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Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty

Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery

Object Details

Artist
Katherine Westphal, born Los Angeles, CA 1919-died Berkeley, CA 2018
Copy after
Edward Moran, born Bolton, England 1829-died New York City 1901
Exhibition Label
For me the most important thing is the creativity, the invention, the imagination, not perfecting the thing and making it right.
--Katherine Westphal
Katherine Westphal assembled this patchwork quilt from snippets of fabric printed with designs she created for the commercial textile industry. The image is a riff on American artist Edward Moran's patriotic painting of the Statue of Liberty's 1886 dedication, in which the statue towers above a harbor crowded with boats and American flags. Westphal's Lady Liberty seems appalled as she gazes at the chaos below, a comment perhaps on the meaning of liberty at the height of the civil rights movement.
Westphal, who described herself as a "free spirit," spent eight years designing fabrics for the apparel industry and taught for over a decade at the University of California, Davis. In the late 1950s she began making quilts and was soon transferring images from her own photographs and mass media sources to fabric in clever transformations of conventional quiltmaking practice.
Credit Line
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Katherine Westphal Rossbach
1964
Object number
1972.15
Restrictions & Rights
Usage conditions apply
Type
Decorative Arts-Fiber
Quilt
Crafts
Medium
cotton
Dimensions
92 3/4 x 66 1/2 in. (235.5 x 168.9 cm.)
See more items in
Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection
Department
Renwick Gallery
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Topic
Monument\statue\Statue of Liberty
Record ID
saam_1972.15
Metadata Usage (text)
Not determined
GUID (Link to Original Record)
http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk7c7c81cd3-9156-41fd-acdd-0508cbb81e39

Related Content

  • American Quilts: Art and Craft

  • The Statue of Liberty

There are restrictions for re-using this image. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's Terms of Use page .
International media Interoperability Framework
IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more.
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