The permanent installation of Morphous in Kennedy Plaza, downtown Providence, RI is a wonderful celebration of South African artist Lionel Smit ’s monumental bronze sculpture marking the end of 2022. The time of the sculpture’s installation in Providence, is also a time of transition broadly in The United States, and locally in Rhode Island. It is a powerful message of representation to consider this reference to Janus when depicting a young Black woman.

"Dedicated to the beautifully diverse community of Providence, my home. All the past and all the future meet at this very moment. Care deeply, question all, dream big, and create the new now.” - Mayor Jorge O. Elorza, The Creative Capital, November 28, 2022.

Smit's particular piece evokes a question of time, of past and future, and the balance point at which his country found itself at the time of the sculpture's creation in 2014, one year after Nelson Mandela's passing. In 2014, South Africa embarked upon yet another chapter, a post-Apartheid and post-Nelson Mandela South Africa, a future South Africa. This double-vision is a foretelling, and an acknowledgement of what has already passed and an anticipation of what is still to come.

The figures are charged with an emotive and gestural energy, a hallmark of Smit's evocative work. Viewers familiar with Ancient Roman mythology and iconography will undoubtedly think of Janus, the double headed deity of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings.

Morphous travelled to several cities being exhibited as a temporary installation across the United States, including Union Square in New York City (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami ( MOCA Miami, 2018), Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey (2022) before finally finding a life-long home in Kennedy Square.

READ MORE ABOUT LIONEL SMIT HERE