Darryl Lauster, Pennsylvania Treaty with the 6 Nations, 1742, bronze, 2024.
As an artist for whom the research of American history is a significant inspiration and primary source of content, my time at the AAS was vital to inspiring a new body of work which will continue into the future.
I use text directly mined from archives such as those from American Foundational documents, treaties, state and federal congressional records, and published letters of correspondence. Fascinated by the way colonial idioms and constitutional references have been reinvented in the political present, my work exploits the stark nature of these texts presented out of context, forcing viewers to question the veracity of their meaning. As public information is increasingly defined through dogmatic parameters, seeking also to replace fact with belief, I am questioning the stability of the foundation on which we stand.
I present these texts on enduring iconic forms, such as bells, stelae, and columns to appropriate their historic and/or symbolic functions and to draw a line from the present to the past. Equally important to me, however, is injecting a contemporary populist shift into the form by presenting our contemporary arguments as unresolved issues persisting from the time of our nation’s founding.
Upon arriving at the AAS, I began to search handwritten manuscripts from the 17th and 18th centuries, loosely organized around issues relating to treaties with Native American nations and other early colonial activity. I found a great reservoir of information from collections of personal diaries and record books of early governors, along with certified letters of indenture, and Massachusetts congressional records. Amongst other examples, I was able to document accounts of treaty meetings between states and leaders of the Iroquois, Penobscot and Lenapi nations.
What I began to accumulate was evidence of promises unkept—a verifiable contradiction between the language with which we define our nation and its subsequent actions. This contradiction figures prominently in my new series of bronzes, which take the form of discarded and crumpled documents.
Darryl Lauster, Pennsylvania Treaty with the 6 Nations, 1742, bronze, 2024.
While this was the original intent of my residency upon arriving at the AAS, rather unexpectedly, I came across other groups of holdings that drew my interest significantly. The 19th century amateur newspaper The Daily Courier, as well as an 1800 apothecary book, a book of horoscopes, a blacksmith’s diary, and various handwritten ledgers and cookbooks led me through an exploration of more arcane microhistories that established a voice of the people. I used their voices, along with their handwriting, to create similar bronzes with greater kinship to the labor and economy of the working class. As such, what began as an investigation into formal and official documents became a deep dive into vernacular and ephemeral manuscripts.
I left the AAS with a trove of photographs and notes that will allow this body of work to continue unabated in the future.