Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace, Speaker 2 (00:03): And it's a story about a woman named Eliza who is escaping across the frozen Ohio River, jumping from ice flow to ice flow, leaving bloody footprints behind carrying a child. This is a story that Harriett heard in Cincinnati. Speaker 1 (00:29): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Abigail Zang, marketing manager for the Harriett Beecher STO House. So how's your time stuck at home? Speaker 2 (01:00): Well, our son will be three in two weeks Speaker 1 (01:05): And Speaker 2 (01:05): We have an eight month old also. Speaker 1 (01:08): Oh my gosh. I didn't realize you had two now. Speaker 2 (01:10): Yeah, so she was born last July. Speaker 1 (01:13): Oh, okay. Speaker 2 (01:14): So I mean, basically all I've done since she was born is try to arrange childcare and now we don't have to do that, but we have to figure out how to do our jobs. Speaker 1 (01:27): Do both at the same time. Speaker 2 (01:30): And obviously my husband works too, so it's been okay. Today's rainy, which is not ideal. Speaker 1 (01:37): You can't send them outside. Speaker 2 (01:38): We rely a lot on the outside. Thankfully we are in a house that has a yard. Speaker 1 (01:44): Yeah, that would be a bummer. Yeah, I guess I don't have kids and I don't think about these things a lot, but I realized when I started seeing my friends with kids, commenting on the stress for people with older kids having to maintain their work at home, full-time jobs, plus now there are full-time teachers as well. Speaker 2 (02:06): I know. Speaker 1 (02:07): I'm just like, oh yeah, that's insane. That's impossible. I couldn't imagine. My working at home has been actually probably more busy than my regular work in the office, and so I couldn't imagine on top of that being also juggling something like that. So Speaker 2 (02:27): Hats off. Well, I feel like my work has ramped up also because now we're only online and I do the website and the social media and Speaker 1 (02:37): So what's your title there? Speaker 2 (02:40): So I'm the marketing manager. Speaker 1 (02:41): Oh, okay. Speaker 2 (02:44): But I'm half of our one and a half paid employees. Speaker 1 (02:47): Oh my gosh. Speaker 2 (02:48): So we're time and we've got like 30, 40 volunteers, but it's the executive director and me. Speaker 1 (02:57): Oh my gosh. In terms Speaker 2 (02:58): Of paid staff, Speaker 1 (02:59): I assumed it was very small, but I did not realize it was that small. Speaker 2 (03:02): Yes, very small. Which I think is a little tricky now that we're in this space where everyone is online to a certain extent, everyone looks the same size online. Speaker 1 (03:14): Yes, that is true. Speaker 2 (03:16): So it's like, oh, well, why can't we do all these things? Oh, because we have no people. Speaker 1 (03:22): Right. Well, and even that's a thing to us. I mean, even you have finite resources and it's like even if we are probably one of the largest arts organizations in the city, we're still small compared to the Met or these other museums, but we're also holding ourselves up against them to compare what we're doing Speaker 2 (03:45): Now. We're getting a handful of people at all these organizations to now become the face of the whole institution is kind of crazy to happen in the time of a week. Speaker 1 (03:55): Yes. Yeah, there was a lot of very fast, very quick. Let's do this on our end, and I'm sure that was the same with you, but yeah, it sounds like you're basically the face. Speaker 2 (04:09): I mean, our director has done a great job. She, let's see, a week ago I was like, okay, can you give me just do phone recordings of your standard tour stops in each of the rooms of the house? Speaker 1 (04:23): So Speaker 2 (04:24): Now I've got those eight videos lined up, but I've got to process them. I have to caption them. I have to find out what our password for the YouTube account is that we never used. Speaker 1 (04:39): Oh my gosh. That was probably set up how many people ago and Oh man. Oh Speaker 2 (04:45): Yeah. There was two videos on it, including one that happened while I was on my maternity leave and I was like, oh, I didn't know we had this video on here. Speaker 1 (04:53): Right, right. Oh my gosh. Oh, the fun of working right now. I mean, I shouldn't complain. So many people have it so much worse. Speaker 2 (05:03): That's Speaker 1 (05:03): Right. Speaker 2 (05:04): My job is pretty stable and Speaker 1 (05:07): Same here. Speaker 2 (05:07): We've got food and a place to live, and Speaker 1 (05:10): Also this is totally what I actually really love doing. I absolutely would rather be doing this right now than probably, I don't know, I was going to say spreadsheets, but I actually love spreadsheets too. Speaker 2 (05:23): Preparing materials, loading art carts. Speaker 1 (05:27): I don't necessarily love having to sit at my desk and plan things. In fact, I'll plan things