150 Years of Artists Interpreting the Statue Of Liberty

The most recognizable silhouette in the United States.

A figure who stands for the United States. Not merely the place, its ideals.

The Statue of Liberty.

Since before its erection in 1886, and unabated through the present day, artists have been drawing inspiration from the Statue of Liberty and using its likeness for political and social commentary. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth presents “The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol,” an examination of the monument’s enduring relevance in American visual culture and the evolution of its image. Admission to the museum is free.

The presentation is anchored by a rare cast of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s bronze sculpture Liberty Enlightening the World (Statue of Liberty) (1894–1901) – the Statue of Liberty’s proper, full name – one of only five domestic-scale bronze reductions made during the artist’s lifetime. The cast was acquired on the secondary market by the Carter in 2024.

“There are all sorts of reproductions of the Statue of Liberty, but there are very few really fine bronze casts from the moment that the artist oversaw,” exhibition curator Andrew Eschelbacher told me via video interview. “We had an opportunity to acquire it at the Carter, and a major part of that goal was acquiring a work of art that everyone in the community, regardless of their background, regardless of their education, regardless of their experiences, would have some familiarity with. It’s an extraordinary work of art that is also one of the most accessible pieces of American visual culture possible.”

From t-shirts to coffee mugs, photographs, magazine covers, movies, tourist souvenirs, tchotchkes and collectables of every variety, millions of political cartoons, and countless other formats, Lady Liberty has been reproduced endlessly. To wit, accompanying the exhibition is a community-centered installation of ephemeral objects featuring the Statue of Liberty in popular culture. Members of the community were invited to loan items from their personal collections, from rubber ducks to apparel, for display.

As for fine art, “The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol” brings together nearly 100 artworks and objects from more than 70 artists, including artists following Warhol. The exhibition explores the statue’s varied manifestations—from artistic marvel and pop culture icon to symbol of immigration, patriotism, and resistance—and how successive generations of artists, including Pacita Abad, Benny Andrews, Edward Moran, Norman Rockwell, Nari Ward, and Andy Warhol, have represented its iconic form over the past 150 years.

“Artists have engaged with the Statue of Liberty constantly and consistently since even before it was inaugurated. We have in the show this great 1881 engraving from Harper’s Weekly by Thomas Nast who has transformed the Statue of Liberty – the statue’s not up yet, but he’s already transformed it to talk about disease and what’s wrong in New York in 1881,” Eschelbacher explained. “It continues all the way to this current moment. It becomes this object where artists reflect on New York, artists reflect on reflect on the United States, ideas of patriotism, both in the positive and in the and in the critical, and that runs the gamut from the 19th century to today.”

Today indeed.

The most talked-about painting of 2025 was Amy Sherald’s Trans Forming Liberty (2024). Sherald painted a transgender person in the stance and dress of the Statue. The painting was supposed to be part of an Amy Sherald exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. last fall. When Sherald caught wind that censorship pressure exerted on the museum from the anti-trans Trump regime was causing the NPG to waffle on including Trans Forming Liberty in the presentation, she pulled the entire show.

The regime’s attempts at bullying the Smithsonian have continued.

The Sherald exhibition, with Trans Forming Liberty, can be seen at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through September 27, 2026.

“What she did with that (painting) is in line with the conversation that’s gone on. Too often that conversation (about Trans Forming Liberty) became here’s this artist who’s doing – and it’s a brilliant painting – but here’s this artist who’s doing this thing that’s totally different than what we’ve seen before, and it’s a continuation,” Eschelbacher said. “It has its roots in Robert Colescott’s Miss Liberty (1980) that’s in the show, or in the critiques of the Statue of Liberty that go back to its earliest reception.”

As a monument birthed of a political ideology – Franco-American relations – sited on what would become the nation’s primary immigration processing center, Ellis Island, artistic depictions of the Statue have always made statements. When a plaque featuring Emma Lazarus’ The New Colossus poem – “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” –was placed on the Statue’s pedestal in 1903, the monument took on additional sociopolitical significance.

Being the rare building-size figurative monument, unlike the Eifel Tower or Space Needle for instance, artists have been able to animate the Statue, to give it expressions, thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. Emotions related to current events. To the struggle for trans rights in Sherald’s case.

“The Statue of Liberty is about telling a story. Monuments are about telling the story of American history, but the stories that monuments tell are often from a specific point of view, more limited,” Eschelbacher said. “Monuments go up with relationship to those who are in power, who has control over city streets. Who has control over urban budgets? Monuments reflect a narrative of American history, not the narrative of American history.”

In addition to access, monuments are expensive because of their size and materials. Stone. Bronze. Copper in the case of the Statue of Liberty. “Out” groups rarely have the access or finances to express themselves through monuments. Not so two-dimensional art.

Sandow Birk’s stupefying White Out: A Monumental Arch to American History (2021: direct gravure etching) reflects a narrative of American history not typically seen in public monuments. His magnum opus presents a people’s history of the United States. The artwork meticulously details women, Indigenous people, African Americans, and other racial minorities mostly omitted from the nation’s popular/propagandist retelling. In astonishing volume. The etching is over eight feet tall by six feet wide with tiny, exacting print.

“Sandow Birk’s work allows us to think about what stories aren’t being told in the monument landscape across the country and who’s left out of that,” Eschelbacher said.

White Out was included in this exhibition because the archway in the piece has a quotation from The New Colossus poem, a direct reference to the Statue of Liberty.

A Statue that physically exists in New York harbor and metaphorically exists in the mind of every American, artist or not.

“The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol” opens at the Carter on August 15, 2026, and be on view through January 3, 2027, before its presentation at the Denver Art Museum from March 14 through July 4, 2027. The Denver showing will include Sherald’s Trans Forming Liberty. The exhibition will also travel to the Munson Museum of Art in Utica, New York, from August 5 through December 5, 2027.