Paula Crown

Paula Crown is a multimedia artist and principal at Henry Crown and Company whose practice spans drawing, painting, video, sculpture, technology, social activism, collaboration, and sustainability. She is also a Museum of Modern Art trustee and Aspen Institute trustee, and her recent work includes the bronze bell edition “The Reverse Side,” developed with Factum Arte.

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