Last week, Littleton Alston’s sculpture of writer Willa Cather was unveiled at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC, where the likeness of a slavery supporter once stood. Alston is the first Black artist to be featured in the National Statuary Hall Collection, selected from over 70 artists who competed to design and construct the statue of Cather, the 12th woman to be represented in the collection.
An associate professor of sculpture at Creighton University, Alston originally grew up in the country’s capital, where he said he spent his childhood roaming the city’s neighborhoods and exploring the “larger-than-life monuments” with his siblings on their bicycles. He said that these public artworks instilled in him “a sense of grandeur.”
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“It gave me hope that I, a poor kid from DC, could someday become a sculptor,” he said. Inspired, Alston continued his art education in high school at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and later the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has lived in Omaha, Nebraska, for more than 40 years.
“All of my sculptures are strongly connected and show my 20-year movement towards the figure and history as my central theme,” Alston said. “Willa Cather is under-recognized as a giant of literature standing equal with our country’s greatest authors like Hemingway and Twain.”
“Willa Cather is my greatest achievement in my sculpture career,” Alston added.
Born in December 1873, Cather wrote 12 novels, six short story collections, two editions of a poetry book, and many other non-fiction works during her lifetime. Although she was originally from Virginia and spent much of her adult life in New York, she is largely associated with Nebraska, where she moved with her family when she was nine years old. Much of her acclaimed literary work heavily focused on frontier life, such as her novels O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923, she won a Pulitzer for One of Ours, a novel that took place in World War I and was partially inspired by a cousin’s death.
Although Cather’s books have been widely celebrated, they have also been criticized for their stereotypical and sometimes racist descriptions of Black and Indigenous people, such as the dehumanization of Blind d’Arnault in My Ántonia.
In 2018, Nebraska’s Legislature passed Bill 807, which approved the motion to install statues of Willa Cather and Ponca Chief Standing Bear in the national hall to replace the state’s sculptures of controversial Arbor Day founder Julius Sterling Morton and former United States Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, which have stood in the collection since 1937. Morton, who has been widely celebrated in Nebraska for his contributions to federal politics and agriculture, has been the subject of a historical reckoning in recent years for his fervent support of slavery. The bronze statue of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, installed in 2019, was sculpted by Boise-based artist Benjamin Victor, who also created the statues of agronomist Norman Borlaug and Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca for the collection.
In sculpting Cather, Alston completely submerged himself in researching her life and work, which included listening to audio recordings of her acclaimed books and embarking on several trips to Red Cloud, where Cather’s family settled when she was a child. In his statue, Alston depicts Cather at 40 years old, the age she was when she began her career as a novelist, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and caught in a frozen forward stride through a windy prairie. Standing at 10 feet tall and weighing nearly 1,200 pounds, the sculpture shows Cather holding a walking stick in her right hand, and a pen and stack of papers in her left — a reference to her journalism and literary career.
Alston also makes several nods to Nebraska in the statue, including goldenrod, the state flower, at her feet, and a half-buried wagon wheel behind her as a reference to Cather’s novels that put a spotlight on the state’s pioneer past and described the struggles settlers faced in their journeys west.
Located in the US Capitol building, the National Statuary Hall Collection is home to 100 statues, two representing each state in the US. Each statuary pair is considered a gift from the state. Currently, 38 statues are located in the National Statuary Hall, whereas the rest of the works are dispersed throughout the Capitol building.
The statue of Cather is set to eventually be moved to the underground Capitol Visitor Center, which is located on the east side of the building, where it will overlook Emancipation Hall.
“I connected to her life, her being a writer and an artist,” Alston said in a PBS interview, remembering the moment when he applied for the Capitol Commission. “And when I won, it rounded a circle — putting a piece into the US Capitol, a place I had gone [to] as a child, no idea of what a sculptor was. It just moved me to tears.”
Source: Hyperallergic.com