Magzoid - Leading Art Magazine: January, 2021

Art News
Portrait of Kamala Harris Made Entirely of
Cracked Glass
Vice President Kamala Harris’s history-making
election as the first
female, Black, and Asian American
to serve in our nation’s second-highest
office has been immortalized in
a new artwork.
Swiss artist Simon Berger’s sculpture,
installed yesterday in front of
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
DC, by the National Women’s
History Museum and the women’s
leadership network Chief, is made
from broken glass, symbolizing the
shattering of the glass ceiling that
prevents women from advancing to
leadership positions.
“Representation matters, especially
at the ballot box, and the inauguration
of Kamala Harris as the first
woman, and first woman of color, to
serve as vice president of the United
States is a landmark moment in
American history,” said Holly Hotchner,
the museum’s president and
CEO, in a statement.
“Representation matters,
especially at the ballot
box, and the inauguration
of Kamala Harris as
the first woman, and first
woman of color, to serve
as vice president of the
United States is a landmark
moment in American
history,” said Holly
Hotchner, the museum’s
president and CEO, in a
statement
“Today’s progress is
built on the legacy of
the women who
came before—the
trailblazers, like Kamala, who
raised their voices, marched
for their rights, and ran for
elected office; the women
who cracked glass ceilings so
that other women could shatter
them,” Hotchner added.
Berger developed his unique
artistic practice of glass shattering
in 2016, when he started
taking a hammer to layers
of laminated glass to create
cracks and fissures that, from
a distance, create legible
images..
He based his six-and-a-halffoot-tall
portrait of Harris,
titled Glass Ceiling Breaker,
on a photograph by Celeste
Sloman, author of the 2019 photography
book The Women of the 116th
Congress: Portraits of Power.
A short film of Berger at work on
the piece, set to the sounds of Harris’s
victory speech, honors some
of the women who came before
her to break other political barriers:
the first female congresswoman,
Shirley Chisholm; the first female
senator, Carol Moseley Braun; secretaries
of state Madeline Albright
and Condoleezza Rice; and supreme
court justices Sandra Day O’Conner
and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In her vice-president-elect acceptance
speech, Harris thanked “the
generations of women… who
throughout our nation’s history
have paved the way for this moment
tonight.… And I stand on their shoulders.”
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