Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art to Present Buzzy New Exhibit — Exploring the Evolution of the Statue of Liberty’s Image Through Art

Initially a symbol of friendship and historic ties between the United States and France, the Statue of Liberty quickly became both an emblem of freedom and a powerful vehicle for debating what that ideal actually meant in America. In mid-August, Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art will present a 70-artist showcase of works depicting Lady Liberty as part of The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol.

Curator Andrew Eschelbacher, Deputy Director and Head of Art and Exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, says the exhibit will showcase a wide range of artists, filmmakers, and illustrators who brought their own unique perspectives to the enduring image of Lady Liberty. The exhibition will unfold in four sections, chronologically highlighting works by Norman Rockwell, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Andy Warhol, and others.

“What is significant about the critiques that we see throughout the 20th century is that they are nothing new,” Eschelbacher tells PaperCity Fort Worth. “The Statue of Liberty has always been this object that has gotten people to think about what liberty in the United States means.”

A Look Inside The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol

Before taking his current position at the Portland Museum of Art, Eschelbacher served as Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Amon Carter, where the museum’s 2024 acquisition of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s bronze Liberty Enlightening the World — one of only five domestic-scale bronze reductions made during the artist’s lifetime — sparked the idea for the exhibition.

In the decade before the now-iconic statue was dedicated, Bartholdi began selling reduced-scale versions of the Statue of Liberty to help finance its construction. That early form of crowdfunding made the torch-bearing figure a familiar sight to many Americans years before the full-size monument was unveiled in 1886.

“Even before it is created, the statue is already a symbol being used to question the very notion of liberty and what it means to be free,” Eschelbacher says. “It shows up in caricatures about political corruption and advertising. The suffragettes questioned how we could make this massive monument to liberty, yet women didn’t have the right to vote. Chinese authors noted the statue’s inauguration four years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, and then there are a number of Black American writers who tie that notion of liberty to the realities for many Black Americans through the Jim Crow era.”

The Evolving Meaning of Lady Liberty

Throughout the exhibition, visitors will encounter a wide range of interpretations of the Statue of Liberty. Norman Rockwell embraced the monument as a patriotic symbol, while Andy Warhol transformed it into a pop culture icon through reproduced imagery. Films by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock use Lady Liberty to explore immigration, identity, and suspense, while contemporary artists such as Nari Ward and Hank Willis Thomas examine the monument through modern conversations about race, belonging, and the American experience.

At a time when political divisions in America feel especially pronounced, The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol serves as a reminder that Americans have long disagreed about what the nation represents. When the exhibition opens this August, Eschelbacher expects visitors to bring their own perspectives informed by their lived experiences.

“The Statue of Liberty has become this object that we all think about because of the way it functions as this symbol of America,” he says. “The show is not trying to prove any point other than to say that everyone has their own experience with this monument, and that all of them are valid. The Statue of Liberty is an object of discourse — something that sparks people’s thoughts about the promise of America, and it has been that way since the 1880s.”

The Statue of Liberty from Bartholdi to Warhol runs Saturday, August 15, through January 3 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.