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Negro Mother and Child by Maurice Glickman
Photo CreditPhoto courtesy of McKay Lodge Fine Arts Conservation Laboratory, Inc.
Negro Mother and Child
Photo CreditPhoto courtesy of McKay Lodge Fine Arts Conservation Laboratory, Inc.

Negro Mother and Child

Artist
Year1940
Classification sculpture
Medium bronze
Dimensions6' x 4' x 1'8"
Credits New Deal Art Program
Location

  • Glickman’s Mother stands with arms crossed and eyes fixed forward. She appears relaxed and confident, but also guarded and reserved—an expression mirrored by her son, who projects independence but is anchored to her with a familiar handhold. This sculpture was first made in plaster and exhibited in 1934 at the National Exhibition, a showcase of New Deal art commissioned by the government during the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt visited the exhibition and commented favorably that the plaster “ought to be in bronze,” for which Glickman was subsequently commissioned. The bronze was shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair before its permanent installation at the Department of the Interior headquarters.

    Maurice Glickman was born in Romania in 1906 and immigrated to the United States at an early age. He studied at the Art Students League in New York before traveling abroad to study classical sculpture on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934. The identity of the mother and child is not known, nor is it clear if Glickman based his sculpture on real or imagined people. It is clear that Glickman’s subject and title highlight a scene of African-American motherhood rarely seen in American art from the 1930s, particularly in sculpture.