Reflections on a Young Republic, 2026
Mirror-polished stainless steel, other metal, lumber, cast elements, paint, conservation work
Cliveden of the National Trust, Philadelphia, PA
Exhibited May–November 2026

When does a nation—born from revolution on the eve of the modern era, in what is still called the New World—look at itself and realize it has aged?

Reflections on a Young Republic is a curated arrangement of Cliveden’s marble statues, which have lived and weathered with the United States since its 18th-century beginnings. Cliveden’s records and letters at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania reveal the statues date to at least the 1760s, when some were gifted to Benjamin Chew and his second wife, Elizabeth Oswald. The donor was Oswald’s uncle Joseph Turner, a prominent Philadelphia businessman, slave trader, and Loyalist during the Revolution. The remainder of the extant statues likely came to Cliveden from Turner’s Wilton Plantation after his death in 1783.

Once conspicuous status symbols at houses tended to by servants and enslaved workers, the statues today are fragmented and weary witnesses. In this installation, lions, busts, and figures—all in various states of disarray—wryly regard each other and themselves. The United States has long been understood as a young country, but Cliveden’s statues know and show us that two and a half centuries constitute a past more than deep enough to reflect upon. They wonder, like the rest of us, what the next 250 might hold.

Conservation and art moving were explicit goals of this project. In the mid-20th century, a disembodied head was mistakenly and awkwardly attached to a headless figure. Now on a pedestal, the head faces its old—but not original—body. The bowl in front of the house, long broken at the stem, was repaired. And the other standing figure and the male bust were moved to public view from a storage purgatory behind the barn.