out in the museum a lot, so I have an excuse to not be at my desk. I'm going to go out into the galleries and take my iPad and write ideas down and work there because I am more productive. Not at a desk Speaker 2 (05:45): Actually. I mean, that's the huge benefit of the art museum. It's just such a pleasant place to work. Speaker 1 (05:52): We should mention, haven't talked about the fact that you used to work there. Speaker 2 (05:55): Yeah. Speaker 1 (05:58): I've done a bad job at introducing you and sort of saying who you are and what you do. So why don't you tell us about how you, your time at the museum and then how you ended up where you are now. Speaker 2 (06:12): Sure. So the Cincinnati Art Museum was the first place that I worked in Cincinnati. After moving from Boston where I finished grad school, I did my graduate practicum in the learning and interpretation department and really loved that. At the same time I was expecting our first son, so those kind of wrapped up at the same time, and I took a few months off just to be full-time with him and then eased back in with some contract work doing the Sunday afternoon gallery experience tours back at the art museum. I did visitor services during Van Gogh. Speaker 1 (06:56): Oh my gosh, Speaker 2 (07:00): Seven. Speaker 1 (07:01): You were an angel for that. Seven, Speaker 2 (07:02): Eight months pregnant. Actually, no, all the way until he was born in mid-April. So yeah, I was sitting on a stool taking tickets, Speaker 2 (07:15): And then I was looking for another opportunity in the city and came across this opening at the Harriet Beecher Stow House for part-time marketing and education position, which is actually a great fit for my background because I had worked in higher education, marketing and admissions during grad school and even before that. So it's been really great to kind of merge these two worlds, which was what I had been hoping to do, and it's just so thankful that it's worked out to have the type of work that I wanted to do in the type of schedule that I wanted to have. Speaker 1 (07:54): Yeah, hold on. I'm opening up my notes. I made them and then my iPad went to sleep. Oh Speaker 2 (08:02): Yeah, no worries. Speaker 1 (08:03): Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. How long has it been a museum? Speaker 2 (08:14): The house itself was built in 1832. It's very old at that time. Cincinnati is on the early side of its kind of population ramp up. It's going from 15, 20,000 people to 25, 30 years later, you're over 200,000 people. Speaker 1 (08:38): So Speaker 2 (08:38): It's kind of that early time. It was part of the Lane Seminary. So the Lane Seminary was in Walnut Hills, and this is the last remaining property of it. So this was built as the President's house on the campus of the seminary. So it was part of the campus through the Civil War. Then a family called the Monfort, if you may know, Monfort Heights. The Monfort family lived there from 1865 until the late 1920s. So three generations of FRS lived there, and then after the Frss moved out, it became a boarding house in Walnut Hills, which at that time was a primarily African-American business district, and so it was a boarding house and a tavern. The tavern itself was also listed in the Green Book, the Green Motorist Guide for Safe Places for African-American Travelers during the Jim Crow era, both northern and southern states. Speaker 2 (09:45): Then starting in 1943, a community group came together of both black and white individuals that wanted to save the house as the neighborhood was continuing to develop, and they wanted it to be not only a memorial for Harriet Beecher Stowe and the work that she had done and the impact that it had had throughout the country, but then they also wanted it to be an African-American community center. And so that's sort of how it developed from that point. It also became connected to the Ohio History connection, which used to be known as the Ohio Historical Society. So we are one of their 50 some sites throughout the state of Ohio, and it's run by a nonprofit called The Friends of Harriet Beecher Sto House. And that's had a few different iterations, but the current group has been running it since 2003, 2005 in there. Speaker 1 (10:48): People have sort of forgotten that March is Women's History Month due to all of the news and the sort of shift in everybody's focus. So it's sort of been like, oh yeah, that's right. This was supposed to be Women's History month, and there's really, I feel like almost nobody is talking about it or there's been very little talk about it because just everybody's mind is on other things. So I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit about Harriet Beecher Stowe, and for people who don't know why she's so important. Speaker 2 (11:19): Yes. A lot of people have heard the name and they don't exactly remember what she did. Also, a lot of times people get her confused with Harriett