Wide Awake Moon Medicin Cape

The 19th-century vigilante group known as the Wide Awakes, founded in 1860 by a small group of mostly young, white men in Hartford, Connecticut, strove to protect and support then-U.S. Representative Abraham Lincoln and to promote the antislavery cause (though racism was not absent from the membership). They ultimately gained a diverse membership and spread across the country in one of the largest mass movements in U.S. political history. Their paramilitary uniforms included a cape, originally intended to protect their clothing from dripping torch oil as they marched, and they eventually adopted an open eye as their logo. Staten Island-born artist Lynore Routte created this piece for the re:mancipation project, involving artist Sanford Biggers, MASK Consortium, and the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, responding to a problematic sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and a Black man in the museum’s collection. Routte brought her ethos of repurposing and layering textiles to the work, and in its creation imagined the cape to be imbued with a protective energy. She considers it a nod to vintage quilt creations made by the artist Sanford Biggers (a member of the current iteration of the Wide Awakes), and explains her choice of the Wedding Ring quilt motif: it echoes the eye shape and alludes to chains—because “marriage can feel as binding as enslavement.”