The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture
Advance registration is required.
This is event is being held online. After registering, connection information will be emailed to you.
This talk offers a preview of Smithsonian American Art Museum’s upcoming exhibition that considers the relationship between sculpture and societal constructions of race in the United States. The exhibition will present more than 80 sculptures made in a wide range of media between the mid-nineteenth century and the present. The Shape of Power asks, why is sculpture such a vital medium to communicate ideas of race? How does the medium give physical form to racist ideas, shaping how generations have learned to visualize and think about race? And how do sculptors use this medium to challenge the enduring social and cultural constructions of race and racialized power while offering new visions of community, identity, and selfhood? At its core 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.
The Art At Noon lectures are supported by the Lefkoe family, in memory of a beloved member of the docent corps, Mildred T. Lefkoe.
Image: Fred Wilson, I Saw Othello's Visage in His Mind, 2013, Murano glass and wood, 64 in. × 51 1⁄2 in. × 7 in. (162.6 × 130.8 × 17.8 cm) irreg., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2019.8, © 2013, Fred Wilson
Karen Lemmey is the Lucy S. Rhame Curator of Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; she joined the museum’s staff in 2012. Lemmey is responsible for research, exhibitions and acquisitions related to the museum’s extensive sculpture collection, which is the largest collection of American sculpture in the world. Her research interests include public art and monuments, the history of materials and methods, American artist colonies in 19th-century Italy, the construction of race in American sculpture, the history of sculpture conservation and direct carving.
Lemmey co-curated Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern (2016) with Dakin Hart, senior curator at The Noguchi Museum; and she was the coordinating curator for Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions (2016). Other recent projects include Measured Perfection: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (2015) and an installation of 24 examples of direct carving from across the 20th century, drawn mostly from the museum’s permanent collection.
Before joining the museum’s staff, Lemmey was a research associate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as monuments coordinator for the City of New York’s Parks & Recreation. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she organized the exhibition Alexandre-Louis-Marie Charpentier (2006).
Lemmey earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Columbia College, Columbia University (1995) and she holds a doctorate in art history and certificate in American studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2005).
Lemmey became interested in sculpture as a high school student while serving as an apprentice at the studio of Greg Wyatt, sculptor-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City. While there, she studied traditional methods of sculpting in clay, making molds and casting bronze.
Grace Yasumura (she/her) joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum as their inaugural Luce Foundation Curatorial Fellow, she now works as an assistant curator at the museum. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, she served as the project manager for Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past, a digital archive that investigates how we visualize, interpret, and engage the histories of enslavement through contemporary monuments created for public spaces. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Maryland, where she completed a dissertation that considered entangled histories of race, labor, and citizenship in New Deal post office murals.