The Fall 2024 edition of the Nasher Sculpture Center’s magazine, The Nasher is now available. In this issue, you’ll find heritage and history resurrected in an array of manifestations: the record collections of activist and collector Jerry Hawkins, connections between art and food, the cultural assemblages of Daniel Lind-Ramos, the exploration of a “memory palace” by Suchitra Mattai, heart-wrenching illustrations of American slavery, traditional basketry used as contemporary metaphor, the scent of Haegue Yang’s former Berlin apartment, and the important preservation of a Dallas neighborhood fighting for power and remembrance in the constant, and too often uncaring, current of metropolitan growth.  

Director's Letter

For centuries, sculpture has been given the task of commemoration. This summer I introduced my kids to some of the strange and wonderful effigies of royals past that top the crypts in Westminster Abbey: embodiments in wood or stone of the human bodies that lie beneath. They are markers of a presence passed, reminders of power, mortality, and reverence, hands invariably clasped in prayer. They are also often together in family groups, clustered in private chapels where existing relations can commune with their long-departed ancestors, a family’s personal history made History. 

Then there are the sculptures that are made as monuments, official commissions to honor important political or cultural figures or mark major historical events and the heroic figures who prosecuted them. Not far from Westminster Abbey is Trafalgar Square featuring Nelson’s Column, celebrating Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson who led the British Navy to victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It is difficult to get a sense of the man from the sculpture there, placed high atop a column over 140 feet tall, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to lift him above the fray, coveted and godlike. That’s what we think of when we think of monuments. That’s why Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, inaugurated in 1982 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., seems so radical and remains such a powerful place of pilgrimage today: a 500-foot-long dark granite wall engraved with the names of over 58,000 soldiers lost in the Vietnam War brings the memorial down to earth, literally and figuratively, honoring equally the vaunted and the unsung and embodying the massive scale of loss. 

The truth is that all sculptures, perhaps even all works of art, commemorate, even those we may not think of as doing so. At their essence, works of art are vibrant documents of human thought, commemorating an idea that emerged from a particular person, at a particular time and place, in a specific cultural, political, sociological, and historical context. Consider these sculptures from the Nasher Collection: Constantin Brancusi celebrates the universal and eternal experience of human connection in The Kiss (1907-08), like an archaic monument made new, stripped of pretense, essential; Naum Gabo’s Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (Variation) (1942-43), takes inspiration from mathematical models and honors scientific and technological advancements of the 20th century while remaking sculpture in lightweight, transparent materials—all light and air rather than stone and metal; or Melvin Edwards’s Five to the Bar (1973), an abstract geometric sculpture strung with barbed wire that can rock back and forth, made in homage to his grandmother, that speaks of simplicity and utility but also bondage, struggle, and through its title, the legacy of jazz. 

In this issue of The Nasher, we learn of other ways artists today illuminate histories—personal, communal, cultural, political, and often overlooked or ignored. Upcoming exhibitions and programs at the Nasher highlight still more encounters with history and commemoration. Haegue Yang, whose work is discussed in this issue and will be featured in an exhibition at the Nasher this spring, incorporates craft traditions from her native Korea and other cultures in contemporary sculptures that consider our present-day relationship with the past. From April 3-5 we will celebrate 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate Otobong Nkanga, whose work highlights the histories and human connections forged in the movement of materials and people around the world. Meanwhile, Nasher Public: Urban Historical Reclamation and Recognition, also featured in this issue, will embark on the second phase of its project to document and honor the overlooked history of the century-old neighborhood of Mount Auburn and the Mexican American and working-class community there. These projects highlight the importance of documenting our moment and reconsider what and who is worthy of commemoration.  

Sincerely, 

Jed Morse 
Interim Director and Chief Curator