ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Nearly 250 years ago, Thomas Jefferson rented a single room in Philadelphia. He spent a summer working at a desk, writing the document that would become the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was not the only one in that room. An enslaved 14-year-old named Robert Hemmings was there, too, as Jefferson's valet.
Today, a building on the site is a tourist attraction called Declaration House. And this summer, visitors will see large eyes gazing out of the windows, blinking. It's a new work of public art exploring the entangled legacies of slavery and freedom in the U.S. Sonya Clark is the lead artist on this work called The Descendants of Monticello. Good to have you here.
SONYA CLARK: Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Ari.
SHAPIRO: This piece is so visually striking. It's in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. Each window of the building is taken up by these large blinking eyes. What are people actually looking at when they see this?
CLARK: What they are seeing in the windows are the eyes of the descendants of those who were enslaved at Monticello, so those who were enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.
SHAPIRO: When you got in contact with those people and described what you wanted to do, what were those conversations like?
CLARK: Oh, it was actually really quite fantastic. One of my dear friends, Gayle Jessup White, is a descendant of both Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. They are her fifth-great-grandparents. And I've known Gayle for decades, and so I went to her as my friend and I said, do you think I could maybe poke around in your family's albums? I just want to get their eyes to get this sense of their ancestors 'cause, of course, 1776 - no photography yet, so no images of the actual people who were enslaved, but certainly the genetic material of those enslaved people are in the eyes of their descendants.
SHAPIRO: Tell us about the conversations you had with them.
CLARK: So we actually showed them images, mock-ups, of what the project would look like so that they would know. Like, this is what we are going to do with your eyes. And also, just the - it was a little bit of a reunion for them. Some of them hadn't seen each other in a little while. Some of them do see each other. Families would come together. We would take photographs with them. We got to know them.
And as we were recording them, Ari, there were these really special moments. To get them to look into the camera just right, they - I would ask them to look for their reflection in the camera's lens. And so there's this kind of mirroring. I would say, not only are you seeing your own eye, but in your eyes are the eyes of your ancestors, and they are seeing you, too. And that's what this project is about.
SHAPIRO: Wow, and that's the moment we are looking at.
CLARK: Exactly.
SHAPIRO: Wow. I think many people are familiar with the story of Sally Hemmings. People may not be as familiar with Robert Hemmings. Can you tell us more about how he came to live with Thomas Jefferson as Jefferson at age 33 was drafting the Declaration of Independence?
CLARK: Robert Hemmings was one of the over 600 people that Thomas Jefferson enslaved in his lifetime. At any given time, there were about 140 to 160 people that were enslaved at Monticello, and some of those were his kinfolk. So Robert Hemmings was 14, working as his enslaved valet, or I should just say - working makes it sound like he would be paid, but - enslaved as his valet. And Robert Hemmings was also the half-brother of Jefferson's wife. So Hemmings was a relation and is there as he's witnessing Thomas Jefferson draft this document about freedoms while he himself is unfreed and made unfree by his own relation.
SHAPIRO: There's something very poignant about the idea of Hemmings being present as Jefferson writes the line, all men are created equal. What kinds of conversations are you hoping this project, this work of art, will generate?
CLARK: I'm hoping that having the eyes of the descendants of those who have been enslaved by Jefferson working as a lighthouse - their eyes are projecting through these windows as a lighthouse, as a beacon, looking to what it means for this promise of a multicultural democracy, especially in these times when our democracy is quite evidently faltering.
SHAPIRO: That lighthouse image is such an interesting and powerful metaphor. Did you have that in mind from the very beginning, the conception of this?
CLARK: Well, one of the things - from the very beginning, no, of course. Like any artwork, things change and move. (Laughter) But always, I trust that - I really truly trust that ancestors guide you. And so I think eyes were always involved. Eyes in windows were something that the project developed into.
That - the project is open 24 hours a day. In other words, you don't have to go into the building to see this project. If you were just passing down the street, you see it. It's open. It's on. I shouldn't say open. It is on 24 hours a day.
And it is most powerful at night, and Ari, that is when this lighthouse metaphor becomes most important. You might not be able to see anything else on the street, but you see these lit eyes looking and witnessing and blinking and moving. And I really think of the pieces, during the day and at nighttime, being a haunting of that space and also being an inhabitance of it and then also a reclamation of this space and a reclamation of ideas of liberation and freedom.
SHAPIRO: An eye can represent so much. I mean, it can be like, I see you for who you are. It can be, like, neighborhood watch, like, surveillance. It can be looking into the window of the soul. How do you think of these eye?
CLARK: I think of all of those things. And here, Ari - this is the richness of an artwork. So I do believe that their eyes can be all of the things that you just said. So these eyes are watchful, right? But they are also the souls of the nation, literally the souls of the nation. And I think of windows as being the eyes of a building.
So here we have a building built in 1976 to reflect on 1776 - right? - that, at the time it was built in 1975 or '76 to celebrate the bicentennial, was about reflecting the soul of the nation, right? By filling the windows of this building with the eyes of those who were enslaved by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, by the descendants of those who were enslaved, we are looking into the soul of the nation. We're looking eye to eye into the soul of this nation fully, truthfully, honestly. And that means we have to deal with the legacies of unfreedoms of this nation.
And so I think of these eyes as being beacons of hope. I think of them as being watchful. I think of them as being surveilling. I think of them as being haunting, and I think of them as taking up the space that otherwise had been denied - all of those things and more.
SHAPIRO: Sonya Clark is a professor of art at Amherst College, and she worked with Monument Lab in Philadelphia to create The Descendants of Monticello. You can see the exhibit at Declaration House through September 2.
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