Negro Mother and Child

1934 sculpture by  artist Maurice Glickman (Jewish Romanian, 1906–1981). Courtyard, Interior Department

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro_Mother_and_Child

Wikipedia

Negro Mother and Child is a 1934 sculpture by American artist Maurice Glickman (1906–1981). The New Deal artwork was produced under the early Public Works of Art Project and later installed in a courtyard at the Main Interior Building in Washington, D.C.

This sculpture appeared in a Corcoran Gallery exhibition of PWAP artworks in Washington, D.C. President and Mrs. Roosevelt attended the gala opening of the show on Tuesday, April 24, 1934. Edward A. Jewell, the New York Times art critic, called Negro Mother and Child "the exhibition's one outstanding piece of sculpture...a work of remarkable insight and plastic strength."[1] It was one of just 11 sculptures exhibited at the 600-piece exhibition and "unquestionably stole the show."[2]

Reportedly, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the plaster cast of this sculpture, he said "it ought to be cast in bronze." Someone paid for the bronze casting and sent it to the White House, the White House sent it to the National Gallery of Art, and after a stint in the art galleries of the 1939 New York World's Fair,[3] it arrived to the Interior Building. The statue is located at the east end of the cafeteria courtyard and stands atop a serpentine marble base.[4] The plaster cast went to Howard University Library.[5] The bronze version of the sculpture is featured in the PWAP official report of 1934

Prompts for Closer Look:

• Compare this mother and child depiction with other mother-child works covered in this guide, including the Mary and Baby Jesus sculpture in Ed Dwight’s Our Mother of Africa (National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception), and the /Daniel Gillette Olney relief of the mother and two children in “The Progress of the Negro Race.” How are these representations alike and unlike.

• What do the mother and children appear to be looking at?  Their current challenging predicament, under conditions of poverty and discrimination in the fifth year of the Great Depression?  The future and promise of a better day?

•  Why do you think FDR was so enormously moved by this sculpture that he urged it be cast in bronze?