DC -- Hirshhorn Museum (Outside) -- Exhibit: Abigail DeVille: Light of Freedom:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: Abigail DeVille: Light of Freedom
October 15, 2021 – April 17, 2022
Abigail DeVille’s critically acclaimed sculpture Light of Freedom is a mixed-media installation through which the artist responds to the Black Lives Matter movement within the larger context of America’s long relationship to the idea of liberty itself. The Hirshhorn presentation of of the 13-foot-tall artwork situates it within the Museum’s outdoor Sculpture Garden on the National Mall. DeVille is widely recognized for works that mine the overlooked, often traumatic histories of Black America to spotlight cultural contradictions and inequities.
DeVille draws inspiration from an 1876 photograph that captures the disembodied hand of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty in New York’s Madison Square Park. The fragment was displayed between 1876 and 1882 to excite crowds and inspire donations for its pedestal. A square of golden scaffolding frames DeVille’s torch, suggesting a construction site. The artist has exchanged Bartholdi’s solid handle for a latticed cage that wraps around a rusted metal bell that can be seen but not rung. Above it, a flame is composed of outstretched mannequin arms. These are painted deep blue to suggest the hottest part of a fire. In referencing America’s long-heralded emblem of freedom, DeVille recasts national monuments as sites that embody democracy for only some and questions the distance between American ideas and actions.
By positioning the torch’s flame to face the US Capitol building, DeVille’s work interrogates the popular mythology embedded in the National Mall, critiquing America’s promise of freedom and the tenuous nature of the ideals citizens are charged to uphold. The work celebrates “people that hooked each other arm-in-arm, and protested in the face of potentially death through this pandemic, to fight for whatever this nation actually pretends that it was founded or based on,” DeVille said.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.145.38.117 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
 DEVIL_211113_01.JPG
|
[2] DEVIL_211113_04.JPG
|
[3]
DEVIL_211113_07.JPG
|
[4] DEVIL_211113_11.JPG
|
[5] DEVIL_211113_15.JPG
|
[6] DEVIL_211113_22.JPG
|
[7] DEVIL_211113_33.JPG
|
[8] DEVIL_211113_37.JPG
|
[9] DEVIL_211113_51.JPG
|
[10] DEVIL_211113_60.JPG
|
[11] DEVIL_211113_65.JPG
|
[12] DEVIL_211119_09.JPG
|
[13] DEVIL_211119_18.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- DEVIL_211113_01.JPG: Abigail DeVille | Light of Freedom
October 2021 - April 2022
- DEVIL_211113_07.JPG: Abigail DeVille | Light of Freedom
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
