“Gov” Sculptor Urges Kids To Claim History

When young Black New Haveners walk by the new statue of William ​“King” Lanson, Dana King hopes they think to themselves, ​“That looks like me.”

“That’s what drives me,” King said.

King, an Oakland-based sculptor, was addressing an audience at New Haven’s Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue Wednesday from her Bay Area studio, which was adorned with Black Power memorabilia and filled with the tools she used to create a new bronze statue of William ​“King” Lanson. The statue is set to arrive in town next week.

“Our descendants have a right to their history and a right to see themselves in the public sphere,” she said. Nearly 100 local public school students took in that message, as well as the words of local Black women working to get the word out about King’s soon-to-arrive memorial to New Haven Black history.

King recently finished crafting a new, nearly seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Lanson that will soon stand along the Farmington Canal.

Lanson, an early 19th century local engineer, entrepreneur, and Black political leader who freed himself from slavery and was elected ​“Black governor” in 1825, helped build the canal and Long Wharf during his time working and living in Antebellum New Haven.

On Wednesday morning, the New Haven Free Public Library hosted an hour-and-15-minute online conversation between King and Artspace’s new executive director, Lisa Dent. The virtual dialogue centered Lanson, King’s statue, and the artist’s dedication to giving visual life to Black history.

Click here to watch a video recording of the event.

Dent, city arts director Adriane Jefferson, Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown, City Librarian John Jessen, and a handful of other library staffers gathered in person — with masks, and six feet apart — at the Dixwell Avenue public library. King was in her studio in Oakland. Students were tuned in remotely. The conversation itself took place over Zoom and on Facebook Live.

Brown said that she helped put together the virtual dialogue for a particular audience: New Haven Public Schools fourth graders. She worked with the school system to send out the video conference link to elementary school teachers across the city. Brown said that around 100 students wound up tuning in for the live talk.

“I did this because I wanted New Haven Public Schools students to participate in this celebratory event,” she said. ​“It’s a history lesson. A Black history lesson. And we need to have a component for the youth.”

Jefferson hit on a similar point when she introduced Dent and King to the Zoom audience. ​“We’re seeing an unveiling of this deep, cultural history. And in particular, a Black history,” she said. ​“And we have a Black woman who actually sculpted William Lanson. Today, I hope that you are inspired. And I hope you leave feeling like you know more about your history.”

The statue, which was commissioned by the Amistad Committee, is set to be unveiled on the Farmington Canal near Lock Street on Sept. 26.

“He Helped Build New Haven”

King and Dent covered a lot of territory during the hour-plus conversation.

They spoke about King’s pre-sculptor career in Bay Area broadcast news, her enrollment in art school at the age of 48, her past works depicting Black political figures, her new commission to make a bust of Black Panthers founder Huey Newton. She described the careful and arduous process of turning unformed blocks of clay into a bronze statue that is then trucked across the country and erected as a lasting work of public art.

Throughout the dialogue, both artist and gallery director returned again and again to King’s underlying motivation for making the Lanson statue in particular, and commemorating Black history through sculpture in general.

The Oakland-based artist said she quickly fell in love with Lanson as soon as she dived into his history after learning about the statue’s commission from Regina Mason, the descendant of another free Black New Havener from the early 19th century, William Grimes.

King noted that Lanson was one of around 800 free Black people in New Haven in the 1820s. Slavery wasn’t outlawed in Connecticut until 1848.

Lanson built Long Wharf to a size and scale that made it competitive with some of the most active wharfs in the country, including New York’s, she said. He cut stone out of a quarry, ferried it down a river, and built the wharf, along with the walls that make up the Farmington Canal.

“It was backbreaking labor,” she said. ​“He helped build New Haven.” Lanson was also a developer and landlord in what is now Wooster Square, where he built and presided over ​“one of the first integrated neighborhoods” in the city, she said.

Because there are no extant images of Lanson, King said, she tried to imbue her sculpted image of him with his work ethic, accomplishments, and travails, including what she described a white political backlash at the time that left Lanson’s reputation in tatters and saw him die in the poorhouse.

“He has a really strong jaw line,” she said about the statue. ​“His eyes are king, but piercing. His nose is broad and his lips are thick. He has got that fine short haircut. And his brow is furrowed, because he worked out in the sun.”

She said that she deliberately crafted one his hands as a closed fist — a small act of solidarity with the ongoing uprising against police brutality that has taken place in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.

“The fist is a symbol of our freedom,” King said. ​“He would have been protesting police brutality, inequality, inequity. He would have been lockstep with us.”

Dent scrolled through various comments and posts submitted by public school teachers and by members of the public watching on Facebook Live. She paused on one and read the post to King.

“Thank you for giving us a statue we can take pride in,” Dent read. King blushed and held her hands up to her face, saying that she might burst into some ugly crying at any minute.

Dent asked King what she would like to say directly to all of the fourth-grade public school students watching Wednesday’s talk. What message did she want to leave for them?

“Be patient with yourself,” King said. ​“Do things you love. And know that learning is a lifelong thing.”

King said that she did not learn African American history when she was an elementary school student. Not until she was an adult did she learn the stories of people like Lanson and California civil rights leader William Byron Rumford and the Black women who, along with Rosa Parks, helped lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

King said that she put the final touches on the Lanson bronze statue on Tuesday, and that the artwork is now en route on its 45-hour truck journey to New Haven. It should arrive on the morning of Sept. 22, she said, and will be unveiled on the 26th. She’ll be in New Haven, too, to celebrate the occasion.

Thank you, King said, to the women who helped organize the talk, and to the public school students watching along online. ​“You are the reason I do the work that I do.”