paul revere – greg.org

We’re All Paul Reveres Now

April 18th, 2025 was the 250th anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Old North Church, which signaled to fellow patriots across Boston Harbor that British troops were on the move. Political historian Heather Cox Richardson recounted the incident in a riveting and inspiring talk at the Old North Church.

Her emphasis was on the ordinariness of the people involved, and the seeming smallness of their actions, even though they faced real, dangerous consequences. This is all the more important now as we ourselves are confronted with choices to do the next right thing without assurance of the impact. [the YouTube channel that posted video of the speech could not be more random, and its nascent virality is leading it to be reuploaded, so I’ll watch to keep the most authoritative version here.]

The star of the “one if by land, two if by sea” story is Paul Revere, but Cox Richardson gives full attention to his collaborators, John Pulling, Jr. and Robert Newman, who had access to the Old North Church and who actually lit the lanterns. [As a keyholder for the church, Newman was arrested the next morning, and Pulling bounced to Nantucket.]

the sons of liberty bowl is silver and photographed from the side on which paul revere engraved the dedication to the 92 massachusetts colony legislators who resisted the king's order to rescind their support for an earlier letter calling for self-governance. collection, mfa boston — Actually, it’s because it’s been polished so much that it looks like that. Paul Revere, Jr. Bowl, 1768, silver, 5 1/2 in high, 11 in. diameter, collection MFA Boston

The seeming insignificance of a particular action of resistance was on my mind when Liz Deschenes posted a picture of the Sons of Liberty Bowl on instagram today. Conceptually, at least, I’m a Paul Revere engraving fan, but I confess, I’d never given the Sons of Liberty Bowl much thought. And despite what the MFA Boston says, if you had asked me to tell you the nation’s third “most cherished historical treasures after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” I would never in a million years have said the little punchbowl Paul Revere made for his friends.

But we are in different times, and have a different relationship to tyranny than we did even a few months ago. And it has been worth giving the bowl a new, closer look.

Ten Years Later: Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2015

a black and white archival photo of a single brass andiron from 18th century boston, attributed to paul revere jr, with item number and other info written in wax crayon on the transparency, but digitized backwards, from the collection of the metropolitan museum, it became an artwork in 2015 by my declaration, whatever that means. — *Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.)*, 2015

I’ve had the tabs open, and I still lost track of the tenth anniversary of Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), the first work to be on view at the Metropolitan Museum. [There was an earlier performance that began as a tweet in 2014—and is ongoing, block a Koch today!]

Untitled (Andiron…) was an early part of a series of experiments with the concepts of appropriation, readymades, and the power (or not) of authorship: they’re declared works of art where I didn’t own or control the physical object or environment.

Brooklyn Museum Quality: Andirons

Lot 14: Andirons, c. 1790-1810, formerly the property of the Brooklyn Museum, sold by Brunk

When David Platzker first sent me the link to the Brooklyn Museum’s recent deaccession auction, I immediately thought of the phrase, “museum quality.” It has long been used by dealers to sell an object of such stature, manufacture, and significance that it should be—or at least could be—in a museum. How does it work, though, for objects that a museum sells off? Is “museum quality” only now for objects a museum wants to keep? Are these now pieces of “former museum quality”? “Some museum quality”? “Almost museum quality”? Brooklyn Museum Quality.

This all came to a head on the first page, when I saw Lot 14, this pair of Federal engraved andirons, estimated to sell for $400-600. Three is a trend, I thought, as I indexed these in my mind against the andiron that started it all—a photo of a lone andiron that turned out to be part of a pair, which was donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1971 with an attribution to Paul Revere.

And the andirons sold by the Wolf Family last year that matched the Met’s in almost every physical detail, but which had an unbroken provenance and an origin and date that differed from the Met’s. What would these Brooklyn Museum andirons add to this situation, conceptually?