Tubman. So Harriett Beecher Sto was a white woman who grew up in New England, moved to Cincinnati when she was 21, lived here 18 years, and then moved back to New England. She wrote a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was a novel depicting the horrors of American slavery. And this novel ended up having a massive influence all across the country. There is an apocryphal story of when Harriet met Abraham Lincoln, which she did meet him. We just don't know if this conversation happened, but he's reported to have said, so you're the little woman who started this great war. Speaker 1 (12:14): Wow. Speaker 2 (12:15): Because of her book did exactly what she set out to do, which was to wake up white northerners to the reality of enslavement and to the humanity of black Americans. Speaker 1 (12:30): I think it's so easy to underestimate the power of pop culture in that way, and this is such a perfect example. This was pop culture at the time. I mean, this would be something. There was no television, there was nothing. Exactly. Speaker 2 (12:46): It Speaker 1 (12:47): Was books and plays and live concerts were sort of pop culture Speaker 2 (12:53): And her book, we don't really do this with books now, but it came out a chapter at a time in a newspaper, so it was serialized. Speaker 1 (13:02): So Speaker 2 (13:02): In many ways, it's like when you were waiting for Netflix to drop a new set of episodes, Speaker 1 (13:09): Families Speaker 2 (13:10): Across the country are waiting for their copy of the national era to come every week to see what's happening with all of these different characters, these different storylines that she's depicting. She talks about someone who has started out on a plantation in northern Kentucky and ends up getting sold further and further south and ends up in Louisiana, and then she tells another story of a family that has started out further south and is moving north and ends up coming up through the Midwest on their way to Canada. Speaker 1 (13:46): Yeah, yeah. There's a pretty famous, this is the time I admit I've never read Uncle Tom's cabin. Maybe I should, but isn't there? You've Speaker 2 (13:58): Got time now. Speaker 1 (13:59): This is what I know about Uncle Tom's cabin or maybe what I don't know about Uncle Tom's cabin, but isn't there a scene where somebody sort of escapes by crossing an icy river that's probably, it's the Ohio River, right? Speaker 2 (14:13): Yes. So that story is about a woman named Eliza, and it's probably the most famous little vignette from the story that if people know anything, that's kind of what they know. And it's a story about a woman named Eliza who is escaping across the frozen Ohio River, jumping from ice flow to ice flow, leaving bloody footprints behind carrying a child with slave catchers like chasing them. This is a story that Harriet heard in Cincinnati from people who helped, a woman that had this thing happen to her. The rankins in Ripley, Ohio assisted thousands of freedom seekers, and the Rankin family was part of the same Presbyterian circles that Harriet and her family were all also a part of the Rankin Sons attended Lane Seminary. And so Harriet's hearing these firsthand accounts or secondhand accounts during the years that she's here in Cincinnati and Eliza's story makes it into the book Speaker 1 (15:19): And people, if you're like me, you might also remember this mostly from the King and I. Speaker 2 (15:25): Yes. The international influence of Uncle Tom's cabin has been really fascinating for me to see even just in our visitor patterns for this. I mean, we're a small museum that's open four days a week in Walnut Hills, and we have so many international visitors who often come much more informed about Uncle Tom's cabin than any visitors from the us. Speaker 1 (15:53): Not surprising. Speaker 2 (15:54): Well, in conversation with them, I've learned that because it was such an influential book. It was so it was the bestselling book of the 19th century other than the Bible, and in the first few months in England, it sold millions of copies, maybe not millions, maybe hundreds of thousands. But it was so influential overseas that when you're compiling a list of books in English that people should read, it's on there. So if they've got a class that's in English, many of them are reading that as part of a required text. Speaker 1 (16:37): So when you see those visitors, international visitors, what's the farthest somebody has traveled to get to the house? Speaker 2 (16:43): Oh, we literally have people from every continent all over. We have had a professor from Japan that was in last fall. We've had a lot of Chinese international students are interested in coming to visit because it's been part of their reading in English classes. We've got maps that we put up a year ago November, and there are just covered with pins from Europe, south America, Northern Africa, South Africa. Yeah, we've got Australian from