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As part of his wide-ranging and often interactive de Young Museum show—his first major US exhibition—Rituals of Care (runs through July 7), Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei asked local artists to reinterpret Quaker minister Edward Hicks’ 1846 painting Our Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a prophecy from The Book of Isiah: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”
Perhaps more concretely, the work—of which Hicks made a vast number of versions—portrays the 1682 purchase treaty that the Quakers’ William Penn signed with the Lenape Delaware peoples. Though Penn apparently respected the terms of the treaty throughout his life, Hicks was witness to how successive generations did not always co-exist with the Lenape Delaware governed by Penn’s promise of friendship, mistreating and eventually displacing them from their lands.
Lee’s artistic project includes “asking how art can encourage social connection and healing in a time of so much trauma and loss.” By asking artists to reinterpret Hicks’ painting, and then they in turn ask fellow artists to do the same, Lee creates “a family tree of copies with multiple descendants.”
The original: Edward Hicks (1780-1849), “The Peaceable Kingdom”, (1846). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd
In total, 16 artists delivered their takes across 39 canvases on this fraught capture of colonial history. Painter Chelsea Ryoko Wong approached her reinterpretation by breaking down the piece and painting from the background to the foreground. Subsequently, two more artists drew from her work, alongside the museum’s copy of…