“one w/slightly loose construction and leans slightly to the left, old repair/reinforcement to base”

Their date, 1790-1810, and manufacture, “American,” take us away from more specific understanding, not toward it. While they are of an identical type, they are different in enough details—the engraving the swaglessness, the flanges, the feet—that even an amateur andironologist would not suggest they were made by the same hands, the same shop, or even in the same town.

And then there’s the provenance. Though the auctioneer made careful note of the andiron’s physical condition—”one with slightly loose construction and leans slightly to the left”? Who among us, amirite?—the only provenance information provided is the freshest: “Property of the Brooklyn Museum.” I mean, we can guess there’s no conservation history, but whatever object record, accession or donor data, or historical documentation the museum may have held for these andirons is not provided.

Someone clearly knew something, though. Because they paid $41,000 for these andirons, 100x their low estimate, and 5x the price of the perfectly provenanced Wolfs’. People are willing to pay for that Brooklyn Museum quality.

The John Brown Andirons from The Wolf Family Collection

*Untitled (Andiron Attributed to Paul Revere, Jr.)*, 2015, post here; original Met record here

There are some developments in the andiron space.

In the eight years since an archival photo of a lone andiron at the Met attributed to Paul Revere—I’m struggling here to say exactly what it did. Diverted me onto a lyrical, conceptual mission? Transmuted itself into an artwork and me into an artist? Whatever, it changed my life. Point is, while I did not turn into some andiron freak, I did gain a somewhat heightened—heightened and specific—awareness of andirons in the world.

Walter De Maria, Small Landscape

The opening at the Menil of an exhibition of Walter de Maria is notable partly because it’s the first US museum retrospective of the artist’s work, but also it is drawn entirely from the Menil’s own extensive collection. There is a veritable landscape of work, and all the attention’s been focused on a couple of square kilometers’ worth.

Here is a small square of the landscape that caught my eye. Actually, a small cube of a landscape, a stainless steel sculpture and drawing combo called Small Landscape. It’s from 1963-65, and the Menil only acquired it a couple of years ago. The images of it are rather inscrutable, as is the official description.

Walter de Maria, *Small Landscape*, does not feel very TV-ish to me, tbqh, more like a box set. image: Menil Collection

Fortunately, Prof. Anna Lovatt discussed the work a few months ago in her Research Fellow Lecture at the Menil Drawing Institute. She prefaced it with some drawings de Maria made of TV set-like boxes with beams or rays emanating from them, which casts a certain glow on Small Landscape‘s form. It is a cubic 13-inch box of polished stainless steel, lined with black velvet, which holds eight 8.5 x 11-inch drawings in steel frames. SMALL LANDSCAPE is engraved on the sliding lid/face.

The drawings are extremely difficult to see, even in person, Dr. Lovatt explains; there is a single faint word written at the center of each sheet:

TREE
MOUNTAIN
CLOUD
SUN
RIVER
SKY
FIELD
GLASS

Together they form a landscape. I had to listen several times because I originally assumed she said GRASS. Glass’s role in a landscape is to shape and mediate it. A landscape is formed by being seen, whether through a window, or through the contemplation of a list of its constituent elements. Or through a screen, which resonates with Dr. Lovatt’s larger discussion of the relationship of drawing and television.

Walter de Maria, *Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray*, 1965, installed at the Prada Foundation Venice in 2011, image: @fabyab

But Small Landscape obviously also relates to other bodies of de Maria’s work from the early 60s. It was a moment when de Maria was making sculptures of polished stainless steel with the financial backing of Robert Scull. In 1965 he made Scull a mirror of silvered steel in a velvet frame and drapery titled, Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray, which the collector was permitted to polish back to perfection whenever he decided the natural oxidation had gotten too dark.

Walter de Maria, New York Eats Shit, 1970, graphite on paper, 39.5 x 59 in., image via blittman

The hard to read text on paper also calls to mind another de Maria landscape series, [City name] Eats Shit [above], which was replicated almost immediately by Sturtevant as [City name] is Shit, which she showed at the Reese Palley Gallery in October 1971.