everywhere. It's been really surprising. Speaker 1 (17:31): Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your work, the museum, anything like that? Speaker 2 (17:38): Well, right now we're in the middle of a restoration project in connection with the Ohio history connection. So that's kind of an exciting thing that is still going, probably slowing down a little bit with everything that's going on right now. But we are working hard to stabilize the building so that it can stay for several more generations. And then to also interpret some things from the 1830s and forties when the Beecher family lived there, and then also the 1930s and forties when it was this tavern that was listed in the Green Book to help people see the continuity in the neighborhood and in these ideas and how they're still impacting visitors today. Speaker 1 (18:28): Cool, cool. Well, now would be the time where normally I would say let's go out to the galleries and look at some art, but we can't do that because the museum's closed and we're both at home. So instead let's go to the virtual galleries. We're going to look at a piece that you can actually see on our website in our collection and our online collection, I should say. And I will put a link to that in our show notes in the description of the show on your podcast. Or you can go to our website and find the podcast page and we'll have links there as well. And it's kind of fun because a lot of times when I do this, I have to worry about what's actually on view so that we can go see it. We have a huge collection and we just don't have space for everything and works rotate in and out. Speaker 1 (19:17): This one is actually not on view right now, so the only way you can look at it is through our online collection. So this was usually I pick out the works and a lot of times I surprise the people and don't tell them anything about it. I kind of don't want them to do too much research where they just sound like a Wikipedia page. But this time you picked out the piece for me probably because you knew the collection already pretty well from working here. I'm glad you did because I will admit, I know very little about this work. I have walked past it so many times. It was actually on view until very, very recently. It was recently that gallery has been reinstalled, and it's no longer on view, but it is called, I should tell you what it is. It's called The Fugitive Story, and it's by a sculptor named John Rogers. It's a plaster cast. So it was a multiple that many, many people could own as opposed to sort of a marble original or a bronze, which is a lot more expensive. So you actually know a lot about the connections here, and actually when you're telling me the story about Eliza in Uncle Tom's cabin, there seems to be a great connection with that piece as well. Speaker 2 (20:36): I really love this piece for a variety of reasons. One, we can talk about that Eliza connection first. So the sculpture has five individuals. There are three men that from their attire, and then also if you read the names around the base, you can see they're men of influence, institutional influence. It's William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Greenleaf Whittier. And they are all looking at a woman who's carrying a child who is presumably the fugitive described by the title, and being a woman carrying a child. I think this is probably a direct allusion to the story of Eliza that Harriett has popularized and made one of the most recognizable kind of just shorthand for what is going on in the country Now. This sculpture was made after the conclusion of the Civil War, but it's during this reconstruction era and people are solidifying the stories of that time period. Speaker 1 (21:57): So Speaker 2 (21:57): In many ways, I think Harriet is an unseen figure in this sculpture because she has connections to all of these men. We've got documentation of her letters exchanged with them relating to her book and anti-slavery topics. I mean, one of them is her brother for one. And then we also have letters. There's documentation of letters between these men about harriett's writing. So her influence on these institutions is really significant. And I think from a perspective as a woman seeing this sculpture, I love that it's three men listening to a woman Speaker 1 (22:49): Doesn't happen a lot. Doesn't Speaker 2 (22:50): Happen a lot. Doesn't get documented a lot. But in many ways, I think because of Harriet's writing, not only are they listening to her, but they're listening to other women. Speaker 1 (23:03): Yeah, that's a very positive spin on it because when I looked at it, I sort of wondered, why are these three white guys here? It's sort of a funny thing of, it's a funny thing to focus on in this story. It seems like maybe certainly the least active part of a story to try to sculpt. So it's a strange sculpture to me in that I can't think of a lot of sculptures that deal with a