The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool has temporarily removed John Gibson’s 19th-century Tinted Venus from its sculpture gallery, replacing it with Zak Ové’s Lost Soul IV, a black child playing in a costume. The removal of the marble statue is part of a community-led project that explores the gallery’s relationship with slavery, colonialism, and empire. Carving Out Truths has worked with Liverpool’s young people from black and minority ethnic communities to reinterpret the gallery’s sculpture collection. Other interventions have included new texts on artworks that have direct links to slavery, and Una Marson’s 1937 poem Kinky Hair Blues, which challenges western beauty ideals.
Ové welcomes the change. “It is a really interesting way to question that history and for people to start to think about things which were not discussed,” he said. “The disruption of placing a black figure ‘amidst the alabaster whiteness of the other sculptures’ immediately creates a discourse. It’s challenging, you can’t help but notice him when you enter the room. He’s in an environment he would otherwise be excluded from.” The project’s curator, Alex Patterson, said the Young people did not want exhibits permanently removed, but they did want to “create an environment for learning, dialogue and recovery”.
Gibson’s statue was described as the “greatest icon” in the history of Victorian sculpture but was also criticised by some for the artist’s decision to paint over it. Venus, in the eyes of some, became a pin-up. Tinted Venus was commissioned by Robert Preston, whose Liverpool engineering company made and exported sugar refining machinery as well as weaponry to the Confederate army during the American Civil War. The bust of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, made by Edmonia Lewis, the first female black American to work as a professional sculptor, will be displayed in the sculpture gallery. The work was once owned by the Sandbach family, who financed the slave trade and made their vast fortune out of it.
The Tinted Venus is part of one of the UK’s most important sculptural displays outside London. It was replaced in February but industrial action at National Museums Liverpool in the spring delayed a formal announcement until now. The gallery’s interventions aim to spur conversations and debates and shine a light on previously overlooked, overlapping stories.
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