The first work that visitors to The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture encounter is Roberto Lugo’s DNA Study Revisited (2022), a resin life cast of the artist’s body painted in four different patterns that index Lugo’s mixed Taino, Spanish, African, and Portuguese ancestry. Standing before the title wall of the exhibition, the work serves as a vibrant and enigmatic initial example of what it can mean to inscribe race on the body and how artists can engage with racial identity. Cocurated by Karen Lemmy, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, The Shape of Power brings together more than eighty works by nearly as many artists to explore the ways that sculpture specifically has embodied, imposed, and challenged conceptions of race in American history. Starting from SAAM’s collection but expanding beyond it (especially through the inclusion of quite recent artworks), the exhibition displays sculptures from the late 1700s to the 2000s, intentionally establishing an expansive definition of the medium through the incorporation of objects like coins, medals, household figurines, and installations, alongside statues, portraits, and monuments.

As visitors move from Lugo’s sculpture into the first room of the exhibition, they are greeted with a short video in which cocurator Tobias Wofford talks with everyday people around Washington, DC, and asks them about their definitions of sculpture, race, and power. By self-consciously putting on view the breadth of answers given, the exhibition signals from the first the difficulty of situating this trio of topics. Nonetheless, The Shape of Power makes a bold effort to chart changing ideas around sculptural practice from the 19th century through the present day. It also maps out the dominant ways race has been understood and visualized, all while drawing attention to the many structures and strategies of power at play in both the creation and interpretation of three-dimensional objects.

Surrounding the video’s presentation of how people understand these terms are three artworks by Titus Kaphar, Alison Saar, and Anita Fields, respectively. Kaphar’s Monumental Inversions: George Washington (2017) is a charred inverse of an equestrian statue of Washington, with amorphous and hollow glass forms tumbling forth from the blackened impression of the first president. The work signals contemporary artists’ efforts to question the lionization of such (white) historical figures, proposing a counter-monumental solution that deconstructs the racism of national heroes. While Kaphar’s piece is about the confrontation with official public sculptures—ubiquitous in Washington, DC—Saar’s and Fields’ artworks both operate on a more intimate scale: they are more personal explorations of how one’s body has been racialized, and what futures are made possible through the reclamation of our specific differences and unique identities. Fields’ So Many Ways to Be Human (2017) includes an array of thirty clay figurines, each individually decorated and posed, celebrating both the plurality to be found in (Indigenous) community and individual identity. In Saar’s Mirror, Mirror (Mulatta Seeking Inner Negress) (2006), a pale figure pieced together from metal looks at her reflection in the back of a cast-iron skillet, presenting a succinct metaphor for the challenges faced by biracial individuals navigating the divergence between their ancestry and the ways society reads their race.

From this initial room and its establishment of key themes, the exhibition proceeds to stage a series of encounters that examine (among other topics): the ways sculpture has helped promote the myth that race is a concrete biological fact in order to control populations and enforce social hierarchies; artists who examine the interaction between race and family relationships; how sculpture inscribes race through domestic objects; sculpture as a vehicle for promoting the alignment of whiteness with beauty; and how artists utilize sculpture to establish new grounds for communal political action. Several of these same topics are examined by essays in the exhibition’s catalog, such as Renée Ater’s on sculpture and the work of mourning, and Claudia E. Zapata’s examination of art and the Chicano movement.

The Shape of Power’s greatest strength is the scope of sculptural approaches it encompasses. Works such as Hiram Powers’ famous The Greek Slave (modeled 1843) demonstrate the long-running neoclassical association of whiteness (in this case, also the literal whiteness of marble) with innocence and purity, juxtaposed against the implied violence of the imagined racial other (in this case, Muslim Ottomans). Elsewhere, under the cover of ethnographic investigation, sculptures like Malvina Hoffman’s Solomon Islander Climbing a Palm Tree (1934, created as part of a commission for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago) present an essentialized and savage vision of the nonwhite racialized subject.

Where these and other examples promote racist narratives, many artworks on display in the exhibition present methods of deconstructing and attacking such oppressive frameworks. Standouts like Ed Bereal’s elaborate mixed-media assemblage America: A Mercy Killing (1966–74) and the much more modestly scaled—but equally sharp in its militant vision of antiracist uprising—The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) by Betye Saar provide critical and provocative visions of what is wrong with America’s sociopolitical structures, and how to fix them. In the final room of the exhibition, Young Joon Kwak’s Divine (2023) is a bronze cast that features the impression of the artist’s face on its interior, while the exterior of this mask—hung upside-down from the ceiling and floating in a corner of the gallery—is covered in rhinestones. The glimmering play of colored light across the walls of the gallery, coupled with the optical illusion whereby the artist’s face appears to both emerge from the mask and recede within it, serves as a poignant metaphor for the many ways the body and identity can exceed expectations, moving beyond what power asserts.

Another impressive aspect of The Shape of Power is its meticulous wall labels, which offer additional context for nearly every individual work on view and provide opportunities for viewers to think critically about possible meanings. There are times when the labels fall short, however, making references that emphasize the diversity of identities and belief systems at play without giving any explanation of them. The label for So Many Ways to Be Human, for example, notes that “Osage knowledge systems anchor Fields’ decade-long practice,” and that the artist “invites us to think about the survival and continuation of Osage knowledge,” but never says what these knowledge systems are or what such an invitation might entail.

If The Shape of Power ever shies away from complexity, it is perhaps in its implicit suggestion that art made in the past regularly reinforced racist power structures while contemporary art and artists have resolved at least the moral—if not the existential—quandaries of racism. Such a dichotomy is expected—it would certainly be unethical for the curators to have platformed contemporary art that espoused racist ideas. Yet missing from the exhibition is a broader acknowledgement that explorations of race, identity, and power in contemporary art still often produce harsh criticism and vehement debate, despite their creators’ efforts to deconstruct systems of oppression. Even in the exhibition’s catalog, in strong essays like James Smalls’s evaluation of the problematic interaction between modernism and discourses of primitivism and ethnography, or Grace Yasumura’s on the pernicious relationship between the racialization of Asian American bodies and US imperial expansion, contemporary artworks are brought in as critical correctives to older art rather than as the subject of critical evaluation themselves. The recent debates about artist Thomas J. Price’s Grounded in the Stars (2025) sculpture in Times Square, with its unidealized rendering of a young Black woman dressed in plain clothes with her hands placed boldly on her hips, show that audiences continue to have radically different ideas about the kinds of figures (in terms of race, body type, and general cultural notoriety) that merit public monumentalization. The omission of such disagreements, however, does not seriously blunt the force of The Shape of Power’s argument: that sculpture is a key medium through which race is constructed, reinforced, and potentially reimagined.

It would be remiss to review The Shape of Power without mentioning that the exhibition was explicitly cited in a White House executive order that described the show’s supposedly “divisive, race-driven ideology” within a broader condemnation of the Smithsonian for “portray[ing] American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” It would be a shame if the exhibition is only remembered as one of the specific shows upon which the Trump administration has heaped its vitriol, since this attack does not even substantively engage with its content. The Shape of Power may have flaws, but it is not a divisive exhibition, and the notion that any exploration of American sculpture could somehow avoid the topic of racism, racial oppression, and art’s role in both is patently ridiculous. In a historical moment broadly defined by resurgent nationalism, authoritarianism, and oligarchy—and with the intensification of racialized police and military violence in America—The Shape of Power has much to tell us about the interaction of race and power. Its specific contribution is to remind us that the body—our own bodies, but also the sculptural ones we fabricate—can be potent forms through which a different world can be made.