In Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met for short) in New York will examine Western sculpture in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and imperialism for the first time beginning March 10. At the center of the exhibition, on view through March 5, 2023, is the marble bust Why Born Enslaved! (1873) by French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. He created it in the wake of U.S. emancipation, some twenty years after the abolition of slavery in the French Atlantic. This period was marked by anti-slavery symbolism, on the one hand, and the development of ethnographic theories about supposed racial differences in humans, as well as France's colonialist fascination with Africa, on the other. The exhibition aims to examine the place of sculpture in these contexts and to take an in-depth look at the representation of enslavement, emancipation, and the personhood of black people. It thus questions whether sculpture actually represents a clear moral or political stance after the abolition of slavery.
To that end, in addition to Why Born Enslaved! more than thirty-five other artworks will be on view, unfolding around Carpeaux's sculpture. Among them are works by Josiah Wedgwood, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, Charles Cordier, Edmonia Lewis, and Louis-Simon Boizot. They are intended to show how 19th-century Western artists engaged with the black figure as both a political symbol and a site of exotic beauty. Additionally, contemporary sculptures by Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley connect the dialogue about Carpeaux's bust to current discussions about the legacy of slavery in the Western world.
