Liberty’s Verdigris

30” x 40” x 1.5”
Mixed Media

Price upon request

The historic copper on this piece is 108-years-old. Only 29 years younger than the copper on the Statue of Liberty. The antique Birmingham Alabama stencil, given to me by a dear friend after I opened at the Rosa Parks Museum for the first time in Montgomery, Alabama, has always held a special place for me. From the unprecedented Voting Rights Act turnout at the Sugar Shack in the Alabama Black Belt, to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ where he famously stated that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, to the courage shown in the face of evil while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The area is a powerhouse of Civil Rights history, but it’s the verdigris, the patina, that is the foundation for this piece.

After reading the article The Statue of Liberty’s Beguiling Green from Ian Frazier on September 12, 2016 in the New Yorker, Ian states: “Patina is a crystalline structure; it’s not opaque like paint. You’re looking into it.” “The thin layer of oxidation that covers copper (and bronze, an alloy made mostly of copper) can preserve the metal for centuries, even millennia, as shown by objects from the ancient world. The Rhodes Colossus stood for about fifty-six years, until 226 B.C., when it broke off at the knees and collapsed in an earthquake. By then, it probably was a shade of blackish-green. Neither bronze nor copper rusts. Pieces of the Colossus lay for nine hundred years where they had fallen, until the seventh century, when they were sold for scrap.”

While talking about the Statue of Liberty he then closed the article with “When we think that we have to treat immigrants cruelly in order to survive, we go against a root structure that’s deep within the city and deep within ourselves.” I would like to take Ian’s words in 2016 and bring them up to 2023: “When we think that we have to treat people cruelly in order to survive, we go against a root structure that’s deep within ourselves.”

The beautiful copper verdigris of Liberty is a colorful reminder of the diversity in our nation that makes us strong, the roots of courage, the struggles of time, the determination and sacrifices of the few and the resilience and preservation of the most important thing of all.

Freedom.

Steel and Paint.