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Liberty.
This work rises in the center of Heroes as the museum's own Statue of Liberty.
A black liberation leader stands holding out his hand, staring into an as-yet-unrealized future, as a formerly enslaved woman rises.
Ousmane Sow created this work as part of a series of sculptures commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Unlike those sculptures, however, Toussaint Louverture depicts a figure who actually struggled against the French state, taking on the mantle of the original revolutionary principles surrendered by that point back in Paris to the authoritarian rule of Napoleon.
The military leader of the Haitian Revolution, Louverture successfully channeled an uprising of free people of color and, later, enslaved people, into an armed movement that, by 1800, had ended both slavery and French rule on the island. Louverture became the head of the Western Hemisphere's second independent revolutionary state -- and its first leader of African descent.. |