The Importance of Allies

The Importance of Allies exists because four different artists put their hands on it. Alexander Rosenberg, a Philadelphia glassblower known to television audiences from Netflix's Blown Away, blew the dome at Wheaton Glass. Therman Statom, a Washington, DC-raised sculptor celebrated for his large-scale glass installations, made the finial. Joyce Scott, a MacArthur Fellow renowned for beadwork that carries social and political weight, beaded the faces suspended inside. Tim Tate cast the ring of hearts and the single hand that circle the outside. No one of them could have made this piece alone, and that's not incidental, it's the whole argument.

The faces held inside the dome are protected not by isolation but by everything gathered around them; that's what allyship actually looks like in practice. No cause moves forward on the strength of the people inside it alone. It needs people willing to lend their skill, their standing, and their labor to a fight that isn't strictly their own, the way Rosenberg, Statom, and Scott lent theirs here. The hearts ringing the dome carry the piece's belief plainly: in the world Imagining Utopia imagines, every person stands surrounded by love. Not tolerated. Not permitted. Held, the way this glass holds the faces inside it, the way allies hold the line for one another.