Review

"Liberty 3" (Detail), Oil and Ink on Canvas.

Donnie Lee
Let Liberty Be Nude

7-9 p.m.
(Opening Reception)

The Bourgeois Pig
6 E. 9th St.
Lawrence, KS
785.843.1001

Hours after opening reception: 7 a.m.-2 a.m. daily.
Runs through: April 10

Artist's site: http://donaldjlee.blogspot.com
Gallery site: http://www.myspace.com/bourgeoispig

Yes, that's the Statue of Liberty atop this post. Yes, she's naked.

And no, that's not the whole of Liberty 3, one of the works in Donnie Lee's Let Liberty Be Nude, which opens tonight at the Bourgeois Pig in Lawrence.

(Because the whole picture isn't work-safe, that's why.)

This particular column, about this particular show, wasn't undertaken lightly. This is a national icon we're talking about, after all ... and as the title suggests, there's nothing in Lee's show but oil and ink renderings of Lady Liberty sans everything but crown, book and torch.

And at first read, Lee's take on the subject seems more than a bit irreverent. On his blog, which purports to be dispatches from a wide-ranging time traveler, Lee checks in from Thursday, May 8, 2160:

Hey.

The old Statue of Liberty blew up.

They asked me to draw up a new one.
So, I took the old design, basically kept it, but stripped her naked.

I was only able to save these portrait paintings, only 3 of the 15 made, just before someone tried to shoot me.
I'll have to got back and get the rest of the series once the machine is fixed.

Buried in all of Lee's seeming flippancy, though, is a serious point:

A lot of people, for a lot of reasons, feel as though the blessings of liberty are being stripped away day by day.

Some would like to see The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus' poem of welcome, replaced with a "No Vacancy" sign. We've got enough tired and poor, that line of reasoning goes. There's a surplus of homeless and tempest-tossed, and we can't take any more.

Then there are those — and they are many — who come here against their wills. Anyone who thinks slavery went out with the Confederacy should read the stories and statistics. For these people, liberty is unattainable without intervention.

Some fear that the same government charged with protecting our freedoms is, instead, stripping them away ... while others charge that they've never been free to worship or speak or love as they choose.

It's a bleak picture, on the surface. E Pluribus Unum has, for far too many of us, become Us vs. Them.

But even stripped of her robe, the woman in Lee's simple, stark works still holds tight to her book and holds her head and her torch high. There's still dignity here, still room and time and freedom to work through the things that divide us, or at least (wherever possible) to agree to disagree.

In recognizing that, and providing a starting point for all sorts of discussions about both freedom and responsibility, Lee does liberty — the concept and its symbol alike — no dishonor.

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