Medal (Award or premium)

Description

This commemorative medal is one of multiples created as premium awards for leading participants in the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York. The designer, a towering figure in American Beaux-Arts sculpture, concentrated his symbolic, monumental imagery to honor the fair's goals to celebrate American, rather than European, artistic heritage. The obverse features a dynamic nude figure of an allegorical woman (Liberty?) holding a winged globe aloft and striding beside a powerful male bison (buffalo). The reverse illustrates the Exposition's celebration of peaceful exchange with symbolic male figures representing the two continents depicted as maps on their spheres. They face each other and clasp opposite ends of feather-adorned peace pipe between them. The man wearing South or Central American regalia is seated cross-legged and the seated man representing North America has a full feather headdress and buckskin clothes with one foot resting on a sheath of arrows. The medal was awarded to Rhode Island woolen textile manufacturer Peace Dale Manufacturing Company.