person telling a story. I mean, maybe there's others that I'm just not thinking of. I'm sure there are, but it's not a super common thing. And I think if you compare it to say, a sculpture that was in the same gallery with this one and is still in that gallery now, the last arrow, which is the most dynamic action packed, sort of depicting the most exciting moment of the story, this is the least exciting part of the story Speaker 2 (24:03): In a way, like Speaker 1 (24:04): A person escaping with a child. I could think of so many ways I would sculpt that. And I sort of wonder if it's maybe the sort of politics of the time that is sort of wanting to focus on these abolitionists and not the person whose life was in danger or trying to give them a little bit more equal weight in a way that I don't think somebody would necessarily do if they made the sculpture today. I think that would be a very bad look for somebody to sculpt this. Everyone would be like, why are you focusing on these guys quite so much? Speaker 2 (24:38): Not Speaker 1 (24:39): That they didn't do good things, but it's like when you look at the weight of there's three of them and one of her. Speaker 2 (24:46): Yes, yes. And this exact scene probably didn't happen. I was talking to our director yesterday. She thinks those three men probably were never in the same room together. Together. So this is kind of a representation. Speaker 1 (25:03): It's symbolic. Speaker 2 (25:04): Yeah. But I agree. I think it's interesting in a fine line that I think we have to walk at the Harriet Beecher Stow House of not centering the white experience of something that was not experienced by white people. Speaker 1 (25:22): Of course. Which is tricky because you're talking about a novel written by a white woman who did not personally experience slavery in the same way. Speaker 2 (25:30): Exactly. And we're not at a point in our country where people are not able to speak for themselves. Speaker 1 (25:40): And Speaker 2 (25:40): So I think it's an important pivot to make now to maybe not put as much effort as Harriet did into telling other people's stories and give them the space to tell their own stories. Speaker 1 (25:52): I think there can be a tendency now to just sort of see things through pretty black and white lenses of good and bad. This is not good. This is bad. And I think when you look at this stuff, you can take the good, take the bad. See, we're talking about this sculpture probably did a lot of good ultimately even if I think now looking back at it, there are these sort of tendencies to maybe focus a little bit too much on white abolitionists, which is something I've noticed in a lot of art from this time period, which was ultimately anti-slavery. The political message of the work was something I think we would all agree with. But when I look at it, I kind of see like, huh, it's interesting that there's a lot more focus given to the white abolitionists in this. I looked at a painting probably it's been over a year now, but with Christopher from the Freedom Center, we looked at our painting, the Underground Railroad, and it's a very similar piece because it focuses really mostly on Levi and Catherine Coffin Speaker 2 (26:57): Who Speaker 1 (26:57): Are two real white abolitionists. And then the freedom seekers in the painting just feel a bit generic. Maybe they're just sort of there as set dressing or they're sort of there to surround the sort of heroes of the story. And if you look at the way the composition is set up, Levi is sort of higher than everybody else. That's the sort of eye leads you to him. So I think there's a little bit of that going on here, but I think also there is a genuine sympathy and a genuine kind of depiction of this woman and an attempt to humanize her in the sense the baby is probably the most humanizing thing you can do that really makes people connect with the person and sort of realize the danger when you see somebody carrying a baby and they've had to escape. I think that puts us sort of like, Ooh, you connect with them. And it sounds like Harriet Beecher stow understood that as well when she had Eliza escaping with a baby too. Speaker 2 (28:05): Absolutely. And that connection for Harriett as a mother, particularly to freedom seekers escaping with children, that was kind of her entry point into the story. So during her time in Cincinnati, she and her husband had six of their seven kids while they lived here. Speaker 1 (28:26): Wow. That's a big brood. Speaker 2 (28:29): It's a big group. So she's growing her family and growing her writing career at the same time, which I find really encouraging as a working mom that during that phase of life, she wasn't tuned out to everything that was going on in the world around her. And during their last few years here in Cincinnati, their youngest son died during a cholera epidemic, and she later said that it was his death. He was 18 months old at the time. It was his death