![]() ![]() Ever since the first images appeared in the mid-1870s, even before construction in Paris had begun, the colossus of New York Harbor has been an open figurative screen, a massive sculpted form onto which an endless variety of ideas, values, intentions, and emotions could be projected. The statue is surprising in part because its meaning has changed from one generation to the next. ![]() But how many Americans know that Lady Liberty had essentially nothing to do with immigration when she first went up? That xenophobes used the statue as a symbol before pro-immigration forces did? That Emma Lazarus’s poem about the “Huddled Masses,” written in 1883, remained little known until the 1930s? The Statue of Liberty is at once familiar and unknown, commonplace and full of surprises. The Statue of Liberty tells the story of America’s most beloved icon, the symbol, we like to think, of our openness to the world. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |