American Sculpture, Race, and the Bronze Economy c. 1840-1890

Centering an investigation of bronze’s materiality, my project excavates the entanglement of race and sculpture to offer a new account of how sculpture and its materials functioned as agents of racial formation within the U.S. during the mid-to-late nineteenth century (1840s-1890s). Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886) began sculpting non-white subjects in bronze in 1849, and his first pupil, John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910) continued this practice into the early 1890s. I frame how art objects, materials, and aesthetic language played formative roles in the United States’ larger settler-colonial, imperial, and white supremacist pursuits. I consider how bronze sculpture in the American setting functions in its production and reception as a socialization mechanism for maintaining and strengthening established gender and racial hierarchies for primarily white American sculptors and the beholders of their work. As the first study to center bronze in its material, art-theoretical, and metaphorical aspects this dissertation shows the pivotal role played by bronze in American sculptural production and probes why and how bronze became emblematic of American national identity; the artistic and socio-economic implications of its deployment; and its representational effects on American subjects.