SWING LOW: A MEMORIAL TO HARRIET TUBMAN

Swing Low

SWING LOW: A MEMORIAL TO HARRIET TUBMAN

by Sydney Greaves

Docents who visited the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in May of this year, or who attended a May 3 lecture by artist Alison Saar here at MAG, may have gotten a sneak peek at one of MAG’s newest acquisitions. Saar’s Swing Low is a small-scale but powerfully symbolic sculpture honoring Harriet Tubman, one of the greatest heroes of the abolitionist movement.

Looking Closely: 

Saar depicts Tubman as an oncoming train, moving forward with strength and determination in her face. In a punning reference to Tubman’s work as a Conductor on the Underground Railroad, her skirts recall a wedge-shaped “cow-catcher” mounted on the front of locomotives to deflect obstacles on the train tracks.  The faces of her passengers, the slaves she led to freedom, appear in the fabric of her dress along with objects such as pipes, knives, bottles, broken shackles and shoe soles recalling the scattered remnants left behind by fleeing slaves. The tree roots torn from the ground behind her represent the family and possessions often left behind in the quest for freedom, as well as stand for Tubman’s role in uprooting slavery.

     

      The base of the figure features a running frieze of quilt-block designs alternating with what are biographical scenes from Tubman’s life, including her birth, working in the fields, her horrific head injury in her teens, her own escape from slavery, and leading others to freedom. 

     

      The Gallery’s piece is a maquette for Saar’s monumental 13-foot tall statue installed in the Harriet Tubman Memorial Plaza, located in south Harlem at St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard at West 122nd Street.  In situ, the statue sits in a small park, surrounded by rocks and trees that grow in Tubman’s native Maryland, giving the impression that she is just emerging from the countryside.  Rather than looking north—the historic direction of freedom, Tubman faces the South, looking back towards Maryland and all those who have yet to secure their freedom. 

Making Connections:

The name of this sculpture refers to one of the most popular “Negro spirituals,” a song form that combines African musical elements with European-based Christian religious practices.  The spiritual is indigenous and specific to transported Africans who served as slaves in the United States. “Swing Low” was composed by Wallace Willis, a freedman of Choctaw heritage living in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, sometime before 1862. He was inspired by the Red River which reminded him of the Jordan River and of the Old Testament story of the prophet Elijah being taken to heaven in a chariot.   

  Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin' for to carry me home!

    I looked over Jordan and what did I see, Comin' for to carry me home!
   A band of angels comin' after me, Comin' for to carry me home!

Tubman loved spirituals, and even wrote her own. “Swing Low” is said to be her favorite. When guiding slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, Tubman used spirituals as signals to hiding slaves indicating whether it was safe to come out of hiding and continue on the journey.

About the Subject:

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross c. 1820, one of 11 children of slave parents in Dorchester County, Maryland. She married a free black named John Tubman in 1844, and changed her first name to Harriet after her mother.

Harriet became determined to escape slavery at an early age. One night in 1849, fearful of being sold, she left her husband and followed the North Star to freedom in Philadelphia. The very next year she returned to Maryland to help her sister escape, the first of 18 trips south over the following decade.  Tubman personally escorted around 300 slaves, including her parents, to freedom in the north. (The exact number is an ongoing discussion among scholars.)  A fugitive herself, she risked capture and death to become known as the "Moses of Her People," delivering them from slavery as Moses delivered the Israelites from slavery in the Bible.  As Tubman herself stated, "On my Underground Railroad I [never] run my train off [the] track [and] I never [lost] a passenger."

     

      During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union army as a nurse, a cook, and a spy. After the war she settled in Auburn, NY, in a house donated to her by William Seward, secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln and himself an active abolitionist. (Seward appears in Hale Woodruff’s Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln Discussing Emancipation, 2002.20, in the 19^th-century American gallery.) Tubman died in 1913, and her tombstone in Auburn’s Fort Hill Cemetery bears the epitaph, "Servant of God, Well Done."

About the Artist:

Alison Saar was born in 1956 and grew up in Laurel Canyon, CA, daughter of artist Betye Saar and painter/conservator Richard Saar. During high school, Alison began assisting her father in his restoration work, learning about materials and techniques from such varied objects as Chinese frescoes, Egyptian mummies, and Pre-Columbian and African sculptures.  She studied African, Caribbean and Southern African American Folk Art at Scripps College, and then pursued studio graduate work at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, earning an MFA.  Saar lived in Harlem and served as artist in residence at the Studio Museum of Harlem from 1983–84.

Saar’s art reflects her own cultural and ethnic diversity (European, African American and Native American) and love of nature.  She often uses found and recycled materials to explore issues surrounding identity, fertility and aging, creating life-size free-standing forms, wall sculptures and works on paper.  She received the Harriet Tubman Memorial commission from the Art Commission of New York City.

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