Bust

Description

In 1979, John W. Rhoden (1916-2001) set to work on a monumental statue of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), a commission for Lincoln University, the first degree-granting historically black college in the United States. In this wax study, Rhoden, who grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, presents Douglass the orator with lips parted, vocalizing–an important symbol of Douglass's voice in the abolition movement and the fight for racial equality. This version and the final full-length statue of Douglass, inaugurated in 1989 at Lincoln University, represent one of the rare instances where Rhoden took up a historical narrative in his sculpture. Another was his bronze work, The Slave Ship, that portrays the middle passage (1989, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), both subjects representing crucial images for artists of the African diaspora.