that helped her begin to understand in a more visceral level what it was like to be separated from a child. And so she said it was that, I mean, her letter specifically says it was at his dying bed that I began to see what a slave mother may feel when her child was taken from her. So the way she used her, the way her own grief connected her instead of isolating her, I find really, really inspiring. Speaker 1 (29:36): Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you sent me the label for this piece as well, which I love that you sent me the label music in person. So basically the label describes this piece as being sort of uncontroversial or not overly sentimental, and that sort of being a part of its success in maybe reaching more people in a way that probably a piece that was maybe more truthful or more radical in its sort of depiction of the horrors of slavery or even focused maybe more on the slave, might not have reached more people, basically, because there might've been more people who said like, oh, I'm not interested in that. So it's like, again, it's like, I don't think you can look at this as totally good and bad. It's like there's things about it that on an artistic level, I kind of go, I don't like this as much, but those might be the exact reasons it's getting to more people. Yeah, Speaker 2 (30:40): I think it's portraying people as they want. I mean, in many ways it's portraying these men as we want them to be. We want them to be these safe, benevolent white men who are caring for individuals escaping. And in many ways, these men did a lot of good, they are mixed bags, all of them for sure. And the reality is we know their names and we don't know the name of this woman, and that's part of the way history's been recorded and something that we're all working to shift so that people can tell their own stories and we know their names. And I think in many ways this sculpture with Harriet being kind of an unseen force in these scenarios, and then Cincinnati is too, because Cincinnati is the border town Speaker 1 (31:33): Where Speaker 2 (31:34): Harriet heard all of these stories. She lived here in the ramp up to the Civil War. She's mixing and mingling with people she never would've interacted with if she had stayed in New England. We've got a pro-slavery business community. We've got people like Catherine and Levi Coffin who are abolitionist activists. We've got institutions that are caught in the middle trying to appease both sides. And then she takes all of that and puts it into her novel that reaches more households than any other book in the 18 hundreds. Speaker 1 (32:12): Yeah, I think about this a lot. When I got married, I had to get married in Pittsburgh because it was not legal to be married in Ohio yet for me, and when I think about why that change happened pretty quickly within a year, I think it would've been legal in Ohio, and I saw that change in perception towards same-sex marriage. When I think about what made the biggest difference in the way the average American feels about it, because there are polls and things that show that the just general public's attitudes changed so quickly. And whenever I think about what it is, I almost always go modern family, modern family. I have no doubt that that was a huge part in changing a lot of middle America's minds about basically showing a gay couple and being just sort of normalizing it in this way that they hadn't seen on television in a way. I'm sure there have been others, but I don't think anything was quite the big success that that show was. So I think we see this still happening today where pop culture, popular stories that are probably not terribly realistic and every single aspect of them, but they have these huge influences on the culture, Speaker 2 (33:35): The power of the written word in the power of stories. Interestingly, for many years, uncle Tom's cabin fell out of favor with academic literature types because they saw it as sensationalist two too emotional, and it's just now starting to come back into view as a book that should be looked at because if nothing else of the influence that it had, Speaker 1 (34:08): Right, Speaker 2 (34:09): And I think mean in that it's important also to acknowledge the way that the book and concepts and ideas from the book were distorted over time. Obviously, the term Uncle Tom is a slur, Speaker 1 (34:29): Which is an Speaker 2 (34:29): Important thing to, it's important thing to discuss with visitors to our museum and to discuss maybe why that happened and the way that minstrel shows took the concepts of the book and ended up merging it with the black faith shows that had been quite popular in the mid 19th century, stripping away some of the radical nature of the book, where in the book the character of Tom is a young man who's sacrificing himself for the good of the other enslaved people. Spoiler alert, he dies, but it's in order to not reveal where some other people