Meredith Bergmann’s new sculpture is revolutionary. In addition to the wonderful and touching portrayals of the 20 women in the new Lexington Monument, Meredith Bergmann’s sculpture has taken monumental sculpture in a bold new direction. She has demonstrated the power of her artistry by creating a new genre in sculpture.
Public monuments usually achieve power by being imperious, overwhelming in size, distant, and above the observer. The Lexington Women’s Monument is on the ground level with figures in a more human scale. The monument is approachable, and simultaneously intimate, friendly, diverse, joyous, and serious. It is strong and powerful in its eloquence.
Ms. Bergmann has taken the classic sculptural technique of the frieze and used it in a most innovative manner. The frieze is a very familiar sculptural style that uses perspective to create a broad scene. The frieze technique is commonly found in Greek or Roman stone sculpture on buildings or sarcophagi or the incredible wood carvings on panels of the Italian Renaissance.
However, these friezes are all carved on solid panels and meant to be viewed from one side only. Meredith Bergmann has taken this technique and moved beyond the limitations of a solid panel that constrained the observer’s point of view. There are ten silhouettes; however, the characters on each side are very different. There are 20 different people. The sculptor had basically invented the two-sided frieze.
If viewed as a whole, the monument has an open, light, and airy feeling, full of detail, suggestive of a framed lace curtain. The powerful messages of the significant accomplishments of those portrayed are gently interwoven within the suggestion of a traditional feminine domestic artifact.
There are so many diverse women who are represented in the monument that every viewer will identify as fitting somewhere within the group. It does not matter whether one identifies with a specific individual, the sculpture is of all women and their aspirations.
The sculpture represents the diversity of women, their struggle for equity, and includes the observers by absorbing them into the sculpture. When I stood in the archway and held hands with the figures, they were also holding my hand as if to say, “We did it. You can too. We’ve got your back.”
This work of art goes beyond individual portrayals, historical stories, and symbolic details. It is a complex, intriguing, elegant sculpture. There is an innovative use of space, simultaneously delicate and majestic, three-dimensional and flat. If you walk around the plaza to see the other side, halfway there, especially from a distance, this large complex array disappears into a tall stick in the air. The silhouette is only of a square, 4-inch pole.
To me this is symbolic of the typical roles of women in my youth and throughout history. It was not unusual for a woman, generally invisible in a domestic role, to suddenly have to step up in a crisis and take over. In addition to running the house and raising the family, a wife suddenly had to manage a business, run a farm, or get a traditionally man’s job when the men went to war, had out of town duties, got sick or died. When the men returned, society assumed, in fact demanded, that the women would just reabsorb back to their traditional domestic role.
As you walk around the monument on the grass outside the plaza, the women are there, then disappear and re-emerge – echoing the periodic needs, especially in a crisis, for the versatility, stamina, and management skills of “the weaker sex.”