Visual Strategies of Uprooting
Introduction
In 2001, New York City Council members proposed and later approved the renaming of a prominent intersection in Harlem to Harriet Tubman Square/Triangle, formed at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard at West 122nd Street. In 2003, the well-known California-based artist Alison Saar received the commission to create a monument to Harriet Tubman, which she named Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial, after the nineteenth-century spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home
The “Record of Fugitives” at Columbia University Libraries documents that Harriet Tubman assisted freedom seekers to Sydney Howard Gay’s office in New York City. According to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, “In 1855 and 1856, Gay, the editor of the weekly abolitionist publication, the National Anti-Slavery Standard and a key operative in the underground railroad in New York City, meticulously recorded the arrival of fugitive slaves at his office. . . . Gay interviewed the fugitives, who numbered well over two hundred men, women, and children and recorded their stories.”[1]
On May 14, 1856, Gay recorded that Tubman brought a party of four men to his offices from Philadelphia including Ben Jackson, Jas. Coleman, Wm. A. Conoway (aka Cook), and Henry Hopkins from Dorchester County, Maryland. Calling her “Captain Harriet Tubman,” Gay documented in detail Tubman’s story of escape from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the persons she had assisted to freedom. This is an important archival source as it provides evidence of Tubman’s work on the Underground Railroad, and the network of men and women who assisted her.[2]
New York City’s connection to Tubman runs deep because of this history and the lore of Tubman moving through the city with fugitive slaves. In 2001, former Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields issued a call for proposals to hire an architect and sculptor for the $2.8 million Tubman memorial project to expand and landscape the traffic island and locate a significant memorial in the space.[3]
Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial
In discussing her visual strategies for the memorial, Alison Saar stated, “Since I’m not exactly a representational artist, I worried about how to present Tubman. There are only a few known images of her from when she was in her ‘70s or ‘80s. At one point, someone on the arts committee encouraged me to ‘do what you need to do; don’t compromise on your image.’ That was nice: A lot of times it’s the other way around. In the end, [Tubman] was a mixture of how I envisioned her (within my own style) and how she might’ve actually looked like.”[4]
In order to derive a historical sense of Harriett Tubman as a person, Saar conducted extensive research, having learned about Tubman as a child in the 1960s but feeling that her knowledge of the freedom fighter was superficial: “What I wanted to do was depict outwardly her inward spirit of compassion, and her fearlessness. The piece started taking on this image of a locomotive–this unstoppable locomotive–because despite all these efforts and bounties on her, she managed to continue her work.”[5]
Without a doubt, Saar based her conception of Tubman on the 1869 frontispiece from Sarah H. Bradford’s Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Saar incorporated the core visual elements of the nineteenth-century wood engraving except for the rifled musket. She dressed Tubman in a Union issued overcoat and haversack, and a skirt with a pleated petticoat.
Saar also modeled Tubman wearing a simple head cloth, much like the wraps in her photographic images. Maintaining the solemnity of Tubman’s facial expression from the engraving, Saar also based Tubman’s immobile face without pupils in her eyes on the ancient Roman portrait bust tradition, connecting her monument to a long history of three-dimensional portraiture. In Swing Low, the verdigris patina of Tubman’s coat and skirt next to the slate black patina of her skin are a visually striking contrast.
The thirteen feet by twelve feet bronze statue also embodies Tubman as a “locomotive coming on full steam.” In Saar’s conception, Tubman’s petticoat becomes the pilot (also known as a cowcatcher or cattle guard) of a train, the device mounted at the front of a locomotive to deflect obstacles on the track that might otherwise derail the train.[6] Here Tubman is represented as a technological force and a force of nature. The idea of Tubman as a train also underscores her role as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, leading approximately 60 family members and friends from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to New York and Canada.
Symbolically, Tubman emerges from the woods (the planted oak trees that frame the site) besides a river (the reconfigured subway gratings). “Trailing behind Tubman’s skirt are roots which symbolize the pulling up of roots by the slaves and all they had to leave behind and Tubman’s uprooting of the slavery system itself.”[7] The trailing branches also connect Tubman to the natural environment and wooded landscape she fled in Dorchester County, Maryland.
Stylized portraits of “anonymous passengers” of the Underground Railroad adorn Tubman’s skirt. “From the surface of her full skirt, small mask-like faces press through the folds of the fabric, representing the more than 300 people she led to freedom. The skirt is also embellished with worn shoe soles, manacles and locks, cowry shells, medicine bottles and other items carried by the slaves to the North.”[8] Although we now know that Tubman did not lead 300 people to freedom, the faces serve to remind us of the dozens of family members and friends that Tubman guided
Around the granite ‘outcropping’ of the monument are bronze tiles depicting events in Tubman’s life that are in an appliqué style (a traditional quilting method) and geometric ‘pieced’ quilted blocks. Saar has said that: “The geometric tiles depict traditional patterns of the Freedom Quilts, believed by some to have been used as signals along the Underground Railroad.”[9] At the center, we see a traditional eight-pointed star quilt block, sometimes called a sawtooth star. To the left, Saar cast an appliqué block of Tubman with a sack, traveling at night under a crescent moon and following Polaris. To the right, the artist created a narrative image of Tubman leading a family through the woods to freedom, following the North Star high in the sky.
References
[1]“The Record of Fugitives,” Book 1 (1855) and Book 2 (1856), Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, Columbia University, New York, New York. Accessed April 5, 2018. https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/fugitives/record_fugitives.
[2]“The Record of Fugitives,” Book 2, page 8-13, 1856. Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, Columbia University, New York, New York, accessed April 5, 2018, https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/fugitives/record_fugitives. See also Kate Clifford Larson, “Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad,” Harriet Tubman Biography, accessed April 5, 2018, http://www.harriettubmanbiography.com/TubmansUGRR.html.
[3]J. Zamgba Brown, “Harriet Tubman’s Legacy Gets Square Deal,” New York Amsterdam News, March 15, 2001, page 10, and Frank Lombardi, “Harriet Tubman Sq. Plan Goes To Council,” NY Daily News, March 14, 2001, accessed April 5, 2018, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/boroughs/harriet-tubman-sq-plan-council-article-1.910128.
[4]George Wolfe, “Aiming High, Swing Low in Harlem: Alison Saar’s Tubman Statue,” OMAG 4 (2008): 15.
[5]“Percent for Art Interview/Alison Saar,” New York Percent for Art, February 20, 2014, accessed September 26, 2016, http://percentforartnyc.tumblr.com/post/77305087355/percent-for-art-interview-alison-saar.
[6]“Pilot (locomotive),” Wikipedia, accessed April 5, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_(locomotive).
[7]Percent for Art, “Alison Saar,” NYC Department of Culture Affairs, accessed September 26, 2016, http://home2.nyc.gov/html/dcla/html/panyc/saar.shtml.
[8]Wolfe, “Aiming High, Swing Low in Harlem.”
[9]Ibid.