What sticks out from all this is how a decent number of people in the New York and European art worlds knew what de Maria was working on; it’s only now, when his other work has been crowded out of mind by his land art, that we need a refresher. Fortunately, Gagosian has just released a 476-page monograph to finally share de Maria’s complete history with the public. It sells for $200.

Untitled (High Energy Certificate), 2021, for ABCOA

ABCOA, 2021, a collection of certificates of authenticity that are the works, organized by Micheál O’Connell for ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative

A few months back, in the midst of the Manet Facsimile Object and NFT frenzy, Eric Doeringer suggested I submit a work for a project being organized by Micheál O’Connell for the ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative. I am psyched and grateful to have my work included.

As an irreverent critique of the whole authentication boom, O’Connell conceived ABCOA as a collection of artworks that are their own certificates of authenticity. The resulting portfolio comprises 60 certified works of art, which is quite a deal for EUR30.

I have also been slow in posting about it only because I have not been able to figure out where my brief accompanying text went. So I’ve finally given up and am explaining the piece here.

Perhaps surprising no one, my COA is based on an appropriation of one of the first certificates of authenticity of the Conceptual Art era, Walter de Maria’s 1966 open edition, High Energy Bar/ High Energy Unit.

Untitled (High Energy Certificate), 2021, Walter de Maria CoA, 11 1/4 x 13 3/4 in., ink on engraved print on bond, image: MoMA’s 1972 example of CoA for High Energy Unit

As the text of De Maria’s certificate itself states, the engraved stainless steel High Energy Bar is not only made “operative and authentic” by the presence of this CoA; the combination of Bar and Certificate constitute another work, the High Energy Unit. My work, High Energy Certificate, completes the gesture De Maria started, by declaring a standalone certificate a work of art.

While this obviously affects all the extant certificates of de Maria’s High Energy Units, the CoA facsimiles printed for ABCOA also constitute a distinct but still authentic subgroup of this work. It’s possible that they have a brief explanatory text on the verso. Or maybe they don’t? They’re operative and authentic either way.

ABCOA for ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative [mocksim.org]
Previously, on de Maria, c. 2009: Another in an apparently infinite series

Paul Revere Masonic Certificate, (2020– ), ed. TBD

Masonic Certificate by Paul Revere, Jr., printed in 1954, after the plate was given to the National Gallery of Art?

Before Sears scion Lessing Rosenwald donated the copper plate engraved on both sides by Paul Revere to the National Gallery of Art, he had around 24 copies of this Masonic certificate made. One sold in 2014 for a couple of hundred dollars.

But this print was made from the plate in 1954, the year after the National Gallery acquired it. And it came from the Rosenwald Collection, but not until 1980. So I guess Rosenwald wanted one more copy on the way out the door. When you’re a founding benefactor donating 22,000 objects, they let you do it.

Anyway, I want to make some, too. But for the moment, I’d settle for seeing the plate. The drawings are wonky, but the script is absolutely gorgeous.

Paul Revere, Masonic Certificate, restrike print by Herbert Pasternack [nga.gov]
Paul Revere, Masonic Certificate [verso], engraved copper plate [nga.gov]
Previously, very much related: Paul Revere (attr.), Time Capsule Plaque, silver, engraved text, c.1790
Hop, skip, and a jump to: Untitled (Andiron attributed to Paul Revere, Jr.), 2014 (sic)

A Walking Stick Frederick Douglass Gave To John Brown Would Be Quite A Find

His cane goes marching on. Lot 65, est. $4-6,000, image: swanngalleries.com

This walking stick carved with three alligators is being sold at Swann’s upcoming African Americana auction, along with a note stating that the cane was a gift from Frederick Douglass to John Brown, and tracing the provenance of the cane from Brown’s widow to the purchaser. After noting the well-documented history of Brown and Douglass’s interactions, Swann continues:

We have found no contemporary documentation that Frederick Douglass ever gave John Brown a cane or walking stick. Nor does the cane itself bear any inscriptions.

