Figurative public sculpture, a mainstay for millennia, seems to be re-emerging as a viable artform after a half-century of modernist abstraction in civic spaces. But the world has changed since the golden age of Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the American Renaissance; the old paradigms cannot be unquestioningly repeated. We honor a wider range of individuals now, and that diversity calls for a renewed vocabulary of sculptural ideas. The achievements of women are being recognized, and sculptor Meredith Bergmann is leading the way in this area. Her 2003 Boston Women’s Memorial celebrated Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone and Phillis Wheatley (see American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2005).

Meredith Bergmann, Marian Anderson, 2006 Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina

Her most recent project, a bronze statue of Marian Anderson (1897–1993), was unveiled in September 2006 at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Marian Anderson is the fourth of a series of five figurative works commissioned by the college honoring women who have made significant contributions to American history. The others currently displayed on the campus honor poet Emily Dickinson, painter Mary Cassatt and astronomer Maria Mitchell. Marian Anderson is a natural choice as the subject for a public monument because she combined excellence in her chosen field with history-making career milestones. A celebrated contralto, she first sang at Carnegie Hall in 1928 and became an international opera and concert star, and made a belated (she was nearly fifty-eight) but highly successful debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera in January 1955. The incident that secured her place in American history, however, occurred in 1939. Manager Sol Hurok had arranged for her to give a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., when the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the building, refused to allow a “singer of color” to perform there. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization. Marian Anderson was invited to perform at the Lincoln Memorial, and a crowd of 75,000—the largest to date assembled there—attended. Anderson did not consider herself a political activist, but her hard work to carve out a career in the face of discrimination lifts her to the rank of a national hero…