LAST YEAR, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art asked five artists to reconceptualize local history through public monuments scattered across the city. Multimedia artist Ada Pinkston chose as her subject Biddy Mason (1818–1891), a formerly enslaved woman whose career in medicine and real estate made her a pillar of Los Angeles’s first Black community. The Open Hand is Blessed is best experienced as the artist intended: over the water with the skyline in the background at Magic Johnson Park in South L.A. You can also see it from your living room using Snapchat’s augmented reality technology on a smartphone.
This is a new model for public art. Mason emerges suspended in a planetary sphere and orbited by photographs of historic Downtown Los Angeles, a herd of wild horses, and a flock of birds. The orb itself, colored in cosmic purples and sea blues, features Pinkston’s signature graphic patterns, while the symbols of freedom that circle it have been gleaned from the archives that hold fragments of Mason’s life.
Pinkston’s title for the work borrows from a saying attributed to Mason: “If you hold your hand closed, nothing good can come in. The open hand is blessed, for it gives in abundance, even as it receives.”
Mason’s remarkable life, half in slavery and half as a freedwoman, spanned most of the 19th century. Born in 1818 in Georgia’s Cotton Belt, she was forcibly transported as a young woman to Mississippi, then Utah, and finally Southern California. As Kevin Waite’s recent monograph explains, although California was a “free state” when it became part of the United States in 1850, “slave marts” of Native Americans were flourishing and the California Fugitive Slave Act legally enshrined the rights of out-of-state slaveowners. Mason worked in bondage in San Bernardino County for five years until she was taken into protective custody and then testified in court about her condition. Days later, at 37 years old, Mason became a free woman.
At her death in 1891, after a prosperous career as a nurse, apothecary, and savvy purchaser of Los Angeles real estate, she was among the wealthiest women of color in the United States. And Mason stood by her aphorism, giving generously to charities, schools, and hospitals. With her wealth, valued at an estimated $300,000 (the equivalent of just under $9 million today), she cofounded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, also known as FAME Church.
Biddy Mason’s legacy has been recognized and celebrated in many forms. Her accomplishments have survived through her descendants and institutions and charitable acts, including the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation established in 2013. Mason’s journey across the country is commemorated in the 80-foot-long concrete wall on the southside of the Bradbury Building in Downtown L.A., and she is the subject of academic scholarship, most recently by historians Sarah Barringer Gordon and Kevin Waite, who have received a collaborative grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research her life.
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