‘Grow’d’ (2019): Reclaiming Topsy

Global Icons, Local Spotlight exhibition
Portland Art Museum — October 11, 2025
Portland, Oregon | 10:15am

In Global Icons, Local Spotlight at the Portland Art Museum, Alison Saar’s Grow’d (2019) sat within the gallery on a bale of cotton, a bronze figure upright, a sickle resting in her hand. Cotton branches rose from her hair. The sculpture did not draw attention through scale or placement. It held its position.

I slowed down in front of it.

Saar draws her title from Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the enslaved girl who answers questions of origin with the line, “I spect I grow’d.” In the novel, Topsy’s identity is shaped by the imagination of her author and the limits of her time.

In Saar’s rendering, that phrase shifts. The figure is no longer written as naïve or unruly. She is presented as grown.

The cotton bale beneath her cannot be separated from the history it carries. Here, it reads as both material and structure. The sickle rests in her hand without emphasis. It is a tool associated with labor, now held without submission.

The work does not rely on dramatization. It remains fixed.

Bronze gives the figure weight; cotton situates her within a specific history.

Together, they reposition the figure. A character once defined by others is rendered seated, self-possessed, and no longer dependent on that original framing.

Standing there, it felt less like encountering an illustration of literature and more like encountering a revision of it — a figure no longer written, but established on her own terms.