The entire burden of proof rests on a slip of notebook paper passed along with the cane for the past 140 years, on the letterhead of Pope, Berry & Hall of Burlington, VT, 10 December 1880: “Bot of Wilcox at Crown Point, NY, cane that John Brown had presented to him by Fred Douglass. Said Wilcox bought it of John Brown’s widow at North Elba, NY and colored man Hasbrook of Westport. Witness, Lyon, hotel keeper of North Elba, NY. Price paid $10.”

This is what we got: this note. image: swanngalleries.com

This story seems plausible. The gift from Frederick Douglass to John Brown would have likely been in the late 1850s. After Brown’s execution in 1859, the cane would have been left to his widow Mary Ann Day Brown (1817-1884) at her home in North Elba, NY. Probably shortly before she sold the North Elba property in 1863, it would have been given to Josiah Hasbrouck (circa 1818-1915), an African-American farmer who was a close friend and neighbor of the Brown family. Hasbrouck resided in Westport, NY from 1871 until before 1880 when he moved to Vermont. During this period he would have sold it to a man named Wilcox from Crown Point, NY; the only Wilcox there in the 1880 census was a 27-year-old laborer named John Wilcox. On 10 December 1880, it was sold by Wilcox to George F. Pope. It has been consigned by a Pope descendant.

It only gets better from here:

Any link in this chain could have been invented or exaggerated by any actor up through 1880. John Brown might have told his wife the cane was from Douglass, but it really wasn’t. Mary Brown might have told her friend Hasbrouck that it was John Brown’s cane, but it really wasn’t. Hasbrouck might have invented a Brown family provenance to effect a sale to Wilcox. Wilcox might have invented the whole story to effect a sale to Pope, although it seems unlikely he would have gotten so many details right. Less likely, George Pope could have invented the whole story and drew up this note to support it; or the original cane could have been swapped out at some point in the intervening century to pair with the note.

On the other hand, we have found no way to disprove the story, either. We are confident that the note is dated 1880, and we have found no reason to doubt the credibility of any of the parties. If this really was a gift from Frederick Douglass to John Brown, well, that would be quite a find.

Myself, I am glad to have found this auction, the contemplation of which, along with the contingencies and uncertainties of history, provides great pleasure. I haven’t had this much fun thinking about the way objects accrue an aura of significance since the slivers of Washington’s coffin and the random, stranded andiron with the attribution to Paul Revere.

07 May 2020, Lot 65: (SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) Cane said to have been a gift from Frederick Douglass to John Brown. est. $4,000–6,000 [update: it sold for $5,720.] [swanngalleries.com]

Related? Mary Todd Lincoln gave her late husband’s favorite walking stick, TO Douglass, and another walking stick given to Douglass just sold for $37,500 in February and went to the South Carolina State Museum this week. OK, now something’s up. The Frederick Douglass Historic Site run by the National Park Service has a cane with an engraved silver band that reads, “FREDERICK DOUGLASS/ 1882/ FROM HOUSE MADE BY JOHN BROWN”.
Also, not related, unless? Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery congressman from South Carolina beat the crap out of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, with his cane, on the floor of the US Senate on May 22, 1856.

Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2014

Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2014, whoops, 2015, obv
[UPDATED, see below; UPDATED AGAIN, see below that]
I am stoked (pun recognized and allowed to stand) to have a new work in the Metropolitan Museum. Despite its minty freshness, Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2014, is currently on view in The American Wing, Gallery 774, the Luce Visible Storage Gallery, officially known as the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art.
I have not seen it installed yet–I just made it a few minutes ago, cut me some slack–if you’re at the Met, maybe swing by and send me a pic? Ideally, the piece should be installed just as it’s depicted in this beautiful photo.

