Philadelphia Weekly

The Afterlife of Iconoclasm: Sculpture in Early New York

In 1770, New Yorkers welcomed a gilded equestrian statue of King George III to the city. In 1776, they violently destroyed it. Following a reading of the Declaration of Independence, a crowd tore the statue from its tall pedestal, scratched gold from its surface, dismembered and dragged its parts through the streets, and eventually boiled it down into bullets for the Continental army. But if the statue was gone, it was hardly forgotten. Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, the tale of the statue’s destruction was endlessly retold in paintings, prints, poems and historical texts – and even re-enacted as part of civic parades and pageants. In the process, the violence of iconoclasm was sanitized and displaced in order to represent the attack on the statue as an organized act of revolutionary patriotism. How might surviving fragments of the statue offer alternative understandings of the event or reveal the material and effective dimensions of iconoclasm?

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

Rate this listing

WHEN
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Recurring: ONCE

TIME & PRICE
5:30pm free

WHERE
Tyler School of Art - B004 at Temple University Main Campus , 1801 N. Broad St., Philadelphia, PA.
One time only on 02/07/2013. .

FOR MORE INFO

Report A Correction

Add to Favorites Print Send to Friend