagines this work and Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Group (1873), of which a version is in the Chazen’s collection. In Biggers’s Veil, Abraham Lincoln is positioned as the ignorant man being led to enlightenment by the standing Frederick Douglass. This sculpture, conceived alongside the Chazen’s groundbreaking re:mancipation project (2023), is both a response to the original work, and an important milestone in Sanford Biggers’s career. While he has frequently brought together classical western sculptural figures with traditional African masks (as in the Chimera series), this piece represents the most in depth response to a single and specific work to date.
