Do you have to be the same race of the subject to make sculpture? It seems that the City of Philadelphia believes that yes, yes you do. 

Last year the city asked North Carolina based artist Wesley Wofford to sculpt a permanent statue of abolitionist and Civil War scout (among other things) Harriet Tubman in front of their City Hall after seeing the reception that a traveling version of his 2017 statue Journey to Freedom had received when it was displayed there. Almost immediately a firestorm was ignited over the choice of Wofford... because he was White! Of course local artists claimed that they were mad that the commission had been given without a bidding process and that Wofford's race had nothing to do with it (never mind that Wofford's statue is apparently what inspired this whole project in the first place). We're very sure that's entirely true.

The Philadelphia Inquirer notes that at the time local textile artist Dee Jones that 'As an artist, it’s hurtful and it is traumatizing...If it was an open call, and Wesley was chosen, it would be fine. But because the process wasn’t open, that’s the big issue.” 

So serendipitously the man whose statue inspired this whole shebang has now been sidelined for... you guessed it, a black man.

Whole vistas of artistic creation and appreciation closed off to us by the accident of our birth these days.

Of course maybe the new statue IS better to sit in downtown Philadelphia given the current state of the city... the new artist whose design has been chosen, Alvin Pettit, has chosen to depict Tubman with a gun strapped to her back. Standing downtown 24/7 in Philadelphia these days she may well need to use it.

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