Art Exhibit: Long May It Wave

The Aiken Center for the Arts welcomes local artists as they share their Patriotic Artistry with original American flag-inspired creations in celebration of our country’s 250th anniversary.

“All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln wrote to a colleague, “to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men in all times, and so embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers to the reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

This exhibition is intended to showcase, through art and artifacts, evidence—both verbal and visual—of the Great Emancipator’s homage to Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence. During the years before and during his presidency he continued to appeal to the Declaration and the equality clause as a gauge of what was transpiring, and what was at stake for America. At Gettysburg he took the final step in declaring the meaning of the war and of the national purpose that was embodied in the Declaration’s equality clause: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”