have gone. And so Harriet intends him to be a Christ-like figure, and she's very overt in her Christian imagery and in her attempt to appeal to these Christian families all over the country who are not paying attention to what's happening. But we see in later visual depictions, in plays in books, the character of Tom gets older and older and older. And so in many ways, he's getting less and less dangerous, Speaker 1 (36:00): Less Speaker 2 (36:00): And less radical. And so many of those concepts have been distorted over time. And I think if people would read Uncle Tom's cabin now, they would be surprised at how fresh it feels. Even some of the commentary that she had in there saying, if this person were escaping over some mountains in Eastern Europe, we would say he was a hero, but he has dark skin and he's doing it here and we're suspicious of him. Speaker 1 (36:32): And Speaker 2 (36:33): You're like, wow, Harriet. That is a bold thing to say in 2020, much less in the 1850s. Speaker 1 (36:42): That's one of my favorite things about reading things that are 150 years old in this case. Or wait, how old is the book? I was thinking about the sculpture. Speaker 2 (36:51): It is, Speaker 1 (36:52): It would probably be more than hundred 50 years. More than Speaker 2 (36:54): 50, because she started it in, they moved away from Cincinnati in 1850 and she started writing it in 1851 or so. It was serialized for a year and then published in book form in 1852. Speaker 1 (37:09): So getting closer to 170 years or so, then. Yeah. But when you read these old things, it's so fun to see how radical they can be because you do tend to think of, well, anything that's that old, it must be so traditional. I mean, it's one of my favorite things about Moby Dick is it's just an insane book. And I think to a lot of people, they just think, oh, Moby Dick is a boring book. It's a very long book, which it is, but it's also one of the weirdest books I've ever read. The way it plays with the very format of a book is just insane. So it's like don't assume that older literature or older things are not radical or older art for that matter. There's a lot of times where I was just looking at some paintings by Goya in the Prado Museum, and it was mind blowing to me that he was making these paintings and these were the paintings he'd never intended the public to see. So they were even more kind of radical and just the aggressive, they were so aggressively painted that it was almost shocking to see it and knowing when these were painted, it was crazy. So I love looking back at that history and seeing how people were kind of rebellious because I think that's the other thing that happens with art and history and books and things is we talk about the stuff it's good for you. Speaker 1 (38:48): It's almost like eating your vegetables or something. And it's like, this doesn't feel like eating my vegetables. To me, this is fun, this is radical. We should talk about this stuff like it's dangerous, not like it's like eating vegetables. Speaker 2 (39:02): We had a program a couple years ago that talked about how Harriet's writing fits into the stream of civil disobedience writing Speaker 1 (39:12): And Speaker 2 (39:12): How, I mean, she talks about topics like the controversy over whether or not you should have violent or nonviolent protest, whether or not there should be armed uprisings or everything should be done peacefully the way the Quaker abolitionists were conducting things. Speaker 1 (39:32): And Speaker 2 (39:33): That's a modern conversation, and it's fascinating to see that it's actually a conversation that's been going on for hundreds of years. Speaker 1 (39:40): Any other thoughts you had about this artwork that we didn't say? Speaker 2 (39:44): I'm glad just to have had the chance to look at it again and just be reminded to listen to the stories of women at the Harriett Beecher Stough House this year. Once we get back open, we're still going through a programming year focusing on women and the connection between abolition and the march toward women's suffrage and continuing expanding voting rights. So I hope everyone will come on in once we're open again. Speaker 1 (40:15): Well, thank you so much for being my guest today. Speaker 2 (40:17): Thanks Russell. Speaker 1 (40:25): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. Just a reminder, the museum is currently closed, but when we reopen, general admission will always be free, and we also offer free parking while we're closed. We want to invite you to a Joinin, our new Facebook group Cam Connect, where we will be posting digital content and asking you to join in the conversation. You can also join the Harriett Beecher STO House Community Connection on Facebook as well. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Music How By Balala. And as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Russell Iig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.