Paula Crown

Paula Crown is an American multimedia artist, advocate, and philanthropist whose practice spans drawing, painting, video, sculpture, public art, technology, sustainability, and social activism. She has exhibited widely, serves on the Museum of Modern Art board of trustees, and was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Fourth of July Speeches Cast the Declaration as an Unfinished Obligation

Bryan Doerries’s Aspen closing session used Fourth of July speeches by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the women’s-rights leaders of 1876 to argue that America’s founding language remains an obligation rather than a settled inheritance. Framed through Theater of War’s town-hall model, the session treated the Declaration of Independence as promise, evidence and indictment: a vocabulary repeatedly invoked by people excluded from its protections to demand that the republic enforce the principles it celebrates.

The Aspen InstituteJul 1, 202620 min read