Continue reading “Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2014”

Paul Revere (Attr.), Time Capsule Plaque, Silver, Engraved Text, c.1795

image: via usnews
I may have tweeted smack about it when I thought it was just old newspapers and coins, but that’s only because initial headlines of Samuel Adams’ and Paul Revere’s time capsule in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House criminally underplayed the presence of this amazing, engraved silver plaque.
THIS is EXACTLY the kind of thing people should put in time capsules: slightly-precious-but-not-too items handmade to commemorate the occasion. These artifacts capture the moment, but more importantly, they retain an historical significance, and who knows, in time they may accrue an aesthetic aura as well.

image via reuters
The Boston time capsule plaque also benefits from the connection to the still-relevant Revere brand; whether he actually made it or not, it feels plausible, authentic. There is also the handmade aspect: I have an engraved ring, and a stationery die, but a whole engraved plaque? That’s something.
[It’s not the intern who wrote this USNews piece’s fault for describing every item in the time capsule in terms of its market value, and the impact a Revere attribution & provenance might have on it. Every report has that. It’s just another sign of who we’ve become as a culture. Like Antique Roadshow.]
A more interesting cultural change is the invisibility/illegibility of whatever the plaque actually says, and what it might mean. The Masonic context goes unremarked or glossed over in the mainstream coverage of the plaque. He that still hath ears, two hundred years on, let him hear, I guess.

Invisibility was one of the qualities of engraved text that appealed to Walter De Maria early in his career; he made a series of polished steel or aluminum works with engravings on them: Garbo Column (1968) had a list of the reclusive actress’s 27 films; Melville (1968, above, which I have swooned over before) features the opening of the author’s first hit novel, The Confidence Man.

The Barnett Newman-scale monochrome painting De Maria asked Michael Heizer to make for him for Dwan Gallery’s 1968 Earthworks show has its title engraved on a polished steel plaque in the center: The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth. Can you read it in this picture?

Walter De Maria, Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1965, at the Prada Fndn’s exhibit in Venice in 2011, image: @fabyab
De Maria created at least one work in silver. It was for his patron at the time, Robert Scull, who fronted the dough for the fabrication of a series of polished metal sculptures. Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray (1965) is just that: a mirrored silver plaque behind a velvet curtain that darkens and oxidizes over time. The artist’s instructions on the back offer the owner the chance to wipe away the stains of aging, though: “When the owner judges that enough time has passed, this plaque may be removed to free and clean the silver plate.” The promise of immortality, the opposite of a time capsule, at least for the mirror. Your call, Miuccia!

image:
UPDATE A brief dive into the history of time capsules tells us we need to pay more attention to the Masons, and to the Egyptians. The birth of the modern/20th century time capsule is linked to the discoveries of relic-filled Egyptian tombs and pyramids. And in a list of the International Time Capsule Society’s 1991 list of the Top Ten Most Wanted Time Capsules is this:

5. George Washington’s Cornerstone
Today’s custom of burying time capsules is in part an outgrowth of Masonic cornerstone-laying ceremonies. Through the centuries, Masons have officiated at rituals which often include placing memorabilia inside building cornerstones for later recovery.In 1793, George Washington, a Mason, performed the Masonic ritual upon the laying of the original cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol. Over the years, the Capitol has undergone extensive expansion, remodeling and reconstruction, but the original George Washington cornerstone has never been found. It is unknown whether there is anything inside of it.

Here is a Mason’s explanation of the cornerstone laying ceremony, one of the only public Masonic rituals. [“When the brethren are sharply dressed, and well-rehearsed, it’s an awesome thing to behold.” mhmm.] And Wikipedia’s article on cornerstones has a brief account of a 19th century cornerstone laying ceremony in Cork, which involved “a trowel specially made for the occasion by John Hawkesworth, a silversmith and a jeweller.” So maybe these engraved plaques are also a thing?
Coins, Newspapers Found in Time Capsule Buried by Paul Revere [usnews]
Previously, very much related: While We’re On The Subject Of Polished Metal Objects: Walter De Maria