Topsy and the Golden Fleece

Artist Alison Saar (American, born 1956)

Date2017

Dimensions35 1/2 × 11 1/2 × 8 1/2 in. (90.2 × 29.2 × 21.6 cm)

Mediumwood, tar, steel, ceiling tin, wire, acrylic paint, and gold leaf

ClassificationSculpture

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott

Object number

2018.37

Not on View

DescriptionA woman brusquely carved from black wood stands on top of a rectangular slab base. In her left hand she holds a sickle close to her chest; in her right she holds a shining gold cloth-like material. Her hair of twisted wire stands upright in an electrified halo around her head; her simply articulated face is stoic and withholding.

Published ReferencesTallman, Susan, Nancy Doll, and Alison Saar, Mirror, Mirror: the Prints of Alison Saar: from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, 2019, p. 16, fig. 3, repr. col., p. 15.

Dr. Halona Norton-Westbrook, Toledo Museum of Art and Dr. Beth Harris, "Turning Uncle Tom’s Cabin upside down, Alison Saar’s Topsy," in Smarthistory, April 9, 2019, accessed January 29, 2020, Link to resource .

Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar, June 23-July 26, 2020.Label TextTopsy and the Golden Fleece embodies multiple narratives surrounding race, gender, and empowerment. The artist Alison Saar alludes to the character Topsy, a young enslaved girl from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s problematic abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), and also to the story of Jason and the Argonauts from Greek mythology. In Stowe’s novel, the dying Eva, daughter of the slave master, gives a lock of her golden hair to her playmate Topsy in an attempt to encourage the girl’s conversion to Christianity. Saar interprets Topsy not as the “wild” and vulnerable child of the book, but instead as a dark-skinned, defiant, and powerful adult. Rather than needing to be “saved” by the White, blonde Eva, Topsy is shown as a mythological hero—nude, holding a scythe, her braids encircling her head like a halo or a crown. She carries a golden bundle that suggests the legendary Golden Fleece, a symbol of kingship and authority that the Greek hero Jason had to obtain in order to take his place on the throne. The conflation of the two stories invites a compelling comparison between the Golden Fleece and Eva’s lock (head?) of golden hair.