Alex Geldzahler, Contributing Photographer

On Tuesday, University of Alabama’s Dr. Catherine Roach visited Yale to talk about her interdisciplinary and contemporary work on “The Greek Slave” statue by Hiram Powers. 

The event, “On Yale’s ‘Greek Slave:’ A Fannish and Feminist Social Practice Art Project on the Most Famous and Forgotten U.S.-U.K. Sculpture,” showcased Roach’s work at the University of Alabama on recontextualizing the famous piece today. 

“Let this be an invitation to think about the power of art to tell stories about freedom and what it means to be human in a community,” Roach said. “How can art help tell a wider story, and hopefully a story of justice and inclusion for us all in America today?”

“The Greek Slave,” a copy of which is housed in the Yale University Art Gallery, was initially created in 1844 by American sculptor Hiram Powers in his studio in Florence, Italy. It shows a captive of the Greek War for Independence who had been sent to Constantinople, stripped of her clothing, and on the auction block to be sold into slavery.

Soon after its debut, the work quickly attained international attention and controversy. Roach described the piece’s prominence during its debut and subsequent tour around the nation as “like the Mona Lisa today, that statue had the same resonance in the nineteenth century.” 

Roach noted that “The Greek Slave” was the first female nude sculpture in the American artistic canon, and was met as such with incredible notoriety. 

Six more full-size copies and countless busts and miniatures were produced based on the original by Powers’ studio in the next thirty years. One, made in 1850, was purchased by a Russian prince before finally making its way to Yale. 

While on tour in the United States, the sculpture was adopted as a symbol of various communities, including the abolition and pro-slavery movements, at the peak of Civil War tensions. Roach mentioned that a miniature copy of the sculpture was even held by Frederick Douglass who wrote about it in his abolitionist publication. 

Powers said that “there should be a moral in every work of art.” This is what attracted her to it in the first place.

Beginning in 2021, Roach, a gender and cultural studies professor, embarked on an academic exploration of the sculpture and, more specifically, its potential cultural applications to today’s world. 

Since then, she has made a concerted effort to trace the statue’s path around the East Coast and England, ultimately leading her to the Yale University Art Gallery. Before her lecture, she sat with the piece for four hours, during which the News was able to get an in-depth look at the sculpture and her fascination with it. 

Working with an interdisciplinary team including five mechanical engineering students, she 3D-printed a replica of the statue according to the scans made public by the Smithsonian. She detailed her project and efforts to replicate the sculpture in a Smithsonian blog post. 

At her lecture on Tuesday, which took place in the Loria Center, Roach presented a comprehensive history of the work, various interpretations of it throughout time and how she and her students were able to connect with the work at the University of Alabama. 

“It’s always nice to learn more about artwork that is on Yale’s campus,” said Sarah Bochicchio GRD ’28, who was working behind the scenes at the event. “I love learning about the work that other people are doing and the objects that drive their research.”

Throughout the lecture, Roach took the time to reference the work’s mystique and contributed to its ubiquity in mid-19th-century decorative arts. She also analyzed the context of the feminist and abolition movements of the mid-19th century, as well as a part of the much more recent “Say Her Name” movement.

Today, Roach works to understand the significance of the artwork in a modern context. Her work invites questions about the use of art and art history as a tool for social change today, as it was over 150 years ago. 

By interacting with the piece with a modern societal context, “It’s arrived at in a different way than we would at a museum,” explained Martina Droth, Deputy Director of Research and Curator of Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art.

“We realize a lot of the historical objects need new forms of engagement,” she said. 

Lucia Olubunmi Momoh GRD ’29, said she was “interested to see how the public will engage with the re-exhibition of this work” and how it was the first time she had ever heard of “contemporary intervention within the sculpture.” 

“The Greek Slave” is currently on display in the Yale University Art Gallery.