Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman

Exhibition Website

Jan 15 2016 - Feb 3 2019

In the 1930s, The Field Museum commissioned talented sculptor Malvina Hoffman to create bronze sculptures for an exhibition called The Races of Mankind. A gifted artist who studied under Rodin—and a woman in a male-driven art world—Hoffman travelled the globe in order to sculpt many of her subjects from life. The resulting sculptures were intended to portray “racial types,” as the theory of the day categorized them. 

These sculptures have recently undergone conservation treatment, and fifty of the most beautiful are now featured in Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. The exhibition is a rich inquiry into the concept of race, which has changed drastically over the past eighty years but is still very much with us today.  Hoffman’s artworks embody the complicated ways we look at culture and race, but they are also detailed and nuanced portraits of individual persons.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

  • Sculpture
  • American
  • 20th Century
  • People/ Children
  • Malvina Hoffman

Exhibition Venues & Dates