Mae Rockland Tupa, Hanukkah Lamp Miss Liberty, Wood covered in fabric; plastic: molded, 1974
Object Name:
Hanukkah Lamp
Artist/Maker:
Mae Rockland Tupa
Bio:
American, b. 1937
Title:
Miss Liberty
Place Made:
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Date:
1974
Medium:
Wood covered in fabric; plastic: molded
Dimensions:
Lamp (a): 11 1/2 × 24 × 3 5/8 in. (29.2 × 61 × 9.2 cm) Shamash (b): 11 3/4 × 8 3/8 × 1 9/16 in. (29.8 × 21.3 × 4 cm)
Credit Line:
Gift of the artist
Accession Number:
1984-127a-b

Not On View

As a child, Mae Rockland Tupa attended one of the largely secular Yiddish shuls in the Bronx. These schools advocated adherence to Jewish customs and traditions as a way of assuring the survival of Judaism. The artist recalled a special Hanukkah performance at her school, an event that occurred when she was eight or nine years old:

"Eight of us, draped in sheets, wearing paper crowns, holding books in our left hands and candles in our right, were lined up across the stage. A ninth child (the shammash) lit our candles one at a time. As she did so we raised our candles in the air and recited a line from Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus": "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…" The parents wept, and we were proud because that poem was us. Our parents had immigrated to the Land of the Free, the Golden Medina. We were the wretched refuse and we were breathing free. It was a great feeling."

Although connected to the childhood memory, Rockland Tupa's unusual Hanukkah lamp is far more than a realization of a childhood memory. The artist brought the trends of the contemporary art world to bear on its creation and imbued the piece with political overtones about America's treatment of the Jews.

The plastic Statues of Liberty and the dime-store flags that ornament this lamp recall the assemblage movement of the 1950s and '60s. Like the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Arman, Rockland Tupa's work relies heavily on found, almost banal objects for its artistic commentary. The imagery illustrates how overexposure and commercialization can undermine the power of even the most potent symbols.

Rockland Tupa also conceived this piece as a political statement. Jews have become an integral part of America, and the artist uses the full panoply of patriotism to represent this change. She also configured some of the statues to comment on America's role vis-à-vis the Jews, by turning some of them backwards. The artist intended this as a "bit of historical commentary. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to America in 1886, has stood at the entrance to New York Harbor as a beacon of hope… But there have been times when Miss Liberty looked away and America closed its doors to the persecuted as when the steamship St. Louis was denied haven in Miami and nine hundred Jews were sent back to Nazi Germany."

Information may change as a result of ongoing research.

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