Ladder for Booker T. Washington by Martin Puryear
Irina Chupina and Svetlana Vorobyova
Marin Puryear (born in 1941) is a modern Afro-American artist who is famous for his abstract sculptures. One his most well-known works is a 36 feet (11 metres) wooden sculpture which is called “Ladder for T. Booker”. It is exhibited in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the US, where it is suspended to the ceiling by invisible wires, which creates an effect of its floating in the air and leading into the far-away distance. The author named the sculpture after Booker T. Washington, who was an important political figure, influential educator and black people’s rights advocate. Therefore many people see this work as symbolizing the long and complicated path which black people had to take on their way to becoming free members enjoying equal rights and opportunities in the American society. We took an interest in this particular picture from the Picturing America project because it caught our attention as a work of art which not just looks beautiful, but as well sends to a viewer a message with hidden meaning. To understand this work properly one should know American history and history of black people’s fight for their rights and liberties. So our aim was not only to investigate the artist’s life, concept and art techniques, but to explore certain historical periods of American history to fully comprehend the consequences brought by the important events which shaped social and cultural movements, that indirectly influenced Puryear and loaded “Ladder for T. Booker” with additional meaning.
Martin Puryear was born in 1941 in the still-segregated US and his youth fell on the rampant 60s, the time of flower children and mind liberation, of social and cultural revolutions when gay rights, feminist and anti-war movements came to prominence. And the African-American civil rights movement became one of the greatest social revolutions of the 60s – this was the time when a million crowd in Washington heard Martin Luther King’s words resonate over the Lincoln Memorial: “I have a dream…”. In early 60s Puryear studied painting at the university but then he abandoned it as he became more interested in sculpture. He says in interviews that he was interested in the form and the very process of making things by hand. “There's a story in the making of objects. There's a narrative in the fabrication of things, which to me is fascinating,” said Puryear in the interview about Abstraction and ‘Ladder for T. Booker’ (“Interview with Martin Puryear”). Expressing himself through sculpture, through which he re-creates human history as he sees it, Puryear creates the major part of his works of wood. Throughout Martin Puryear’s life his works evolved and changed, as he tried different styles from minimalism and post minimalism to formalism. Talking about modern artists, Puryear says that their works now are vehicles for conveying information, and his main difference is that he “came from a generation where the work was itself the information and so there remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can hopefully speak” (“Interview with Martin Puryear”).
“Ladder for T. Booker”, one of the most prominent Puryear’s pieces, was created in 1996. It is an ash and maple ladder, to create which the artist used the principle of forced artificial perspective (“Ladder for Booker T. Washington”). This artistic technique, which was very popular in the Renaissance art, fools one’s mind into believing that the things one is seeing are much further than they are indeed. This effect makes the ladder look to be much longer than it really is. To create the ladder Puryear split a tall 36 feet tree of an unusual zig-zag form and from the two halves of the tree he made its side rails, which he connected with 100 maple rungs. To make an illusion of distorted visual perspective, the ladder is narrowing towards the top dramatically: its bottom rung is 2 feet wide and the top one is only 1 inch (“Ladder for Booker T. Washington by Martin Puryear”). The narrowing ladder symbolizes that the goal is extremely far, the path to it is very long and every next step is more difficult than the previous one.
Martin Puryear usually comes up with the names for his works after they have been finished, that is why when he began ‘Ladder’, he didn’t plan to create a piece devoted to Booker T. Washington. But when Puryear was thinking about the title for the work, he remembered Washington and his idea of gradual progress, and thus the life of the famous Afro-American educator seemed to the sculptor to fit the form and meaning of his work perfectly. Puryear thinks that “Ladder for T. Booker” is an unusual piece of art as it teaches a history lesson: people look at it and can’t help wondering what the story behind it is. Probably this is why the label on the museum wall next to the sculpture tells much more about Booker T. Washington than about the artist and the work itself. Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in 1856. His biological father was an unknown white man and his mother was a slave in a tobacco plantation. Later she married a slave, who became Booker’s stepfather and whose name Washington he took at school. Since early childhood Booker T. Washington had a strong desire to study and to develop intellectually. But then it was illegal to educate slaves, so he had to attend school carrying books of his Master’s daughter. In his autobiographical book “Up from slavery” he wrote: “I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise” (“Up from slavery. Booker T. Washington”). After the abolition of slavery, Booker T. Washington went to West Virginia, where he worked in a salt mine and continued his study at school. Later he entered Hampton University, where black students were able to get education. He paid for his living by doing menial tasks. But that time was a turning point in his life: studying at the University let him forget about forced labour for good. In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and became well-known in the US as an influential and eminent black educator. He believed that hard work was a guarantee of success; he often said that he couldn’t remember a single day when he was not occupied with labour. This idea had become the basis of his social philosophy. He was also struggling for equal rights for African-Americans, because despite the abolition of slavery, black people were still suffering from infringements of their rights and freedoms which were quite limited in the white governed American society.
And in place of conclusion we would like to quote Martin Puryear, the author of “Ladder for T. Booker”, because no one else could sum up his work and its meaning better: “I mentioned about the perspective being really what the work is about. And the idea of Booker T. Washington, the resonance with his life, and his struggle...the whole notion that his idea of progress for the race was a long slow progression... <…> Booker T. Washington was someone who made enormous contacts with people in power and had enormous influence, but he was what you would call a gradualist. And so, it really is a question of the view from where you start and the end—the goal. The whole notion of where you start and where you want to get to and how far away it really is.” (“Interview with Martin Puryear”). To us this project gave one more opportunity to glimpse back on the American history and the fates of people who were fighting selflessly for the just, equal society and whose efforts were not in vain. And this work of art is very characteristic of the American society as well: in it there exists a ladder for everyone and no matter how long, difficult and winding the way up may be, those who have a goal and are full of determination are going to make it to the top without fail.
Works Cited
Booker T. Washington. Spartacus Educational. Web. 1 May. 2011. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/>
Interview with Martin Puryear: “Abstraction & “Ladder for Booker T. Washington””. Art21. Web. 1 May. 2011. <http://www.pbs.org/>
Ladder for Booker T. Washington by Martin Puryear. Blog by Roldan on wordpress.com, October 21, 2007. Web. 1 May. 2011. <http://roldandin1.wordpress.com/>
Up from slavery. Booker T. Washington. Web. 1 May. 2011. <http://www.nps.gov/archive/bowa/btwbio.html>
Smith, Roberta. Humanity’s Ascent, in Three Dimensions. The New York Times, Novermer 2, 2007. Web. 1 May. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/>
Wilson, Beth E. “Ladder for Booker T. Washington”. Chronogram.com, October 25, 2007. Web. 1 May. 2011. <http://www.chronogram.com/>
